The tree is up! The tree is up!

Is it only Saturday?  Is it still Saturday?  This long weekend has me confused and confounded - no sense of routine, seemingly non-stop in the kitchen.  But come on, it's worth it.  I mean, look....

Leftovers turned into mashed potato soup (garnished with caviar - Natasha came over, and we like to give her that treat when we can).

Leftovers turned into turkey pot pie.

Giving myself a pat on the back for using up leftovers so well.  And my gosh, is there a lot more in the fridge.  We'll do what we can with it.  Tomorrow, though, I swear that it is microwaving things only.  I have cooked enough this past week.

Enough complaining.  We had a nice evening.  Van showed up wearing his Christmas fox tshirt, and that inspired me to put on a fleecy Christmas bunny sweatshirt. 

The table was set simply but nicely. 

And, best of all, we have a tree. 

Yes, that is a tree, a modernish tree that Van bought for his former place in Rancho Mirage and that we now keep in storage here.  We decided to go with that this year.  I'm happy we did.  Oh, I will love seeing all the ornaments in a future year, but for this year, a much simpler and easier Christmas in terms of decor.

14 more cards done today.  I should do more before bed, but I think I won't.  Yaaawwwwn.  I'm a little fatigued, I confess.  Happy long weekend - I hope you all have trees up by now!

using up some leftovers

Sunday we stayed in. And ignored the Super Bowl (though, good gay that I am, I caught Madonna's performance online on Monday). I made us shrimp tacos, a dinner of several components. That left me with some things to play with for lunches and dinners later in the week.

Today I took leftover homemade tortillas layered with a tomato-green chile sauce and black beans and cheese in to work. A filling lunch. But this blog isn't about plastic containers of food reheated in a staff lounge at work, no. Instead, let's talk about dinner tonight.

Look, I love my husband absolutely. Totally. Adore him. A wonderful man, a wonderful husband. But not perfect - who is? Turn him loose in a grocery store, and, well, be prepared for a little improvisation. Even when he's equipped with a list. He did fine today, though, picking up some salmon for dinner (he LOVES salmon, and he knows my disdain for Atlantic salmon) and a few other things. I might have steered away from the chard if I'd seen it, but I asked him for it, and though it wasn't as tender as I prefer, it was fine. No, he did a good job, and the reward was a reasonable dinner.

The salmon I dusted with masa harina. The smell of the flour was really something. I told TK this morning in an e-mail that I'm on a Mexican kick with dining thanks to recently reviewing a book on the cuisine. That crept in to the dinner tonight. The coated salmon I pan-fried, simple as that.

The salmon went atop some of the leftover tomato-green chile sauce. I wish the sauce had more heat, but as I usually do, I found the chiles fairly mild. I swear the chiles we got at the store back home in NORTHERN CANADA had more bite to them. Ah well. It was a fine sauce under the salmon.

The other leftover was a bit of lightly pickled vegetable around the plate. A different sweet-tangy taste from the sauce, and a welcome bit of crunch.

The chard went on the side, and then atop it all was some guacamole. Maybe not traditional, but heck, salmon really isn't Mexican either. Plus, the avocadoes needed using up!

A filling meal, a decent one. Not my best effort, but good for a Tuesday, to be sure.

"shepherd's pie" and potato cakes

I made far more parsnip and leek puree on Saturday than I really needed for the four of us. I hate to see food go to waste, and the idea of just sitting shoveling puree into my mouth for dinner one night wasn't much more appealing. What to do?

Buy some ground lamb. Cooked up with various seasonings and some onion and celery, and it becomes a nice filling for what we might loosely refer to as "shepherd's pie". Very loosely: the puree took the place of potatoes as my topping. It made for a quick reheatable dinner after swim practice tonight. Not too bad, alongside some Brussels sprouts. It will be my dinner again tomorrow and lunch on Wednesday.

It was a busy weekend in the kitchen, wasn't it? On top of all that, I also had to put together my contribution to the annual swim team banquet (photos to be posted another evening). I had signed up for a veggie side dish, but I ventured a little ways away from that and ended up with a tray of two-dozen potato and kalamata olive cakes. The recipe comes from Roger Hayot's cookbook, and it (along with some others, like the white chocolate chip cookies) is a reliable one. The cakes are fairly soft, in fact, and I had a smooth tomato and saffron sauce made to go with them. I think people enjoyed them.

The rest of this week, though, I'll mostly take a break from cooking, this despite the lovely gift of some cooking magazines and really neat looking cookbook of Swedish pastries that Conrad's sister Karen sent me. I will have to explore that latter one as we head into the crucial holiday baking season.