Stay Home and Cook: Variety Hour (Week Five)
Sunday was gorgeous. Such a gift of a day.
If there is anything we’re learning during this extended time at home, besides forcing a necessary routine during the week, is that variety is the spice of life, especially at dinnertime. For the fifth week of cooking-all-of-the-time, we covered a lot of ground.
Spicy stir-fries, pizza with pizzazz, a homemade meat sauce that’s one of my favorites, and a brand-new pasta recipe that checked all the boxes, our dinners were anything but boring. They were bold-flavored features that made mealtime joyful and while I rarely planned more than a few hours ahead each night, we ended up having a great dish each time.
Five weeks of constant cooking is a lot, even for us. So while I hope you’re hanging in and trudging along (like we all are), please know that I understand this time isn’t easy. If you’re reading these recipes and feeling inspired, then great! But if you’re reading them just for fun and then making a peanut butter sandwich, that’s totally OK, too. No shame or judgement. Just make sure you’re eating something that makes you happy. 🙂
Let’s get to the meals!
Spicy Beef Larb with Coconut Rice
Recipe via What’s Gaby Cooking
What better time to incorporate a weekly night of larb into your dinner routine? Larb is essentially a ground meat stir-fry or “salad,” with a few ingredients, but loads of great flavor. This spicy beef larb, in particular, is especially delicious.
Never did I imagine that stir-frying beef, cucumbers, hot peppers, and a spicy sauce together would create something so crave-worthy, but it does. And in case you’re wondering, the cucumbers do stay crisp once cooked!
In fact, the cucumbers are one of my favorite elements of this dinner. Their bright flavor and crunch are a great contrast to the savory beef. Plenty of cilantro and fresh lime really round it out.
Oh, don’t forget the coconut rice! Yes, you could make basic basmati rice and it would go well, but I highly recommend making the coconut rice instead. It’s white rice cooked with coconut milk and a smidge of sugar (it’s a decadent starch) and a lot of fresh lime juice. It’s ridiculously yummy and goes all too well with the spicy beef larb. A perfect combo and a wonderful, very quick weeknight meal.
Meat Sauce and Elbow Pasta
Original Creation
I had wondered how long it would be until we made this classic dish, and apparently the time for it was last Tuesday. We waited a little over four and half weeks until we caved and made meat sauce and pasta. Nothing too fancy, but oh my it was so, so delicious.
For our meat sauce, we used a one pound package of ground meat that was a “meatloaf mix” of beef, pork, and veal. The trio really has much richer flavor and takes a dish like this to a deeper level of goodness. That’s an official term, right? Let’s go with it. Basically, the meatloaf mix makes the meat sauce marvelous.
For sauce, we created one from scratch using a large can of diced tomatoes which we enhanced with garlic, salt, and shallots. Yum! While a jar of pre-made sauce works, creating it from scratch really makes a meat sauce “meatier.” 😏
Lastly, we will always be using Jovial gluten free brown rice pasta. This time around we made elbows, but I’m partial to their capellini, spaghetti, and bow-ties. However, any pasta shape will do!
A meat sauce and pasta night will always be delicious and welcome. The best way to make it even more delicious is to be particular about the ingredients (sometimes easier said than done) and make certain elements from scratch. And don’t forget the Parmesan on top! 😉
Spinach Salad with Wild Rice and Crispy Chickpeas
Original Creation
All of a sudden, it was time to incorporate some greens on to our plates. Since I don’t seek out a full-blown salad too often right now, we opted for a salad-ish style dinner, which is basically a salad with a lot of hearty ingredients. So yes, we had a salad for dinner, but it was a really, really good one.
With a similar plan to my favorite pasta dishes, for this salad we used a basic base (spinach) and tossed it with as many flavorful ingredients as possible. We cooked wild rice to mix into the greens (have you done this before? Rice in salad is a great way to make them heartier), made a large can of chickpeas extra crispy (cook them in a lot of olive oil on medium heat), and added red onion. Plus, dollops of cottage cheese on top. So. Much. Protein. Not to mention flavor.
This salad had so many of my favorite ingredients all packed into a healthy bowl brimming with protein. In regard to a dressing, we made a light mustard vinaigrette based on one from Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook, Cravings. It was flavorful and delicious, and slightly acidic, which went well with the rice, chickpeas, and spinach.
Overall, this is a salad we will most definitely be making again through the spring and summer. And why not year-round? Start with the spinach and wild rice and then see where your ingredients go. A seasonal dish for all.
Spicy Turkey Stir-Fry with Crisp Garlic and Ginger
Recipe by Melissa Clark via NYT Cooking
It took a decent amount of debating and searching for our decision on what to do with the package of ground turkey we had for dinner on Thursday night. So many ideas crossed my mind and for a while I was feeling fairly settled on either a turkey burger or some sort of meatball. However, neither was really calling out to me and making me look forward to dinner. That needed to change.
Low and behold, I tapped open the NYT Cooking app and this dish was right there, staring back at me. It was a recipe I had saved weeks ago, but had only then remembered. It was perfect and just what I was in the mood for on that particular Thursday evening. My flavor cravings are somewhat random, but fairly predictable. A spicy stir-fry is (almost) always a win.
While the dinner was low-impact (not many ingredients and quick to prepare) in one regard, it really delivered on flavor and was quite satisfying. To enhance the dish and get some extra greens, we added a big handful of spinach to the wok. Hooray for health! In fact, I’d say adding a big bunch of spinach to any meal is a good way to get extra greens; bonus points on the healthy meter. Luckily, the spinach and turkey worked together nicely.
Finally, the crisp ginger and garlic on top really were a nice final touch and of course, we served it over jasmine rice. A healthy, hearty, and delicious meal that wasn’t our original idea, but I’m so glad it turned out to be dinner. Yum.
Buffalo Turkey Meatball Pizza
Original Creation, GF crust by Against the Grain Gourmet
Switching up the routine, we moved pizza to Friday night because life is for living. And since my tastebuds were all over the place, what else is new, we made a buffalo-sauce-themed pizza! If you haven’t tried this yet, then it’s about time. Buffalo sauce is delicious and easy to make from scratch (I recommend a quick Google search). While you’re at it, make a ranch sauce from scratch as well - Google is for everything.
In terms of the pizza, we used a gluten free crust from Against the Grain Gourmet, another excellent crust option which is stored in the freezer. As I’ve said before, my top tip for crispy crust is to use a pizza stone in your oven (the stone is a great kitchen tool investment) which heats up - in the oven - before the pizza is put on top of it. Crispy crust is the best, don’t you agree?
Toppings-wise, we made mini turkey meatballs which were made with some of the homemade buffalo sauce, GF panko, and an egg as a binder. How easy is that? The one pound of turkey made way more than enough meatballs for the pizza so we had a side dish of turkey meatballs with dinner. No complaints here; they were delicious dipped in the extra buffalo and ranch sauces. ;)
Pizza is a wonderfully versatile dinner and can basically be treated as a blank canvas. Whatever you’re craving, put it on a pizza crust and ta da - dinner. While I knew we were going to make something with a buffalo flavor, I couldn’t quite pinpoint it until suddenly I realized (remembered?) that buffalo pizza is a thing that exists and it’s awesome. I’d highly recommend a buffalo-sauce-theme pizza for your next meal.
Pasta with Chorizo, Chickpeas, and Kale
Recipe by Dawn Perry via NYT Cooking
I think this recipe was designed especially for me. I’m kidding. Kind of. The day this dish, along with four other new pasta recipes, was presented on NYT Cooking, I knew this would be the one we would make first. And that’s exactly what happened! It was a perfect dinner for Saturday night. But I completely understand if you made it on a Tuesday. Or whichever day you see fit.
This pasta combined three of my favorite pasta ingredients: spicy chorizo, creamy chickpeas, and hearty green kale. Now each of the ingredients is great on its own, but when they all came together they created an unstoppable pasta trio, which we adored. For the record, we did use pepperoni instead of chorizo. We had pepperoni in the pantry so we did what we had to do. The next time we make this dinner, we will be sure to buy chorizo. I promise.
I’d love to go on and on about how much we loved this dinner, but I fear you may get bored and skip to another article (there’s a new one in baking!). So I will keep this short and direct: a pasta dish is so stellar when contrasting ingredients are mixed together.
I loved the bites with everything all together on my fork and admittedly, I got a second bowl which was mostly pepperoni, chickpeas, and kale. The pasta was the “filler” which brought it all together. Oh, and don’t forget a generous heap of parmesan (or the cheese of your choosing) on top. :)
Grilled Chicken and Wok-charred Broccoli Rabe with Roasted Potato Wedges
Original Creation
By Sunday night, I was feeling somewhat depleted on the inspired-dinner front so we made a very basic, and fairly unexciting dinner. Not to say it wasn’t yummy, but it was by far the most boring of the week. Boring food is not bad! Boring food can be awesome. This particular plate was a little uneventful, save for the potato wedges. Those, my friends, were fantastic and the star of the plate.
When in doubt, add potato wedges to your meal and you’ll turn that bland meal into a grand meal. Slice each russet potato into four, long and wide wedges, microwave them for four minutes, and then coat them in olive oil, salt and pepper before placing them on a baking sheet. Then bake them at 450 degrees for 25 minutes. After that time, flip the wedges and bake them for another 15 minutes.
Scrumptious potato wedges await! And they will most certainly brighten your Sunday night dinner. :)
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As always, please leave us a comment or send us a note with any questions about our meals.
Enjoy, be safe, and feel well.
