The Week of Unending Cooking

Sunday, 1-18 (with Margit and Allistair)

Coq et Lentilles Au Vin
Bacon cooked in oven ahead of shift, then red onions and mushrooms roasted in the fat (another pan done with olive oil for the vegetarians). Chicken sliced and sauteed with salt and pepper, lentils cooked in veggie broth, wine sauce - three bottles Charles Shaw, three small cans tomato paste, veggie broth, parsley, marjoram, and thyme- also made alone, then everything mixed together in two big baking dishes, covered, and left in oven to meld. Tasted kind of boring, so I cooked four heads of minced garlic in some olive oil and split it between the two dishes around 6:30. I added the actual bacon added to chicken dish right before serving.

White Beans with Sage
A year and a half in the co-op kitchen, and I still don't have the hang of beans. These seemed hard forever, and then suddenly totally fell apart, and ended up very sludgy. And yet delicious. I mixed in a ton of powdered sage, and a little lemon juice.

Carrot Salad
Grated carrots, A lot of lemon juice, a little honey, salt, pepper, and fresh parsley

Brown Rice with Dried Parsley and Frozen Corn
Almost as easy as plain rice, but so much tastier. And a lot more likely to get eaten as leftovers.

Green Beans with Caramelized Onions and Balsamic Vinegar
Green Beans tipped and tailed and steamed. Onions cut very small and cooked as long as we had time for. Vinegar added to onions pretty late, onions and green beans tossed together in hot wok right before serving.

Cranberry Birthday Brioche with Orange Flower Syrup
Margit's baby, and extremely well done. From Paris Sweets.

Monday, 1-19 (Margit in charge, Kevin Chan assisting)

Naked Spinach Salad with Last Night's Carrots
Yay using leftovers!

Amazing Stir Fry (Broccoli/Cauliflower/Carrots/Magic?)
from one of the Alice Waters books

Roasted Garlic and Pumpkin Soup
Yay using the pumpkin!

Vegan Sweet Potato Dumplings with Sage Butter and Bechamel
This is the only dish that I worked on, having stepped in to cover part of a blown shift. These were supposed to the gnocchi, also from the Alice Waters book, but a bunch of substitutions had been made resulting in a good tasting but extremely wet dough. So we went for dumplings, simmered in veggie broth and then baked in at 450 degrees until the end of the shift because even after boiling they were still falling apart. For something that kept seeming like it might just be a disaster, these were amazingly good. Actually, even if they hadn't seemed like they were going to be a disaster, I would have been impressed. I made a brown butter sage sauce to go on them, and because I was a little worried the brown butter would also be a disaster, I threw together a quick bechamel at the same time, following the recipe from the Minimalist vegetarian book. This is the first time I've made a cream sauce for the house that's come out well. I don't know what I did differently, or what I could have screwed up all the other times, because it seemed pretty easy tonight.

Apple Brown Betty