What’s for Dinner
Today in our veggie box we got: kale, red chard, asparagus, radishes, two bags of baby lettuces, four spring onions (red this time!), four leeks, a bag of snap peas, four kiwis, and about a pound of yellow fingerling potatoes. Snap peas! The seasons are changing in our bellies! Oh man, I am craving fresh tomatoes so hard, it will be like a miracle when they show up.
Last week I forgot to account for Easter in my meal plan. Whole Foods has the local, grass-fed lamb at the butcher counter right now: it’s only here a couple times a year, and it’s so good. The rest of the time the lamb is from New Zealand (and isn’t grass-fed, and isn’t as good). So last Sunday I got some cubed lamb and roasted it with honey and saffron, using the Silver Spoon recipe for “agnello all’araba” that I discovered last year. As a result, we still have a bunch of chard in the crisper: it is not as lovely as the new chard, but it’s not bad yet, so I’m going to go ahead and use both bunches in that polenta dish tonight. I’ll use the leeks too.
Tomorrow night our doula is coming over in the evening (we’re hiring a labor doula this time around) to discuss our birth plan, so I’m not planning on cooking: we still have some leftover lamb, so I’ll just reheat that quickly before the doula shows up.
But I do want to get to the rest of the veggies while they’re still fresh and gorgeous, so Friday we’ll have a big salad with the lettuce, radishes, snap peas, and green goddess dressing. I might put in some bacon too, and/or the hardboiled eggs left over from Easter.
The weather’s turned beautiful again after a brief spate of rain earlier this week, so over the weekend I’m planning a picnic lunch in the park: I’ll make potato salad and the roast beef and blue cheese sandwiches described in this article (item #5: I can incorporate the red onions from our box!) I’ll have to do at least some of the prep work for that on Friday, but maybe Saturday morning I can whip up a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies to add to our picnic. Then dinner will be…oatmeal cookies. Along with whatever’s left over from lunch, or can be scrounged from the fridge.
Sunday night I’ll make asparagus risotto, and Monday, braised kale crostini—probably with something to accompany or follow it, like maybe fruit and cheese: there are lovely local strawberries at the store right now. And Tuesday will be for leftovers, as usual.
