With high hopes it was with a notably grateful heart and spirit, I congratulated February for its excellent conclusion, brimming with the best of spring-like weather. The first full week of March tried to be as impressive, with more bright sunshine and glorious colors on blooms and blossoms and, as March’s first Monday evening rolled around, the night sky offered quite a show of the full rising moon to the east and the celestial alignment of Venus and Jupiter to the west. Although birthday dinner prep on Monday March 6th, and an afternoon session down in Montgomery County the next day, cut my outside time down to size, there was enough time in the sunshine to still go around. The pleasant weather held through that Thursday before switching to an uneven and bumpy ride through alternating rains and chills and small short-lived returns to decency.
I'm caught just now with quite a backlog of blog posts; my obsession with capturing and documenting and commenting on life in the Roediger House has me posting each day about things that happened over a week ago. To catch up, I'm rolling into this one entry several of the meals from last week because my need to tally and document cannot be subverted.
Meal No. 3313: Crusted Chicken Breasts
Let's begin with Wednesday, March 8, when hunger drove me to the kitchen early in the day in order to come out with panko-parmesan-crusted chicken breasts and garlicky roasted asparagus, plus the last of the Mexican coleslaw I'd made. It's all pretty straightforward, nothing fancy, and yet remarkably satisfying.
Meal No. 3314: Pesto-Ricotta Deep Dish Pizza
It was a fun evening for three on Thursday night, starting with deep dish pesto-ricotta pizza, followed by Scream (2022), which was next in our ongoing run through that film series.
Meal No. 3315: Not So Cajun Chicken
Last Friday night was a return to an established easy special meal, one that has often served for celebration or marking occasions...or impressing guests: Not So Cajun chicken, over white rice. One might argue it is the best thing you can do with chicken tenders (with the possible exception of breading and frying them and dipping them in a homemade honey mustard sauce!). It's a one-bowl comforting wonder, a fitting end to a day that began cold and grey and rainy but ended with enough sunshine to make for a great long downtown walk.
Meal No. 3316: Pork Tacos on Homemade Tortillas
Saturday offered a chance to try out two new recipes: crockpot pork for street tacos, and flour tortillas. The pork had a great flavor, and the overnight cook made it incredibly tender. I kept the slaw low-key by just making my version of my mother's sweet Southern coleslaw. It matched up well. Oh: and thank goodness I still had creamy avocado lime sauce from the previous Monday's mojo pork.
I've made corn tortillas before, and they were good...but these flour tortillas were outstanding. I am really ruining myself for the storebought baked goods with all these bread and dough challenges I've been happily tackling of late. Update: because I had plenty of tortilla dough left over, I decided to toss the formed balls into the fridge, and then brought them out a few days later to roll and pan sear for a round of pork taco leftovers. It was all so very good, all over again:
Meal No. 3317: Vierling Saloon Chicken and Wild Rice Soup
After a snowless winter, forces combined at long last to bring us near-freezing temps and unending precipitation, as we emerged into the first full day of Daylight Saving Time on March 12. When Sumner and I first went out in the pre-dawn chill, with cold fat drops falling from that dreary sky, the snow and sleet were still lightly accumulated on the vehicles and planting beds.
I’d picked up some pansies that were still chilling (quite literally) in the bed of the truck, and they too had traces of the frozen stuff that had eluded us the entire winter…and with only eight days of this dark season remaining.
Plans had been long laid for a gathering of the core crew to mark Amy’s birthday. I switched up the menu because weather like we had seems to compel intentionality. Translation: soup! The convenience of a rotisserie chicken from Costco makes lighter work for putting together a pot of Vierling Saloon chicken and wild rice soup, long a favorite when there are bowls to be filled on cold grey days. If I hadn’t had a frustrating morning weigh-in that day, I might have added some fresh-baked bread. But I had to deny to all what could not be granted to me!
Meal No. 3318: Creamy Chicken Francese
The leftovers in the fridge called on me to stay my hand on making a new dinner this past Tuesday night, but a package of chicken tenders made other demands on me as they neared their use-by date. So I dug back into the archives to retrieve guidance for a happily-remembered attempt at chicken francese, tweaked things around a smidge, and came out with a sensational result. With some spaghetti to give it a bed for the tenders and the sauce, and roasted Brussels sprouts as a green side, it was a bit too good and a bit too much.
While we're at it, let's also see where things stand with the spring colors appearing in the yard. By the evening of March 6, the first daffodil bloom in my third "group" popped out with its nice color contrast:
Here is how prolific were the blooms on a daffodil that my friend and colleague Donna gave me:
And while it took them a good while from first sprouting from the winter ground to manifest their gorgeous blooms, the tulips I planted in the late fall are dotting various planting beds with their luxurious architectural evolution:
It was a race that the new tulips were not apparently aware of, or maybe they did not want to bust out their vulnerable beauty before adjusting to the cruel plunge in temperatures. They certainly seemed to take their sweet time from first breech of the planting beds’ surface to their sensational struts. That timidity was still operating to constrain their display, as of the sunny day back on March 9th:
"Fool-Proof Pan Pizza" [Updated 03 January 2020] and "Pesto Pizza" [Updated 27 February 2019], by J. Kenji López-Alt, former culinary director of SeriousEats.com.
"Not So Cajun Chicken," a dish I regularly enjoyed at Crowley's Old Time Favorites restaurant and bar on Medlin Drive in Raleigh, NC. (Another version of the recipe can be found here.) A heap of thanks is due to Jimmy Randolph for tracking down the recipe for me.
"Easy Crockpot Carnitas," by Lindsay Ostrom of PinchofYum.com. [Published 04 May 2021]
"How to Make Flour Tortillas (Tortillas de Harina)," from Alex Cardenas of TheKitchn.com. [Published 20 February 2023]
"Vierling Saloon Cream of Chicken and Wild Rice Soup," formerly offered at the Vierling Saloon in Marquette, Michigan. Another online version of the recipe can be found at Miss Mary's Blog.
Based loosely on "Creamy Chicken Francese," from Karina Carrel of Cafe Delites.
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