I wrote this post a while back. Now I have zero (0) daughters in the house. I kept forgetting to ask Cute W for his marvelous potato recipe. But I’ve finally got the link, so here’s my overdo post!
At this exact moment, I have two (2) daughters in the house, but it is fleeting. One is heading off to her summer gig on Sunday, and the other will be gone a couple of weeks later. These days, when M comes home, she often complains that the kitchen is too empty. It’s true that we’ve been doing a lot less cooking as empty nesters. It’s frequently what we call “catch as catch can” or just making some chicken that is typically thrown into salads. Cute W also loves ramen.
But it’s not like we’ve forgotten how to cook, and lately we’ve had a couple of restaurant-quality meals. After our visit down to D.C., we came home with a bag of Meyer lemons that our friends passed along from someone’s tree. We decided to make a copycat of some of our favorite dishes from an Italian restaurant on Union that we don’t really go to anymore because the food’s expensive and they’re not on Team Democracy. I have to say, the Meyer lemons were absolutely fantastic with a little chicken scallopini with mushrooms, and the pasta and broccoli side dishes were pretty fantastic, too. I’m definitely going to buy Meyer lemons the next time I see them: I don’t know if they’re always that delicious, or if it was partly because they were homegrown-fresh, but I ate them happily, rind and all.
Cute W, meanwhile, had already perfected his rare-but-not-bloody steak with the sous-vide and a quick sear, but he’s more recently conquered the most fantastic cubed roasted potatoes. Here’s the recipe.
The girls typically shy away from steak these days, but there are other meals that we like that aren’t their favorites, like these Asian Chicken Lettuce Wraps, which I like to make with coconut rice, just because I’m always looking for an excuse to have coconut rice (just use coconut milk in place of all or some of the water when you make your rice).
And, yes, we haven’t had the best week for it, but we’ve been enjoying eating out on the front patio.
In other tales of domesticity, I recently followed the instructions of some influencer (I’m sorry! I don’t remember who! Instagram just served it up to me, and whatever screen shot I took had it clipped out), and I ended up with this Extremely Satisfying Before-and-After:
I put the Pink Stuff on and scrubbed around with the Scouring Stick and voilà!
It was absolutely some work, but in my opinion it worked better and smelled much nicer than trying to use an oven cleaner and the oven’s cleaning function.
I continue to put all of those leftover mama nurturing skills toward caring for houseplants, and this jade plant in particular gets a careful inspection a few times a week:
That’s because, lovely as it is, it’s had a persistent mealybug infestation. If you look at the picture below, you can see it most clearly along the stem at about the fourth tier of leaves down: a little white fuzzy thing trying to hide under a leaf.
Luckily, things have been contained pretty well, but every few days, I may find three or four spots like this. I attack them with some alcohol on a cotton swab, and it’s actually deeply satisfying. Like squeezing a pimple, but without the shame. It’s a nice little mental health break.
