thoughtful consumption

Here’s what I got this week.

• apples
• sweet potatoes
• pair of pears
• pancake mix
• basil
• lettuce
• sorrel
• field peas
• okra
• squash
• eggs
• spice rub

I also ordered onions and garlic from the online store.

However, for lunch today, we ate leftovers: sliced tomatoes, field peas and black rice, and green bean casserole that looks oddly like macaroni and cheese.

Supper was another story. We had shrimp in lemon garlic basil cream sauce over fettuccine and lettuce.

It’s my kind of dish, and I loved it. For the shrimp, I followed the “The Simplest and Best Shrimp Dish” recipe from How To Cook Everything. It does not lie. Then I deglazed the pan to make the sauce.

Tomorrow’s plans

Tomorrow night, I’ll use the spice rub on a flat iron steak. With the steak, we’ll have some more lettuce, the last tiny tomato, either stir-fried squash or fried okra, and possibly some caramelized onions. And maybe some field peas, too. My husband loves field peas – I think he’d prefer them to the steak. These field peas have a reddish tint to them. Can’t wait to see if they taste different.

I think I’m the only one that likes raw sorrel. And I love it, so I have no qualms about eating it all up myself. There are some perquisites to being Chief Food Officer.

Run down for the week

Apples will get eaten as snacks. No need to do anything else with thes’uns.

Sweet potatoes will be baked in the oven or the microwave. The last few sweet potatoes didn’t turn out so well. But these two look like they’ll be delicious.

Pears will get poached with red wine sauce. (Darn! I should’ve ordered some goat cheese!)

Basil’s already done. I used some of it in the shrimp fettuccine and turned the rest into pesto.

Lettuce and sorrel will be washed, spun, and eaten fresh with minimal dressing.

Field peas will get cooked with onions sautéed in a little leftover sausage drippings. Heat the drippings, sauté the onions, add the peas, cover with water, bring to a boil, and simmer for 20 minutes to 8 hours. So easy and good!

My okra always gets fried in cornmeal. I’ve never learned to like okra any other way. (Well, it’s okay in soup, but that’s more indifference than liking.) I may try frying it in a little olive oil instead of deep frying in canola. When I’ve been frying eggplant recently, I noticed that olive oil doesn’t smoke as easily as canola. Just keep it on medium and keep the batches coming. Wonder if I could cut the okra long ways so that the pieces would be bigger and easier to fry in less oil. More like Asian eggplant slices.

Squash will be stir-fried. Possibly some of it will be used for squash muffins.

Eggs will make us happy in many ways: cookies, pancakes, scrambled eggs…