Weekend Cooking: Eating Out of the Pantry and Freezer

Hello, my friends! If you normally read my blog during the week as well as on Saturdays, you'll see I didn't post this week. All is fine here. It's just that I'm in my super-duper busy editing season plus still dealing with settling my mother's estate and selling her house and (of course) trying to follow the news and recommendations for COVID-19. Phew! What a super-ridiculous time we're living in!

Here are some random notes about up-coming Weekend Cooking posts. I know I will soon have another batch of cookbooks from Abrams. I'm not sure when I'll have more cookbooks from Voracious. I'm currently trying to use what's in the house, and we're avoiding the grocery store. Cooking is . . . interesting!

Last week's menu included the wonderful beef stew from Michael Ruhlman's Braise cookbook, which I wrote about in early January. The recipe can be found on that post. When I bought the chuck roast for the stew I made in January, Wegman's had a deal on a two-pack, so I froze one roast and used that this week. Because this is social distancing time, I didn't want to "waste" 2 cups of wine on the stew, so I used homemade frozen beef broth instead. I have to say that the stew was just as wonderful this time around, so if you're doling out your wine or just never have wine in the house, don't hesitate to make Ruhlman's Ida's Beef Stew. Our stew did have potatoes in it, but they didn't show up in my photo.

The one thing I totally forgot to buy when I was stocking up for COVID-19 was yeast! ARGH--I'm so incredibly mad at myself. It's nowhere to be found these days. Much more scarce than paper towels, and my favorite brand is on back order for up to a month. I do have enough, I think, but I decided to make a King Arthur Flour rye soda bread for that stew dinner, so I could conserve my yeast stash. The recipe comes from one their cookbooks, and I couldn't find it on their website. If you want me to post the recipe, let me know.

We also had a tuna quinoa chickpea salad from The Spruce Eats. The link will take you to the recipe and the scan is also from their website. This was really good and made one dinner and one lunch for the two of us. We're currently a little squeamish about eating greens that aren't cooked, but we seem to have survived the salad anyway. I'm guessing this would be a great make-ahead lunch salad for when life gets back to some kind of normal.

Other dinners were beans and rice and soup with tortellini and frozen veggies. Tomorrow night's dinner is a surprise for Mr. BFR: we're going to have a snack night! I bought some cheeses, crackers, hard salamis, sardines, and olives. I think we're going to break out the playing cards and play some gin while we snack and sip wine and forget about the troubles of the world -- even if it's just for a couple of hours.

Finally, in the necessity is the mother of invention category, I discovered a new quarantcocktail: rye with limoncello. Here the idea was to conserve our fresh lemons and our wine stash. We wanted a drink but didn't want to crack open a wine bottle and didn't want to waste a lemon on a few slices. Thus a cocktail was born. It's really good--or at least it's good in the present climate. I'm happy and Mr. BFR is happy, and that's all that counts!

And I lied when I said "finally" in the last paragraph. The real finally is to alert you some Penguin Random House live events that include a peek into cookbook authors' and chefs' kitchens to learn a new recipe and get a few cooking and kitchen tips. You can find the full schedule of bookish and cooking Instagram and Facebook events by checking out Virtual Events. The current schedule is for March, and you can watch past events. I really liked the video with Melissa Clark.

Here's to another successful week of cooking under these strange circumstances.

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Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page.

NOTE: Mr. Linky sometimes is mean and will give you an error message. He's usually wrong and your link went through just fine the first time. Grrrr.
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