Jenny Check

Lunch Club!

I got this new "Rock and Serve" tupperware which allows you to go from the freezer straight to the microwave. As we only have microwaves at school and at the hospital instead of toaster ovens, it was definitely time for a lunch club. Emily came over and we made macaroni and cheese with pork chop and green beans for one of the lunches and chili with beef over rice topped with cheddar for the other. So now I have nine new minilunches in the freezer in my new tupperware. The only problem is that I'm not sure what the best way to nuke these is... do you defrost first or blast them on high for a long time?

lunch club!

Lunch club meeting on Thursday.  We made lasagna and chili with the cornbread crust.  This time we did ground beef in the lasagna with tomatoes, carrots, mushroom, spinach, red peppers, onions and garlic, parmesan, cheddar and mozarella cheese.  A solid staple with all food groups represented.  The chili was free form with ground turkey thigh, garbanzo beans, black beans, onions, garlic, red peppers, cayenne, cumin, oregano, thyme and chocolate.  The cornmeal crust came from a Nigella recipe from the NY Times for vegetarian chili.  Also very delicious!  Emily was figuring out whether lunch club could turn into a business, but the outlook doesn't look good.  Plus we found competitors like www.thehomebistro.com.  Oh well. The kittens made lunch club cute!  They didn't get on the counter too much and played in the towel cabinet.  See the pics!

lunch club!

Emily and I had another lunch club meeting yesterday where we made lamb in fragrant spinach sauce over couscous and chicken sopa, which was kind of like a mexican lasagna. The recipe for the sopa was from the Jimtown cookbook again, and it was miraculous that we could fit all of the layers into the mini loaf pan: fried tortilla, chicken in sauce, cheese, fried tortilla, vegetables, roasted poblano chilis, sauce, fried tortillas and cheese. We even left out a sour cream layer, thinking that it wouldn't freeze well. The lamb with fragrant spinach sauce turned out great. We followed the recipe directions to the letter and actually pureed the sauce separately (a step I was tempted to skip) before bringing it all together to cook the final hour and a half. yum! Yield: ten lunches each at $3.10 a piece. Not too bad... It was hard to keep the kittens off the counter with all the chicken and lamb, but they were cute and have now become totally immune to the spray bottle.

Lunch Club

To inaugurate Emily's work toaster oven, we started making mini-lunches in tiny loaf pans and freezing them. Our first time out was lasagna and chicken pot pie. Then we did beef stew and basque chicken (red peppers and chorizo), Indian chickpeas and turkey chili with cornbread topping. So far, a huge success! Julie Sahni's "Classic Indian Cooking" has been the best resource as she tells you on each recipe whether it freezes well or not.

Our latest effort was lamb stew and chicken cacciatore. Emily did the grocery shopping and accidentally bought pork instead of lamb, so it became pork stew. The chicken recipe came from Tom Valenti's "Soup, Stews and One Pot Meals." We doubled the recipe and cut the chicken up into smaller pieces (for lunchtime ease). It was the most boozy dish I've ever made with the doubled proportions coming to two cups of white wine and two cups of dry vermouth. The sauce didn't taste extremely boozy though. It mostly shows up in the chicken. The lamb/pork stew recipe comes from that tiny Martha magazine.