Batch Cooking – October 20, 2019

Sunday is cooking day in Juiie’s kitchen! Due to some afternoon plans, I got started quite a bit later than I normally do, which means it’s now deep into the evening. Still! Cooking was accomplished! Let’s talk about that, shall we?

But first! As always, some thoughts on last week:

• The Parmesan chicken was okay, though I admittedly couldn’t really taste the parmesan, which is surprising given how much I put in there. Probably next time I make it, I’ll leave out the cheese from the recipe while I’m cooking and just use it as a topping. Still, it was tasty enough. Nothing stand-out special, but fine.
• The “three sisters casserole” was really nice. I very much liked the cornbread topping, even with the over-salting. I think this one’s a keeper, though the next time I make it I should really use shredded greens as opposed to the whole baby-green leaves. Ah, well. Lessons learned.
• About the right quantity for this week. I had a few unexpected meals out this week, which means I’ve got one serving each left of the chicken and the casserole, which will last me until tomorrow and then I’ll start in on this week’s stuff.
• As seems to be my habit, I didn’t use any of the rest of the lemon juice beyond what I used in the cooking. Alas.
• The oat milk was actually quite tasty — I wasn’t expecting that. I used it in my overnight oats but also just drank it straight when I wanted something a bit creamy to drink. Very nice. I might do it again.

Honestly, I don’t have too much else to say about last week. Onward to this week’s planning and shopping!

• I’ve fallen into a pretty decent pattern for how I choose my recipes for the week: load up a bunch of cooking blogs and meal kit services (notably ones that provide their recipes online), scroll through until I have a bunch of options, winnow down the ones that wouldn’t work for me (either because they have ingredients that I can’t buy in small quantities, or because they use a method I don’t have access to, or whatever), and then pick the finalists. This week, that was a “Thanksgiving” lentil salad and a “classic” instant pot chilli.
• The lentil salad looked interesting, and provided sufficient contrast to the chilli, but was also something I’d never made before. It’s essentially a warm lentil salad with greens and roast vegetables (red onion and butternut squash), and also golden raisins and toasted pecans. Interesting!
• I honestly thought I had a chilli recipe on hand, and I probably do… somewhere. But I apparently didn’t have one for the instant pot, so I downloaded a new one and adapted it for the instant pot,. (Yes, I am reaching the point where I am able to do that. Yay!)
• I had a problem when I went shopping for the chilli, though: ground beef. I believe you all know that I’ve been making a serious effort to avoid factory-farmed meat, and the only non-industrial ground beef at the grocery store where I went shopping this week was an organic, local brand… for $15 a pound. And friends, I just could not justify spending that amount of money on ground beef. I couldn’t. I very seriously contemplated buying factory-farmed, just this once, since it was literally five times cheaper. I looked for sustainably-raised chicken — no dice. Ultimately I settled on “free from” ground lamb, which despite being nearly $10 per pound was still a 30% savings over the ground beef, which is just blowing my mind.
• Also when I got home, I realized I’d completely forgotten to buy the beans for the chilli. However, I discovered a can of mixed beans in my pantry that I’ve been meaning to use up for a while, so I figured if I was already going “un-classic”, I might as well go even further off the beaten path and just embrace the irregularity.
• I wasn’t at my usual grocery store, so I couldn’t get my usual bread. I have no idea if the kind I got is any good — I’ll have to see later this week.
• Sale on strawberries! Yay berries!

Okay, enough about the planning stages. Onward to cooking:

• As usual, I did a bunch of pre-prep yesterday: chopped some onions, assembled the spice mix for the chilli, toasted the pecans, etc. That way, my mise en place was all ready to go today, which worked out very well. Definitely gonna stick to this schedule if I can manage it in the future.
• I’ve never dry-toasted nuts on the stove before. They may have gotten ever-so-slightly charred, but on the whole they are *very* good. I had to stop myself from just eating all of them right from the pan. (They’re gonna be toppings for the lentil salad.)
• While it was a relatively light cooking day, I made a few mistakes. While I’ve done a lot of roast vegetables, I’ve never done red onion or frozen butternut squash before, and I think I may not have done it right. I cut the red onions into wedges, as per the recipe, but I didn’t realize I should have taken off the root ends. (I kept them on so that the wedges wouldn’t fall apart.) Ultimately this meant I had to remove them from the finished, roasted product when I realized they weren’t going to be edible. Also, I’m not sure the frozen butternut squash works for roasting if I’m trying to do it straight from frozen. They boiled a bit and then stuck to the pan quite a lot, and also the pieces were *very* small. Next time I make this recipe, I’ll have to cut the onions into a dice, toss with some larger pieces of squash (either chopped myself or else purchased) and probably do more of them. Ah, well. Now I know.
• I’m also not super-fond of my new microwave’s “auto-cook potatoes” function — I find it makes the sweet potatoes *very* overdone. I might just have to do it manually in the future, even if it’s more of a pain.
• The chilli is fine, though I found it too liquidy. Instead of waiting around to boil off a bit, I decided to add a cornstarch slurry, boil for a few minutes, and call it good. But at least I knew better than to stir in the tomatoes and risk a burn notice? *Eventually* I learn things!
• I had some roast garlic left over from the head that I roasted for the lentil salad. I’m not entirely certain what I’m going to do with them. Mix them into my hummus, maybe? Use them as a savoury spread? Hit me with some ideas!
• I managed to get *most* of my dishes washed while the chilli was finishing to cook, but the instant pot is always a bit of a pain. Oh, well. Such is the life of a batch-cooking home chef without a dishwasher, I guess.

I think that’s all of that. Here’s my groceries for this week:

Metro Grocery
Item	Price
Du puy lentils	$3.99
Apple cider vinegar	$1.69
Carmelized onion spread	$2.99
Pecan pieces	$4.79
Diced tomatoes	$1.99
Eggs, 1 dozen large free-run	$5.19
Greek yogurt, 5% plain	$4.99
Baby carrots	$2.29
Oranges, 3 lbs	$3.00
Red pears x3 (560 g)	$3.69
Red onion x1 (265 g)	$1.45
Sweet potatoes x3 (1.13 kg)	$4.96
Cortland apples x3 (540 g)	$2.53
Stawberries (454 g)	$3.00
English cucumber	$2.99
Spring mix greens	$4.19
Ground lamb, 450 g	$8.76
Multigrain rye bread	$2.99
Hummus	$3.49
Jarlsberg cheese	$4.60
Total	$73.57
Bulk Barn (not shown)
Item	Price
Cashew pieces (120 g)	$2.92
Chia seeds (90 g)	$1.75
Golden raisins (205 g)	$2.08
Walnut pieces (100 g)	$1.81
Pecan pieces (100 g)	$2.96
Slivered almonds (140 g)	$3.47
Coupon	($3.00)
Total	$11.99
Grand Total	$85.56

And that’s a wrap! See you all again next week for the end-of-October edition of “Julie’s kitchen”!

Tagged: batch cooking, beef, chilli, lamb, lentils, vegetarian