Monday night dinner: Leftovers, kind of

I got home fairly late this evening and didn't have much time to cook. I had initially planned to sautee up our kale/chard, microwave some frozen chicken tenderloins in marinara sauce (I see your skepticism, but they turn out really well and it's SO fast) and prepare some kind of grain to finish it up. Instead, I noticed that we had some leftover coconut milk-poached chicken (yum/yay!) and already-steamed sweet potato cubes (leftover from Sunday's waffles). Sounds good to me!

So I went ahead with the chard: washed thoroughly and then chopped roughly, thrown into a pan with a little bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, a few dashes of lemon juice and a teaspoon or so of crushed garlic (a tip: I hate cleaning out our garlic press, so every month or so I will do several whole heads of garlic, and store the crushed garlic in a glass jar in the fridge. It seems to sweeten and mellow over time, but I'm cool with that. I have also considered freezing it in little cubes, like you can buy in the store - I just haven't found a suitable tray yet!) Sauteed over medium heat, the chard cooks down in under 10 minutes. I usually put the ribs in first and let them soften up for a minute or two before I put in the leaves.

The sweet potato got a heavy dusting of cinnamon and a few minutes in the microwave to warm up, as did the chicken - and that is how I made dinner AND cleared out the fridge in 15 minutes. Not too shabby. :)

Week 1: A surfeit of root vegetables

Well, this blog is off to an inauspicious start! This week's veggie box came on Wednesday, and of course I was out of town for a lab retreat from Wednesday to Friday. This week we were absolutely inundated with satsumas (mandarin oranges) and sweet potatoes. Also in the box: a bunch of carrots, a handful of apples, salad greens, a couple heads of broccoli, leeks, a head of cabbage, and a bunch of chard. As you can see, we have a couple butternut squash to work with as well. I love squash, but I sort of think of it as interchangeable with sweet potato, so we may well put them off for another week. Thank goodness they keep forever!

My tentative plan for the week is to make sweet potato waffles for breakfast on Sunday, and then use the rest of the sweet potatoes in a soup with some chard and chickpeas or white beans (embracing my recently discovered love of Northern African-ish cuisine). We tend to eat a lot of our fruits and veggies raw as snacks - the satsumas will be, for sure, as will the carrots, and the apples will either be snacks or wind up atop a salad (or possibly the waffles). The leek and broccoli seem like prime candidates for a creamy soup, but would also work just fine as side dishes with chicken or fish some night this week.

I must admit I've been having some trouble with the cabbage so far this year... it's just not in my culinary lexicon (yet) so I keep putting off cooking with it, and as a result there two entire heads of cabbage hanging out in our compost bin. This leek and cabbage sautee looks like a decent side dish, but I'm hoping I'll come up with something a little more interesting, perhaps in combination with all the potatoes we still have lying around.