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What We Had For Dinner This Week

Since my meal-planning post struck a chord with a lot of you, I thought it might be fun to post one of these lists. Let me know what you think; this is how I structure the list now, and this is how it looked this week, with lunch, dinner, shopping, and prep steps for each day.

As I’ve said before, you’ll have to do without pictures for the time being. Melissa is pouring all her energy into the house renovation, and has none left for nighttime camera work. Once we’re settled, I hope to offer more of her gorgeous photos.

Saturday

General Strategy: Saturdays are our main market days: Our three favorite markets — Berkeley, Grand Lake, and Ferry Plaza — all occur on Saturdays. Weekends are also our main house days. (Melissa does it during the week as well.) That means that I can include dinners that require a bit more work, but not a lot. It also means that I can’t yet cook tons of food on the weekend for use later in the week.
Lunch: Bakesale Betty’s Fried Chicken Sandwiches - Melissa’s mom brought us lunch as a treat. If you live in this area, try this sandwich, which features fried chicken and cole slaw on a deli roll. The slaw is spicy, but this sandwich is a stroke of genius. She told us in advance she’d bring them, so I noted it for lunch.
Dinner: Dopo - My friend Amy gave me a gift certificate to Dopo, an Italian restaurant in Oakland. While I had decided on Friday to use it for Saturday night, the timing ended up being fortuitous. We had a rough day, and delicious food — cooked by someone else — was the remedy. Dopo used to annoy me because they charged standard restaurant markups for wine, but then served it in crappy little tumblers. If you’re going to double or triple the price of a bottle of wine, at least serve it in decent glasses. If you want to be a casual trattoria, don’t double or triple your wine prices. I’m happy to say that they now have real wine glasses, and they still have fantastic food.
Shopping: Shallots, sausage, greens, lentils(?), arugula, mirepoix, deli rolls, radishes, orange, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, pears - When I’m writing my lists, I’m in one room surrounded by books, and the kitchen is in another. So I put ? next to ingredients that I may already have. It reminds me to look in the kitchen before I head to the market. I write “mirepoix” when I want equal amounts of carrot, celery, and onion for stock or stews. It doesn’t save much space, but I like the word: It is my nom de plume in the National Puzzlers’ League.
Prep: Hard-cook eggs, make bagna cauda, (a.m.) soak anchovies

Sunday

Lunch: Bagna cauda sandwiches (hard-boiled eggs, radish, arugula) - This sounds very exotic, but in truth I made a small amount of bagna cauda (a warm bath of oil, garlic, and anchovies) and used it as a spread on sandwich rolls. I added all the ingredients to the sandwich. We told my mom, who helped me strip paint that day, that it was a good thing her husband was out of town: The sandwich was pungent.
Dinner: Lentils braised in red wine with sausage, and greens - The lentil technique came from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, and it’s one I’ll use again. She has you cook the lentils sort of like risotto, keeping minimal liquid in the pot with the beans. I seared the Fatted Calf sausage, but I daydreamed about grilling them in the future.
Shopping: baguette, kale/chard from house - Even with just a few pots in the backyard, we’re reaping the benefits of a garden. Bonnie gave us some potted greens, and they have persevered — flourished, even — despite sharing the yard with a substantial amount of construction effluvia.
Prep: soak beans for minestrone

Monday

General Strategy: On weekdays, I can shop at Rainbow Grocery, a natural-foods, vegetarian co-op near my work. Oddly, they have a weak produce section, but I dare you to find a better bulk section. I decided to try Heidi’s Do-It-Yourself Power Bars, and Rainbow had all the exotic ingredients I needed.
Dinner: Minestrone - But with cabbage, turnips, and potatoes instead of the normal ingredients.
Lunch: honey, pear, goat cheese sandwich
Shopping: Bread for mussels, dried fava beans, cumin?, lemon, dried figs, bay leaves, 1 ¼ c. rolled oats 1 ¼ c. hazelnuts, ½ c. oat bran, 1 ½ c. crisped brown rice cereal, dried cranberries, crystallized ginger, brown rice syrup, ¼ c. natural cane sugar
Prep: Soak dried figs in leftover wine,(a.m.) beans,power bars - Having used half a bottle of wine for the lentils the night before, I used the other half to rehydrate some figs for Friday (another Zuni technique).

Tuesday

Dinner: library night - I had to do some research at the library, so I left each of us to our own devices for the night. In the end, we both ate leftover minestrone.
Lunch: On our own. I fell down a bit on planning lunches this week, but usually we had good leftovers from the night before.

Wednesday

Dinner: Mussels - Few things are worse than waking up the morning you plan to make moules marinières and realizing that you didn’t make plans for french fries. The way I make them, they require a fair amount of prep, and without potatoes on hand I couldn’t include them.
Shopping: mussels - One of the best parts of the house is its proximity to lots of our favorite food stores. Monterey Fish Market, one of the Bay Area’s best seafood sources, is just up the road a bit, so Melissa went and bought us mussels.

Thursday

Dinner: Ful sandwiches - This isn’t the full name of the fava bean salad from Mediterranean Street Food, but it’s how I abbreviated it. I decided to cook the dried fava beans in a slow cooker I’m reviewing, and they came out well, though they could have used a bit more time, I think. I cooked them for almost 3 hours, but I think in the future I would cook them for 3 ½.
Shopping: scallions, parsley, persimmons?, pita bread - Rainbow didn’t have persimmons — the original recipe calls for way-out-of-season tomatoes — so I used avocado instead.

Friday

Dinner: cheese course with condiments (dried figs with red wine) - This revived an old tradition of ours. When we wanted to learn about cheese, we would buy three cheeses each week and eat them (with bread and salami and whatnot) and read about them. I thought it might be a fun treat to bring that back from time to time. We got to the cheese counter and asked the vendor which cheeses she liked at the moment. We bought Brebiou, Cone de Port Aubry, and Cabot’s bandage-wrapped cheddar.

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