Ahhhh….nothin’ like a 4-day weekend and sweet, delightful friends as house guests to get your kitchen smelling good!
Get out your grocery lists, because here’s what I’ve been cookin’ (and eating. a lot of eating happening around these parts! and i’ve got the parts to prove it!):
This is from Gwyneth’s cookbook, and it’s called “spaghetti limone parmeggiano.” Could not have been simpler! I mixed up some cheese, some lemon juice, etc, cold in the pasta bowl, cooked some spaghetti, coated it with the stuff in the pasta bowl with the help of some pasta water, tore up some fresh basil from my little plant and – voila! I tried to tell the girls it was “lemonade pasta” to get them interested, but it didn’t really work.
Kids.
I served a nice salad of just greens afterward. I love that. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that I eat my salad with just a bit of olive oil, kosher salt and freshly cracked pepper on top. My kids don’t even know what salad dressing is! I hope that’s a good thing.
Another night last week, Mr. Fresh Scratch made us his “mac and trees,” which is homemade macaroni and cheese with some lightly boiled broccoli, all thrown together and broiled.
Love.
The kids love it, too!
I love to go all-out with dinner when we have long weekends or house guests. This past Friday I roasted a chicken, made my very unhealthy mashed potatoes, baked some biscuits (I used the Stay at Stove Dad’s recipe, but they tasted like baking powder. Back to my old standby!), and made gravy on the fly for the first time ever with no recipe!
Everyone enjoyed lingering at the table and gobbling down some rhubarb cobbler after dinner. It was my last bag of frozen rhubarb from last summer’s harvest….the next day, Mr. Fresh Scratch saw my rhubarb plant poking up from the ground! Perfect timing!
I love a great pot roast, and the one from The Pioneer Woman’s cookbook does not disappoint! It was also the thing she made on the first episode of her Food Network show, so it was nice to know just what to do since I’d seen her do it! It takes about a half hour of active prep time: chopping, then searing the veggies and meat. Then it all just goes into the same Dutch oven you prep in, lid on, for a few hours. That’s it! The house smells like heaven for like four hours (if your idea of heaven is the smell of cooking meat!).
{As an aside: I don’t get a jillion cable channels. Therefore, no Food Network. And PW’s show isn’t on YouTube or Hulu or Netflix or even available for viewing on the Food Network. But, you know what? You can download it on iTunes. This discovery was one of the happiest moments of last week!}
Confession: I absolutely adore the carrots from a pot roast. Seriously one of my fave foods. This sparked a, “What’s your favorite vegetable?” discussion around the dinner table with our friends, which is always very interesting. You can learn a lot about a person this way!
What’s your favorite vegetable? Mine’s actually a beet…
