Justin & Meredith Winokur's Kitchen Cooking Notebook
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posts/2016/06
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Asian Style Salad & Cucumber Carrot Salad -- back to top
Our original plan was to make fresh/spring rolls, but we spent much of the night packing and just didn't feel like dealing with the rolls. So we made this into a salad.
As you can see in the picture below, we made the salad out of:
For meat, we had two things:
Like I said, the plan was to roll it up but we decided to turn the sauce into dressing and make it a salad. Much easier and very good.
Meredith made the dressing inspired by The Food Network though we really only used that as inspiration so I am not copying it locally.
Meredith used the following to taste:
We also made a cucumber salad with this Will Cook For Friends recipe (local). Meredith has done this before and it was good so she did it again. The only real change was the use the vegetable peeler on the carrots instead of the spiralizer. Also, she went on the light side of the honey.
Huevos Rancheros -- back to top
We needed a quick meal and wanted to use some of the tortillas and rotisserie chicken. So we made the usual Huevos Rancheros. Nothing really to it. Just used up the rotisserie and some smokey sauce
Tofurky and Vegetables -- back to top
We are moving in a few days and have packed just about everything that will be going or getting donated. We had a frozen tofurky and lots of vegetables so we decided to work with that.
You can see we used a aluminum lined cast-iron pan. The recipe for the baste calls for soy sauce, oil, and a bunch of other things. I had to work with the few things we kept around (and anything cold).
So I made a baste with chicken broth, oyster sauce (in place of soy), garlic powder, cumin, and pepper. I killed the whole vegetarian thing, but we didn't mind.
I also took a pound of frozen green beans and some frozen corn. I covered it well and put the whole thing in the oven at 350 for 1.5 hours. It calls for some other things, but I just winged it.
The whole thing is 5 servings but I just broke it up into 4.
Calabacitas Con Pollo -- back to top
First meal in the new house! We needed something quick, easy, and healthy. We bought a Costco thing of rotisserie chicken earlier in the day and Smiths had a thing of 3 zucchini + 3 anaheim1 peppers on sale since it was getting old. We did those plus another zucchini.
We did what has become our regular calabacita trick: butter. We used 2-3 Tbsp butter (but it made 4 servings) plus some adobo powder, salt, and garlic powder.
When it was almost finished, we added ~12+ ounces of Rotisserie chicken.
It came out really good. Not a ton of food since we divided it into 4 but it was enough. Also, this was our first time getting to test both the new kitchen and also the new cast iron pan.
This is a guess! They kind of looked like very long and smooth banana peppers. But they were also old. We're really not sure ↩
Rotisserie Chicken Kale Caesar -- back to top
We were again doing a Rotisserie chicken week. This was pretty easy. We used Costco's Power Green mix (Kale, swiss chard, and spinach). We used our regular healthier salad dressing (which I also went back and added a note about less lemon). We also had one extremely stale leftover bagel from the move. I cut it up, sprayed it with pam, topped it with salt and garlic powder, and toasted it. The bagel croutons came out really good!
We also topped the salad with tomatoes.
It came out pretty good! And easy!
Seared Salmon and Sautéed Asparagus -- back to top
We made a quick dinner. I made the usual seared salmon with Meredith's cilantro sauce/dip. There wasn't much more to this one. Though I do not think I would waste the dip on this again since the flavors didn't really come through much.
Meredith the asparagus thing. It was really good and she said pretty easy. Here are her steps
Black Bean and Feta Salad -- back to top
Meredith made the Black Bean and Feta salad (from 2016-03-09) with the same basic changes but without crab. I do not know what else she changed but it wasn't much. These were what we took for lunch two days this week
Lobster Tails and Toast with Green Sauce -- back to top
Another simple meal. We butterflied two lobster tails and cooked them on the grill pan1. We actually ended up taking them out of the shell later and cooking it some more. I think we should start planning to start it in the shell but de-shell it and keep cooking it before we serve it to make sure it si fully cooked.
We also had a fried egg on toast. Everything was topped with cilantro sauce/dip.
I think we can start doing these on the regular cast iron. You never see the grill lines anyway ↩
Sausage and Onions -- back to top
We made another quick meal. Just sautéed some onions and peppers in a bit of butter. We did this in the cast iron to get it nicely cooked. Then added chopped up Trader Joes' Spinach, Fontina, and Roasted Garlic Chicken sausage.
Good and fast meal! (again)
Cheese and Snacks for Dinner -- back to top
A Meredith Meal! Brooke was visiting and we wanted to make a "chill out and relax" type meal.
We made Crab and Corn Salad (from 2013-08-17), Romesco sauce and then a tray with:
Whole Foods stocks a different kind than I've had elsewhere. I think it is supposed to be closer to prosciutto but I think this one is thicker and better ↩
7(ish) Layer dip -- back to top
We were invited to a friend's house and Meredith decided to make 7(ish) layer dip. There were really 6 layers but one had different things. We skipped olives.
We based it very roughly on this Brown Eyed Baker (Local) recipe. Mostly just the order and the enhancement to the beans
They were, (in order)
It was really good. We would do this again
Chicken Skewers and Kohlrabi Gratin -- back to top
We had bought some pre-assembled chicken skewers for the night before and didn't end up needing them so we had them for dinner. They were Chicken Teriyaki. We just baked them for about 25 minutes at 375 with the Kohlrabi Gratin.
We did the same Kohlrabi Gratin as last time with most of the same changes except we actually had the Kohlrabi greens. It was, again, pretty good. We like this and will do it again.
Zucchini Buffalo Salad (with Sous Vide Chicken) -- back to top
We made a zucchini buffalo salad based on this Kitchn recipe & the croutons (Local for both). At the very least, it was based on their recipes.
I decided to sous-vide the chicken. I bagged the chicken with some Franks Red Hot and did it at 145 for an hour and a half (based on my suggestion on 2016-05-15) This was a nice amount of time and temp. The chicken was juicy and moist and was a nice consistency.
I used their recipe with some sourdough but I wasn't super impressed. I added the Franks to the (possibly too hot?) oil and it splattered everywhere. I then added the bread which absorbed all of the oil and then burned little pieces on. It was kind of a mess. What was left was flavorful but kind of mush
Rather than use their dressing, Meredith made her own. She mixed some fat free greek yogurt, Penzeys Ranch, Penzeys powdered roasted garlic, and some almond-cashew milk. Very low calorie and flavorful.
No cheese in the dressing. We just used it (Cambozola) on the salad. The salad was just spiralized zucchini
The ideas were pretty good. I liked the super-low calorie dressing and the chicken came out very good. Meredith thought the cheese was a bit much (even though Cambozola is not super "blue"). I thought it was fine...in small enough amounts.
As I noted, the croutons were a bit of a mess but really not too bad.