Salads, mostly

This is another week of storytelling by pictures, with maybe one recipe hidden in here. The thing about having mostly salads to work our way through is that there's only so much of a recipe you can apply to a salad. And it's worth understanding that everything improves with bacon; we got a pound of pretty tasty bacon that made it through the week just fine.

I think I'll try and remember to post actual recipes as their own blog posts, for the sake of indexing.

Anyway, let's start with Sunday. I'd bought a chicken, so we roasted that. Ed went all Jacques Pepin, and deboned the chicken first, though it took him probably three times as long. But then it cooked faster! We made up a tasty sauce of porcini mushrooms and savory to go on top, especially since we were slicing up the chicken, and served that with some roasted garlicky broccoli. We then ate the rest of the chicken with salads and roasted broccoli stems for lunch (two lunches, in my case). No complaints.


The sauce cooking down. Savory gets so delicious and crunchy. I didn't even know that herb was a thing before this!


Ok, my photo skills still would benefit from a little more time spent on composition and lighting. That's a big ask when dinner is sitting on a plate in front of you steaming, so don't expect any changes anytime soon. But there is a pile of chicken under a pile of mushrooms and two balsamic-glazed onions and a pile of garlicky broccoli. It tasted so much better than it looks!


Monday was a braised collards and red lentils dish, which is maybe worth its own post.

Tuesday was a big salad, with bacon, baby shitake mushrooms, and fried potatoes on top, with a dressing that consisted of roasted garlic, roasted poblano, balsamic vinegar, and I think an egg yolk.

Again, shiny brown things don't photograph all that well. Tasted so much better than it looks.

We also needed lunch, so the rest of the broccoli and basil was sacrificed to that, with kamut and a thinly sliced raw zucchini.



And the remaining cucumbers got turned into pickles.

Wednesday the fridge was pretty bare. We went for a garlic-heavy linguine carbonara, with regular garlic, garlic scapes, AND green garlic all cooked down with the final two pieces of our bacon. Lots of cheese, an egg, and an egg yolk took care of the sauce. Which led me to making a single egg white's worth of meringues. Best way to use up an egg white EVAR. I was a pretty happy camper after eating way too much of that carbonara dish, but it's just so delicious.

So many garlic options! 


Also known as heaven on a plate. Linguine carbonara with tons of garlic, cheese, bacon, and the last of the fresh peas.


Ottolenghi's rosewater and pistacchio meringues. Too rosewater-y for Ed.

Thursday we picked up our new CSA, yay! Lots more salad greens, and also a ton of cucumbers and little zucchinis. We've been super impressed with the zucchinis; small and flavorful and not many seeds, they fry up really nicely but also taste good raw. Yum. See other blog post for notes on week #4!