March Menu #3

This week I got away from the endless chicken of the week before, although I still had 2 days of chicken, once in a sandwich and once in a salad.

• Mon: Pulled bbq chicken sandwiches with pineapple slaw
• Tue: Crab cakes benedict with avocado
• Wed: Sriracha Caesar salad, beans and garlic toast in broth
• Thur: Repeat of Caesar and beans
• Fri: Baked sweet potato topped with roast broccoli, onions and red pepper
• Sat: Stuffed portobello mushrooms with roast butternut squash and broccoli
• Sun: Cobb salad with honey-mustard ranch dressing

Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwich with Pineapple Slaw

This Pulled BBQ Chicken Sandwich from Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings: Hungry for More was quite tasty. I didn’t have any cabbage in the house but I did have some kohlrabi so I grated that, squeezed it dry and used it in place of cabbage in the slaw recipe. The slaw recipe was a fairly standard mayonnaise-based coleslaw with grated carrots and sliced scallions with the addition of some minced pineapple.

For the chicken, you season and brown a boneless skinless chicken breast in a bit of oil, then remove it from the pan so you can make a barbecue sauce with sliced onions, garlic, tomato paste, ketchup, tomato sauce, apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, chopped chipotles and mustard powder. Add the chicken back in, cover and simmer for an hour, until you can pull it apart with two forks.

Crab Cakes Benedict with Avocado

Eggs make such a nice dinner sometimes but this was beyond “breakfast for dinner.” I used canned crab to make the crab cakes with a mayonnaise, garlic and Sriracha mixture in place of the Hollandaise sauce you’d normally find on eggs benedict. This was from Teigen’s first cookbook, Cravings. Served on a bed of arugula with sliced avocado. It made a very satisfying dinner.

Sriracha Caesar Salad with Beans and Garlic Toast in Broth

The Caesar salad with a bit of Sriracha in the dressing was another from Teigen and quite tasty. The croutons were fabulous! Slices of baguette were brushed with an oil that had garlic, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper and then toasted.

The Beans Garlic Toast in Broth were fantastic! The recipe is here. White beans are cooked with a Parmesan rind, onion, garlic and olive oil. You remove the rind, onion and garlic then make the garlic toasts and serve the beans and broth on top of the toast, topping them with a bit of parsley and grated Parmesan.

Both of these were so good I served them again the next night when Marlo came for dinner.

Baked Sweet Potato Topped with Roasted Vegetables

This was an unplanned meal that I threw together. We’d gone out for burgers for lunch and wanted something for dinner but didn’t need anything heavy. After the sweet potatoes were baked, I tossed chopped broccoli (florets and sliced stems), red onion and red pepper chunks in a bit of olive oil and seasoned with Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning before roasting them. Marlo was hungrier than I was and added some leftover pulled BBQ chicken to his sweet potato.

Stuffed Portobellos with Roasted Vegetables

At the grocery store, we saw some prepared stuffed portobello mushrooms marked down and decided to make those for dinner. We got some brioche buns to put them in and added lettuce and tomato. I roasted more broccoli along with some cubed butternut squash to go with the mushroom burgers.

Cobb Salad with Honey-Ranch Dressing

This Cobb Salad was also from Cravings. Cook up some bacon while you hardboil some eggs. Make a ranch dressing with some honey and Dijon mustard added. Spice a chicken breast with paprika, salt, ground cumin, thyme, black pepper, and cayenne pepper then bake on an oiled, foil-lined pan. When the chicken is done, let it rest on a plate and add some corn (I used frozen) to the same pan and broil it until charred. Make a salad with iceberg or Romaine, halved cherry tomatoes or chopped Romas, cubed avocado, sliced chicken, chopped hardboiled egg, crumbled bacon and the dressing.