what’s cooking

Have I been cooking too many yellow foods? I feel like lots of my recent photos feature corn, soup, noodles, and now pizza…lol. Gotta mix up the color palette next week, at least of my photos! This week was a good one in the kitchen– we managed another jam packed meal plan without any unexpected fails or wastes, so I feel pretty good. But also like I want to take a nap. Or maybe cook some extra easy stuff next week 🙂

what we ate last week:
friday dinner out (szechuan! so good!)
saturday inspired by the meal we had the night before (spicy beef with cumin sauce, and the “chef’s special” green beans), I really wanted to see if I could replicate the flavors from some of those favorite szechuan dishes while the memory was fresh. We played with this cumin beef recipe from serious eats, adding szechuan peppercorns, shiitakes, and celery based on aspects we liked from the restaurant. For the green beans, we blistered them in a hot pan, reduced the heat and stirred in lots of garlic and black garlic; then steamed with a splash of chicken broth to soften the rest of the way. Unshockingly, the results weren’t exactly the same as the restaurant versions, but were tasty! I want to try again and keep on tweakin 🙂
sunday pizza party at friends’ house! we brought a salad with this vinaigrette (added a bit of honey) on butter lettuce with slivered almonds, sugar snaps, and shredded carrot. Would definitely use that combo again as a go-to side salad! Maybe add avocado.
AND! Have to add that we made no-churn ice cream, inspired by one of the flavors at an ice cream and beer pairing last week, and it turned out great! Will post soon!
monday used this crispy sheet pan gnocchi technique, roasting a package of gnocchi alongside a head of cauliflower and serving with lightly brown butter, sage, and parm. Definitely want to keep playing with this oven roasted technique for gnocchi, the texture was good and cleanup easy!
tuesday we made this weeknight pork chile verde, served in burritos with leftover rice from Saturday. Two thumbs up!
wednesday the pizza pictured above, inspired by an Ottolenghi recipe that recently appeared in The Guardian. We went with garlic, olive oil and sage for the base, a combo of mozzarella and fontina instead of the mascarpone layer suggested, and topped with the potatoes, scallions, and pecorino. Yum!
thursday this curry honey mustard chicken was simple, served with rice pilaf and broccoli. would reduce the honey next time as it was a bit sweet for me, but this was overall tasty and low maintenance!

on the docket: 

• when grabbing the gnocchi for last week i saw that DeLallo makes some mini gnocchi! then i saw this recipe for italian sausage, gnocchi and tomato soup, so i think we’ll use the mini ones for that and celebrate the return of soup weather around here.
• we have some leftover cheese from this week’s pizza, and it was actually a last minute shift to make the potato one when i saw that recipe last week, so we might go ahead and make a different style of white pizza, with a repeat of last week’s yummy salad on the side.
• like the idea of making gyros at home; we’ve made gyro salads in the past with homemade ground beef and lamb gyro mixture, but this technique makes a little loaf, shaves, and broils it for a more authentic effect. some of that in a pita, with tomato, lettuce, feta, onion, tzatziki sounds fresh and savory!

on my mind:
> making no-churn ice cream was fun, easy, and so adaptable…thinking about what other flavors we could dream up!
> one of my favorite things about September? local grapes appearing in the store for a short few weeks! they have such a more interesting flavor and texture than normal grapes, i always gotta scoop them up while they last!
> a couple summers ago on whim and a discount we bought the PC game “cook, serve, delicious” and played through it obsessively on a weekend it was too hot to go outside. it’s a co-op cooking game that’s kind of addicting, and i just found out the sequel came out…bring on the weekend!
> I kind of want to make bread! Maybe it’s fall in the air…