Thursday, April 30, 2009

Working Around One Ingredient

Do you ever start to plan a meal with just one ingredient in mind? That's the way this week is turning out to be.

Thanks to my friend Kris (of the What's Cooking? blog), we started our week off with a great recipe. In a blog post of hers a couple weeks ago, she talked about a chimichurri recipe that she makes. Stein bought some steak and salmon over the weekend and we had some parsley leftover from something last week, so I thought that recipe would work out great. It was awesome. The combination of the sauce, bleu cheese and steak was so tasty. Oh, and we didn't use skirt steak - I think any steak would be great. Stein said it was okay with the salmon (I'm not a huge salmon fan), but thought it may be better with a milder fish.

The next night, we had leftover tomatoes, and also some basil from the lasagna Stein made last week. I decided to make a tomato/basil salad (our first of the season!), and also pulled some pork chops from the freezer to have with it. Then I remembered the chimichurri sauce from the night before. It was perfect for the pork chops. I just seasoned the chops with salt and pepper before I grilled them, and then put the sauce on top. It was perfect.

Today I saw that avocados were on sale at the store (probably in anticipation of Cinco de Mayo), so I decided to do a recipe with avocados. I also wanted to use chicken, so I looked for a recipe on foodtv.com. I found this one. I did modify it a bit - the avocados ended up not being ripe enough for guacamole, so I used Trader Joe's guacamole and doctored it up with some onion, cilantro and tomato. I also used bagged shredded cabbage for the cole slaw, with the change of 1/4 cup sour cream with 1/2 cup of mayonnaise (we ran out of mayonnaise). When we sat down to eat, Stein wanted to hate the meal (he's not a Bobby Flay fan). He took one bite and said, "Damnit". Man, it was good. The combination of creaminess, smokiness, and a little kick was great.

Any one of these meals would be perfect for guests. We usually make new things for guests (a no-no, I know), but now we have some tested recipes that we can use.

2 comments:

Kris Mulkey said...

Stein doesn't like Bobby Flay? What's up with that? It's a man thing I guess. I bet he likes Giada.

: )

Kelly said...

You're right, he does like Giada! How could he not with the "outfits" that she wears?!

He doesn't like Bobby's cockiness. Like on Throwdown when he walks into a place and thinks that everyone should swoon. I have to say I agree with that, although I do like his recipes.