food I have
Produce
1 grapefruit
oranges
2 tomatoes (1 urgent)
3 roasted bell peppers
2-3 bell peppers (yellow & red)
broccoli
mixed small lettuces
Dairy
3/4 container of sour cream
1% milk
1/2 pint heavy cream
goat cheese
Starch
1/3 loaf of brown bread (ETA: just heels left)
1/2 round of pumpernickel
small amount of leftover white rice
Protein
carnitas
some leftover cooked chicken (from the breasts marinated in peaches & cowboy rub)
Miscellaneous
some prepared enchiladas that need to be baked
sauce to go with them
meals
Tuesday, February 19 *done*
take 1 link of turkey sausage from freezer to thaw.
take container of small cut pork from freezer to thaw (with black bean & pepper sauce?)
put enchiladas into the freezer
Make a sandwich with chicken leftovers, tomato, and lettuce (and goat cheese?)
Wednesday, February 20 *done*
make a “bread pudding” with some of the pumpernickel bread, eggs, cream, cheese, tomato, and grilled turkey sausage with onions and peppers. Possibly bacon, too. With a little side salad, of course.
*freeze some of this for lunches*
Thursday, February 21 *done*
stir fry of pork, broccoli, onion, and peppers over rice.
Friday, February 22
leftover rice needs to be used up. So do carnitas. Would it be sacrilege to dump them together with cream of chicken soup? Probably. So it would be slightly more respectable to… make burritos! with lots of cheese and sour cream – and maybe a zucchini. And all the rest of the lettuce.
plus bonus recipe – Mexican corn soup
Oh, and I almost forgot to give you the recipe for the soup I made the other day.
If you remember, I had some stock with tomato paste mixed in (let’s say a 3-4 cups of stock with 1/2 a little can of paste).
I also had some liquid I had drained out of the carnitas at the very last minute because I didn’t have the nerve to see what happened to my cooking pot, if I let the pork get completely dry. This was only about 1 cup of lovely pork/citrus/spices essence.
So I went looking in my Mexican cookbook, and found a recipe for corn soup I could use as a starting point.
So I boiled the stock/tomato paste mixture for 20 minutes to kill any bacteria.
Then I combined in a blender:
- 1 onion, cooked down in some of the fat skimmed from the pork liquid (there wasn’t much, really – I was using pork loin instead of the fattier cuts the carnitas recipe recommends) and then seasoned with paprika
- 1 can of corn, drained
- 1 tomatoes, peeled and seeded
- enough stock to make everything juicy and blending smoothly
In a saucepan, I think combined:
- everything from the blender
- the rest of the stock
- salt & pepper
If I were following the recipe, I would now add 1/2 a cup (a whole cup? I don’t remember) of heavy cream. But since most of this would be going into the refrigerator and getting reheated, I decided to add the cream right before serving. And then I found that lumps of sour cream were more satisfying than cream.
I also considered adding chicken at that time, but I ended up also just adding cut up chicken to the bowls while reheating so that I could have the option to swap in carnitas instead of chicken (though I never for around to trying that). It was also a good soup without meat.
