The week has taken an...interesting...turn. Luckily, I have a date in the kitchen this evening with both a new dinner venture (my second of the week, and it's only Wednesday!) and a baking adventure.
I'll have to round up my photos from Monday, but I made orange chicken a la Pioneer Woman, and it was delicious! I am totally going to make this part of my rotation, and it finally gave me a preparation for chicken thighs that didn't make me gag. I just usually find that meat to be weird. Biting into a fat pustule is never a winner-winner-chicken-dinner scenario for me. I'll do a full post later on my savory cooking separate from my baking to keep things interesting. Diversity, people!
Tonight's culinary adventure will be cooking our first meal from Blue Apron. A friend has been using their meal-delivery service for a few months now, and as she's a vegetarian, she has been loving the variety and inspiration each box brings. With her subscription, she was able to send a trial week to a few friends, and she sent one along to me and John, knowing we'd apprecaite the opportunity! It's actually pretty cool:
They deliver once weekly on a day you choose, and they give you pre-portioned ingredients from meat and veg to spices and oils to cook 3 recipes, from which you get 2 meals each. So it's essentially a full week's worth of meals. You can set your dietary preferences, and you can even choose which weeks you want deliveries. For example, I think it's a bit expensive ($60/delivery) to use every single week, so I've gone in and picked one week per month to receive a delivery. Those weeks we won't have to buy entrees from the grocery store, and as we find recipes we like, we can keep the recipe cards and shop from the shelves to recreate them later on our own.
In our box that arrived today, we can make sausage with gnocci and cabbage; stewed chicken with latkes and creme fraiche; and fresh chestnut pasta with ghee and poppy seeds. We will dive into the gnocci dish first because it looks AMAZING.
Then, while happily digesting all of that yummy gnocci and sausage, I'll bake up some extra special cupcakes for a friend's birthday to bring into the office tomorrow. Yum yum!
And all of this before I start in on my prime holiday baking. I did my holiday stock-up last night of all the shelf-stable supplies (plus our usual weekly needs from the grocery store). Back in October I had gotten all 4 tires on my car replaced, and got a $70 rebate Mastercard gift card--I squirreled it away for this exact shopping trip, and thus got $110 worth of groceries for $40 out of pocket. Man, that felt good! I knew the gift card would come in handy to offset the extra money we're outputting for holiday gifts and travels this time of year. I'm very grateful it did!
On my holiday baking forecast are the following:
apple-cranberry crumble pie with homemade flaky pie crust (with butter, not lard!!!!!)
Linzer tarts
hot chocolate macarons with marshmallow buttercream filling
Ree Drummond's Knock-You-Naked-Brownies
LOTS of my homemade Irish cream liquor (for both drinking and gifting)
Christmas morning crockpot pumpkin spice latte
Thank goodness for the kitchen during stressful times. There is something so soothing about sinking my hands into dough, about measuring out vanilla extract and about cracking eggs.
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