cook one new dish every week

This week, Husband is mostly out of town, so I was cooking just for myself. That gives me license to experiment more freely, since no one has to eat the results except me.

Here’s what I made:

- Gazpacho

- Shakshuka (new; pictured): the eggs didn’t really behave perfectly, but I think it will still taste fine

- Something that tried to be a soon tofu stew and failed utterly (new, and never to be repeated). However, a sufficient quantity of kimchi can rescue anything, including whatever that crap was.

• Cambodian stir-fried fish with herbs
• Orecchiette with nduja
• Korean stewed chicken

• Pizza with a little bit of nduja, which is a yummy spicy spreadable sausage [new]
• Chickpea and herb salad

We have a lot of leftovers from last week, and Husband has a bunch of business dinners coming up this week, so we didn’t exactly strain ourselves to cook up a storm today.

• A spring farrotto with fava beans and asparagus (new)
• Pork chop with cherry sauce and roasted sugar snap peas
• Thai cashew chicken stir-fry

Here’s what we made for the week:

• Oven-roasted flounder with bok choy and brown rice [new!]
• Oranges in balsamic-anise caramel sauce with Greek yogurt [new!]
• Black-eyed pea and kale stew [new, pictured]
• Thai stir-fry with chicken, squash, egg and a ridiculous amount of fish sauce

Almost everything we made this week was new!

• Flemish stew [new!] + braised carrots with thyme (we usually do this with sage instead)
• Kimchi and pork belly stir-fry [new!]
• Indian ground meat and peas—old standby dish, new recipe

• Aussie burger with corn on the cob
• Green bean and mushroom Indian curry
• Sweet potato/eggplant/chicken Khmer curry [sorta new]

Husband was out of town, so I picked all the dishes myself this week, and then a friend came over to help with some of the cooking. When the boy’s not around, I tend to cook vegetarian(ish), because I don’t really enjoy meat enough to put up with all the food handling issues.

Here’s what we/I made. Everything this week was new!

• Gazpacho
• Stir-fried yellow chives
• Bucatini with anchovy breadcrumbs (ok, tinned anchovies aren’t vegetarian, but they’re also not raw)
• Broccoli slaw with miso
• Chickpea salad with lemon and feta

Everything turned out pretty delicious!

• Capellini alla norma + bruschetta with peaches and ricotta [both new]
• Fried rice with leftover meat from Friday night’s dinner

The pic’s not mine, but it’s pretty close to our pasta dish. No blobs of ricotta though – we saved those for the bruschetta.

• Eggplant pizza
• Singapore noodles (new!)
• Cashew chicken with eggplants and gai lan

We have a ton of gai lan and two eggplants left over. If I have any time this week, I’ll do something with those.