The weekly menu

Yes, I have a friend who is also named Elise.  It’s very confusing for me since I’ve never shared a name with anyone, let alone someone I interact with frequently.  She has a little boy a few months younger than P so we hang on the regular.

Anyway, we went to her house for a potluck/swim/world cup party on Monday.  Oh, and it was her b-day too!  I brought a corn and quinoa dish that I loosely based off this Bon Appetit recipe for Mexican Corn salad.  I made extra and added crab meat to it to have as a lunch option mid-week, too.

Honey baked salmon in foil with green beans (from the garden) and salad.

   

I used this recipe for the salmon but only used 1 lb of fish (should’ve done more so we had leftovers!).  It was really easy to make (all the marinade ingredients were things I had on hand – including the fresh thyme which was from our garden) and even easier to clean up thanks to the foil.

 

I love cooking meats in foil – it’s such a good way to keep the protein moist and flavorful.

Wednesday market fun.  I got a corn dog from The Hotdogger.

Fig and goat cheese pizza with chard.  And a side salad.

 

I hunted every grocery store in town to track down this GF Vicolo crust.  I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it but I knew I had seen it somewhere!!  In the end I found it at the Davis Co-op.  It is truly the best GF crust around. I’ve tasted my fair share and this has oomph to it.  In other words, it’s not a crispy thin piece of cardboard.  And it was a pretty decent deal (at $6 for 2 crusts).

 

The rest of the ingredients were easy.  We still have figs aplenty thanks to my friends’ tree and the chard was from my own garden.

 

I (loosely) based the fig portion on this recipe but deviated from it rather drastically in an attempt to use what we already had on hand (cabernet and a bit of yellow onion instead of marsala and shallots).  Plus I used fresh figs, not dried.  It’s what I had.  I pre-cut everything earlier in the day (nap time) and put it in a ziplock so it would be easy to chuck in a pan later that night.  Once it cooked down I added it to the blender to puree into sauce.  Then I spread it on the crust, topped it with chopped chard, goat chèvre and goat feta and baked it for 15 minutes at 425 degrees.

Oh pizza.  Glorious pizza.

 

The salad had spinach, pistachios, peaches, and avocado with a home-made balsamic vinaigrette.

Kyle and I each had our own pie.  Love.

This quinoa dish was inspired by these Chicken and Apricot skewers.

 

Because I had peaches aplenty left over from pie making, I subbed those for apricots.  Also, Kyle thinks apricots are weird when grilled or warm.  When I asked him when he’d ever had them prepared that way, he shrugged, said he didn’t think he ever had, but he imagined he wouldn’t like it.  Ummm, okay?  So bizarre.

Anyway, I roasted them in the oven instead of grilling them and then served them (with the sauce) over quinoa.  This was my first time cooking with jalapeño and it wasn’t as scary as I was thinking it would be.

 

I actually made so many changes to the sauce I think I’ll just post my version of it soon because it was amazing.  Most notably, I swapped sun butter for the PB (because we are a peanut free facility).

And the bonus recipe was this month’s cookthecover from Bon Appetit.

I cheated for the bottom layer and used a GF crust that I got from Whole Foods.  It was free because the WF customer service is amazing (full disclosure: I had purchased a different brand a while back which was moldy, but when I tried to get a replacement that brand was no longer in supply.  As a way to make it up to me, the staff at Whole Foods gave me their gluten free crust to try out instead).

  

I was in a time crunch when I was making it (when am I not?), so I ended up making a crumble style topping – just almond flour, whole rolled oats, coconut sugar, and coconut oil.

And that’s the week in food!