Notes from the kitchen table: No. 04

It’s been an interesting week here in the Sierra foothills - after the hottest July in California ever, we are now having some very unusually cool weather. I’m not ready for summer to be over, but I will admit that it’s a nice change from the heat for a few days. We’re supposed to get back to summer weather next week, but here’s today’s view from the kitchen table, with some actual rain falling on the pool in august.

We’ve had a full week of three back in school full time and that’s taking some getting used to. It’s so strange to have the house so empty all day - after 5 years of homeschooling it is an adjustment to have them gone all day.

I realized another aspect of having three of four kids in school that I hadn’t anticipated - we are going through the leftovers much more slowly. I always cook a lot so we have leftovers to eat for lunch. With all 6 of us home all day (homeschooling and husband working from home) we eat a lot of leftovers for lunch. But now with three in school and just three of us at home for lunch we suddenly have too many leftovers in the fridge. I’m going to have to adjust my cooking a bit.

Now that I have more time on my hands with three out of four kids out of the house, I am working on getting this blog. and my social media back in fighting shape. If you aren’t following me on Instagram and Threads, now would be a great time to start. I am posting a lot more regularly now, including sharing a lot of my past lunch pictures. You can find me on both platforms at @whatliscooks.

Things are getting interesting in my little garden. My melon plants have taken off. I planted a variety of small watermelon and a variety of cantaloupe. There are a couple of surprises here - first of which is the size. I thought these varieties were both for small melons. But I’ve got some huge and still growing melons out there. Second is I’ve realized I have no idea how to tell when they are ripe, so some googling is in order. And third, I had no idea how these vines would spread all over everything. It’s fine, it was an empty space and it looks nice all green, it was just a surprise. As far as the rest of the garden goes, I think the hottest ever July affected things a bit, a lot of the plants definitely struggled with the heat. But now that the weather has been a bit more normal the last couple of weeks, they are looking better.

The other awesome surprise in the garden has been the zinnias. This is my first time ever growing zinnias and wow they just don’t quit. I have had fresh flowers every day. I absolutely love them. Unfortunately so do my cats. It’s like catnip to them. They will not leave them alone, so I have had to put the bouquets in my bedroom and keep the door closed. But having a nice bouquet of flowers on your dresser is not the worst thing ever.

We are still enjoying lots of pool time, except for those few cooler days. Another thing I love about living here is all our little wildlife sightings. This past week I saw a bobcat, which are very rare to see here, and a giant jackrabbit. And always the deer. But I finally saw a baby deer, the first one so far this year. Their mommas keep them very well hidden for so long. I also finally saw a preying mantis for the first time this year. In years past we have seen dozens and dozens of them all summer, so I’m not sure why they are so scarce this year.

Here’s the big news: I’ve written an ebook! This is hopefully the first of many. Ebooks seem popular now and I thought it would be a great way to share all my 15+ years of experience in packing school lunches. The first book is just a taste of all the wealth of knowledge I’ve gathered in packing lunches over the years - my top 5 tips for school lunch packing. I hope you’ll check it out. I’ve also updated a few of my basic lunch planning printable, and I’ve created a new section of the website to start offering all of my printable things for downloading. I make templates and pages for everything around here - packing lists and meal plans and chore charts and more. People always seem impressed when they see them so why not share. Look for more to be added there over time.

Ok, now on to the meal planning section.

On the menu this past week:

Sunday: oven roasted salmon and veggie fried rice

Monday: pasta with bolognese sauce, garlic bread

Tuesday: enchiladas - chicken, and black bean (two separate kinds, not combined)

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: lasagna, made with the bolognese and a béchamel and roasted eggplant and squash

Friday: frozen pizza and bagged caesar salad

Saturday: leftovers again because we are swimming in them and we don’t waste food here

For the upcoming week here is my current plan:

Sunday: pasta with ground pork & sautéed cabbage

Monday: gumbo, or something gumbo adjacent but I won’t claim it’s authentic

Tuesday: ground beef tacos (are we calling these white people tacos now?)

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: seared ahi tuna bowls, with greens, edamame, tofu, rice

Friday: pizza, probably homemade

Saturday: still debating between shawarma or butter chicken

That’s all for this week.

A gallery of pics from the week, in no particular order, is below. See you soon.

Lisa

Notes from the kitchen table: no. 02

Hello -

A shorter update today than I plan to normally do, and more of just a brain dump, and a bit late, because I’ve got a lot going on this week.

I have three heading to school in a couple of weeks. This is new for us - we’ve been homeschooling for many years now. One started high school two years ago, but I was still homeschooling three. Now I’ve got two more going to high school and I will just have one left at home this year. It’s an exciting new phase for all us. I’m not a fan of school starting in August though, if we’re being honest. When we lived in Seattle school still started after Labor Day, and that still seems more right to me. Middle of august still feels like the middle of summer. Oh well, it is what it is so we’re making the best of it.

So a theme in our house this week is getting ready for school. Especially for the two that haven’t been since third grade - there’s a lot of uncertainty happening and a bit of stress. I think they will do great though. We’ve done a bit of school shopping, we need to figure out what they want to do about lunch. I’m sure the first few weeks will be a little exhausting as they adjust to the schedule.

We have lots of critters around our place. It’s one of our favorite things about living here. Very common visitors are deer, small birds, ravens, butterflies, squirrels, frogs, lizards. Sometimes we see skunks, eagles and hawks. Less often and more exciting are when we get to glimpse the occasional owl, bear, coyote, fox, raccoon. We wait excitedly for the baby deer, their mommas keep them well hidden. And just the other day for the first time we got to see a little bobcat. A few critter pictures are in the album at the end.

Two of my kids are involved in local theater, and one is currently in a summer production. This is tech week, and if you’ve got theater kids you probably know that it’s a bit like finals week or crunch time. Rehearsals every day leading up to opening night of the show. It’s her first musical and we are really excited to see how she does.

We’ve had big wildfire burning a ways north of here. No danger to us but the view of the smoke clouds have been impressive.

Out in the yard we’ve been doing a bit of clean up in preparation for friends coming to visit - we’ve raked a new path through our woods and my husband put in some steps up to the path and to the house from where our friends will be parking their RV while they visit.

I’ve made a trip to Costco in preparation for having a house full. I have a love / hate relationship with that place. It can be fun, but also so overwhelming. I try very hard not to impulse buy and focus just on the bulk food that really is a better deal than elsewhere. But it is a bit fun to browse. ;-)

On the menu this week:

Sunday: pasta with bolognese sauce, salad with berries & lemon vinaigrette

Monday: chicken & thai basil stir fry, coconut rice, crispy salt and pepper tofu

Tuesday: fish tacos

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: lasagna with béchamel and leftover bolognese

Friday: pizza

Saturday: salmon

Next week we’ve got houseguests, friends from Seattle visiting, a family of 5. So I’ll be cooking for 11 people. My goal when cooking for a crowd is to make things that are easy to feed a lot of people but don’t require working in the kitchen for hours and hours. I like to enjoy my time with my friends. I’m still tweaking the details but my tentative plan includes burgers, carnitas, fried chicken, maybe gumbo or paella, pizza, and maybe we’ll all go out one night.

Just a quick one so signing off. More next week.

Notes from the kitchen table: no. 01

New feature here that I am really going to try to keep up with. This will be back to more of an old school blog style - longer form writing about what’s on my mind each week. I’ll write about what’s happening in the kitchen, in the garden, things I’m loving, and who knows what else. This one is a bit more than a week because I’m catching up, but I’ll try to find a regular week day moving forward.

Notes from the kitchen table because that’s literally where I sit when I write. It’s my favorite spot in the house, next to a big window that looks out over my swimming pool and forest. I’ll tell you some stories about what we’ve been up to, talk a lot about the food, and reward you with some pictures at the end.

Last week was a mix of activity. Summer time, we’re trying to beat the heat and enjoy the pool, and take advantage of the slow unscheduled days while we can. We had a house guest for part of the week so that influences my cooking a bit. When we have guests my goal is to figure out meals that will feel special, something that the guest(s) might not normally have, but that don’t have me working in the kitchen for hours. I like to be able to actually enjoy time with my guests, and not exhaust myself working. But I also like it when our friends and family get to experience what our real life is like, so I don’t try to cook things that I normally wouldn’t make.

This particular week we had one guest - my younger brother visiting who lives in Italy. I try to avoid making pasta for Italians, because I feel like I could never even come close to what they eat at home. But they don’t get as much Asian or Mexican style meals at home, so we focus on more in that direction.

I did make our usual Friday pizza, not something I would do for a lot of guests because it is a bit of work, but for just one extra person it’s ok. Keep reading to see what I cooked for the week.

Besides cooking, here’s just a bit of what’s been happening around here: (some pictures at the end)

My garden is starting to come along nicely. Learning to garden in the California heat is a bit different. Some things seem to really be liking the heat and a few are struggling. I’m super excited about my melons. Living in Seattle we never had enough heat to grow melons so it’s fun to try something new. I’ve had a few little tomatoes already, but hopefully lots more to come. I’ve picked lots of bunches of herbs already. I’ve got a baby eggplant and some tiny cucumbers and a couple of tiny squash. Lots of promise. The weather is not quite as hot for the next week so we’ll see how things do.

We’re in the heart of wildfire season now, but we haven’t had anything near us that was bad so far. There is a big fire burning now up by Chico, and we had scouts at a scout camp near there. My oldest scout was working at the camp for the summer but she had just come home a few days before that fire broke out. They did finally shut down and evacuate the whole camp though, so all the other staff and scouts are out safe. We’re in the flight path out of the air attack base for this part of the state, so we an always tell when a fire is kicking up because the Cal Fire aircraft head out right over our house.

We’ve been spending time in the pool basically every day. Having a pool is a lifelong dream of mine and we finally made that come true last year. It wasn’t finished in time to enjoy it most of the summer, so this is really our first full summer with the pool. It’s totally changed our lives and I feel so incredibly lucky to have it.

Where we live is a close drive to the amazingly beautiful South Yuba River. This is one of my favorite things about our move to California - being able to go swim in a river in the summer with water that is actually warm. It’s truly amazing. It’s not usually warm enough, or low enough to be safe for swimming, until late July, so we’ve just started our river swimming this week and we’ve been twice. Even though we have a swimming pool now which I LOVE, there’s still always going to be something extra special about swimming in a natural body of water. It’s healing for the mind and spirit. I can be in the worst mood ever and after swimming in the river I feel like a new person.

Now on to the food content. Here’s what we ate this past week:

Thursday: Chicken & vegetable stir fry, with crispy salt and pepper tofu

Friday: Pizza

Saturday: Salmon, mixed green salad with strawberries

Sunday: Carnitas taco bar

Monday: Salmon patties (with leftover salmon)

Tuesday: Green enchiladas (with leftover carnitas)

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: pasta with pork & veggies

Friday: Pizza again

We also made beignets for a treat.

A bit more about each meal:

Thursday: stir fry and crispy tofu.

I don’t have a recipe for stir fry, you can find plenty on google or pinterest, but I think it’s one of those things that once you’ve made it a couple times you really don’t need a recipe. I cut up whatever meat I’m using into bit size pieces, and then I season that with a bit of salt and pepper, a little sesame oil, sometimes a little soy sauce, and then I add a couple spoons of corn starch to coat it - and here’s the real trick: baking soda. There’s chemistry here that I don’t bother to get into, but I think it changes the pH of the meat and tenderizes it. The amount I use depends on the type of meat. For chicken that’s already pretty tender, I use just a little, maybe a teaspoon. For beef or pork I will use a bit more. Mix it all well to coat and refrigerate for a few hours until ready to cook. Then I just brown all those bites of meat in batches in a little oil. Meanwhile I’ve chopped all my veggies, and the selection is a little different every time. This week I had onions, celery, carrots, cabbage, a little zucchini, some broccoli, and always plenty of garlic and ginger. After the meat is done I dump all the chopped veggies in the pan and saute them until they are starting to get tender. Then add the meat back in and a little something for sauce. Sometimes I just use a little bottle oyster or hoison or black bean sauce. This week I mixed about a cup of chicken broth with a little cornstarch, some soy sauce, white pepper, and a little oyster sauce and stirred that all in to coat everything. Easy and pretty fast. Although I always make a mess of the stove.

Crispy salt and pepper tofu is one of our current favorite things. It seems like no matter how much I make, it always gets devoured. I’ve written up my recipe and that will be posted soon.

Friday is pizza day.

Always and forever. My people expect pizza on friday. Sometimes it’s delivery, sometimes it’s frozen, but most of the time it’s homemade. I make a lot, usually 4 or 5 pizzas, because we love leftover pizza. We have a mix of preferences here so I usually make two thicker crust, and two or three thin crust. The thicker crust are usually cheese, or sometimes one will be half cheese and half with other toppings. Most of the time these days I am using my sourdough for the crust which is just done by feel and no recipe, but my basic yeast bread and pizza dough recipe can be found here. This is my tried and true basic recipe that never fails. The toppings are a bit different each time, there’s always some pepperoni and onion and tomatoes in the mix, and then it’s whatever else I have that I sounds edible on a pizza. My sauce is a simple one: crushed tomatoes, a little olive oil, salt, thyme, rosemary, garlic. I’ll post an actual recipe one of these days.

Saturday: salmon and salad

I’ve cooked salmon a million ways and I will always come back to my stance that simplest is best. I like to actually taste the fish. Lately my seasoning is just salt, nothing else. I usually get whole filets, season them well with salt, and then cook in a very hot oven (like 550 convection) for 5-10 minutes depending on how thick the fish is.

The salad is one I’m obsessed with this summer. Spring mix greens, blueberries, strawberries, pickled red onion, salted pistachios, bacon crumbles, and a lemon vinaigrette dressing.

I also made a simple white pasta for the kids. My one-pot pasta method, with some butter, cream, and salt. Never fails to please the kids, and I’ve found that even though they don’t like to admit it, most adults love this pasta too.

Sunday: carnitas

Tuesday is usually taco day at our house and my kids were a little stressed that I was serving tacos on a sunday. But our guest was leaving monday and I knew he wanted some mexican so I did it anyway.

Don’t leave me nasty comments about how any of this is not traditional, I never pretend to be Mexican or to make anything the traditional way. I cook what tastes good to me.

So anyway, my latest method for carnitas is to buy the pork country style ribs at costco. They’re not actually ribs - it’s just cut strips of the pork shoulder. I used to always buy the whole shoulder, but it’s a mountain of meat and I don’t always want that much. The ribs cut is usually the same cost per pound and it’s a more manageable quantity. I season these pretty simply - salt, pepper, cumin, a little chili powder, sometimes a bit of garlic and onion. Sometimes I cut up an onion to throw in there, sometimes I quarter an orange. I use all kinds of different cooking methods, but this time it was in a deep casserole dish, covered well with foil, and in the oven at 300 degrees for several hours, until the meat was falling apart. Then uncover and turn up the oven to about 375, use tongs to break up the meat, and cook another half hour or so to let the juices evaporate and the meat brown a bit.

We serve this with a selection of usual taco fixings - tortillas, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, lettuce, salsa, chips - as a taco bar and everyone makes their own. It’s one of my favorite meals to make for a crowd.

Monday: salmon patties

I know some will scoff at the idea of even having leftover fish, but I always buy a little extra salmon and cook more than we will eat that night because I want to make salmon patties. I keep them simple, the fish, a little diced onion, egg, breadcrumbs, a bit of garlic salt.

We had these with a kale & quinoa salad and the leftover pasta from the salmon dinner, reheated with a bit of cream.

Tuesday: enchiladas

Another meal made with the leftovers - the extra meat from the carnitas dinner, mixed with chopped onion and shredded jack cheese, and layered with green enchilada sauce, tortillas, and more jack cheese, cooked until browned and bubbling. This is a very easy meal to make if you have extra cooked meat of any kind. Sometimes I roll them into ‘real’ enchiladas, but sometimes I just layer it all like a casserole because it’s much faster and tastes just as good. Just go easy on the cheese. I know as Americans we love our cheese, and I love to drape everything in cheese just as much as the rest of you, but meat enchiladas really should be mostly about the meat and sauce and tortilla, with just a little cheese at each layer.

Wednesday is always leftover night here. We have scout meetings that night and need to eat fast and get going, so it’s nice to have lots of options we can easily heat up. I always make extra of everything so we have plenty.

Thursday: pasta with pork & veggies

This was an accidental dinner once that my family loved so much that it’s now become something that is regularly requested. It’s a great one to make when you need to clean the veggies out of your fridge and you don’t have a whole lot of other stuff. I brown some kind of ground meat, usually pork, or a pork sausage is best. This week I had a package of breakfast sausage so I used that. After the meat is browned I add a variety of chopped veggies. The first iteration of this had just onions and cabbage, and that is a really great combo with pork. These days I find it a fun challenge to see just how much veggies I can pack in here and have the kids still love it. This week I had onions, cabbage, zucchini, baby kale, mushrooms. I feel like there was more but I’m not remembering now. Get all the veggies sautéed until soft, sometimes I add a little butter, and then the real secret is canned soup. I don’t use a whole lot of this stuff but this is one occasion where I love it. It’s a quick way to make a yummy meal. My choice for this is Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom with Roasted Garlic. It’s all about the roasted garlic flavor here, so try to find that one and always keep some in your pantry. I usually don’t add any salt until after I’ve added the soup, because the sausage + canned soup is often all the salt you need. After the sauce (aka, soup) is in, then it’s time for the pasta and there are two ways I do this. You can either just cook pasta separately (or it’s a great way to use up leftover pasta), or you can now do my one pot pasta method - just add it all right in the pan: one pound of pasta and four cups of water. It soaks up the flavor of the meat and veggies and soup as it cooks and it’s delicious and always a crowd pleaser.

That brings us back to friday and pizza again.

Extra treat: beignets

This is a fun one that we’ve made a few times now. My kids love the beignets that we get in New Orleans Square at Disneyland, so when we found the recipe in the Unofficial Disney Parks Cookbook we definitely had to make them. While this isn’t a fast recipe to make, it isn’t hard. And it makes a lot. We made the mistake of doubling the recipe the first time and we ended up delivering beignets to all our neighbors because there was no way we could eat them all. Sometimes we even make them Mickey shaped using a Mickey cutter, sometimes we just cut them in squares. They all taste great no matter what. This dough also holds well in the fridge for a couple days, which I recommend because they really are best when they are fresh, so don’t cook more than you plan to eat while hot. We made the dough and cooked half on Thursday, and then cooked the second half on Sunday. Deep frying can be intimidating at first, but if you have a good thermometer that makes it easier. I don’t have a deep fryer, I just use a pot on the stove.

For next week:

If you’re still reading this far, here are some thoughts about what might make it on the menu next week.

I’ll probably make a similar stir fry and tofu again, because it was so good and I keep thinking about it. But I have an overabundance of Thai basil, so I need to figure out if that will be good in the stir fry. Tuesday is always tacos, and I try to mix it up. We haven’t had fish tacos in a while so maybe we will do that. We have guests again coming next weekend so I will try to make a trip to Costco later in the week, which usually means I’ll get a couple of rotisserie chickens and we will have a couple of meals out of that. Sometimes when I’m feeling uninspired I will ask the family what they’ve been craving. Recent requests have included spaghetti with meat sauce, some kind of curry, grilled sausages, turkey burgers, so some of those items might show up on the menu next week.

As promised, some pictures…

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