Dinner went as planned last week exactly once — but having the plan still made my life easier. Monday night we ate the spaghetti and meatballs I had planned for Sunday (I forgot that we would go for our weekly burgers at the local inn, it’s a relatively new tradition). I bake the meatballs. Any recipe, at 375 degrees, works brilliantly with no stove cleanup or stuck meatballs, which used to leave us essentially eating meat sauce instead of meatballs.
On Tuesday, we ate Monday’s leftover soup. Wednesday — Wednesday was a dilemma. I had planned pot pies because of a school outing (the Annual Moonlight Trail walk) which was then moved to this week. I could have cooked, or we could eat the pot pies anyway. I probably don’t even have to tell you which one we did.
On Thursday, I intended to cook the roasted fish with panko suggested by HK in the comments. I really did. But I bought the fish on Monday. And by Thursday it really did not smell delicious. And we’re having a party this weekend — the kind of party for which one prepares things like “Mummy Meatloafs” and “Mummy Hot Dogs.” I did not want to cook that fish. I did not want to eat that fish.
So we ordered Chinese food, which I said I wouldn’t do, because I’m sick of it. Everyone else ate it. I had cereal. Tonight we will have the planned lasagna-from-the-freezer. So that, I guess, is the one night this week that should go exactly as planned.
While driving home Thursday night, after ordering the Chinese, my 13-year-old and I were listening to the radio in a sort of stunned silence (we had just dropped his two bickering sisters at hockey) when we heard the voice of the chef, Steven Raichlen, describing, in that sated, enthusiastic way of the radio foodie, an “otherworldly” brisket.
“Your knife doesn’t so much cut through the brisket as glide through it,” he said. “It’s beefy, meaty, earthy.” He goes on in this vein for some time, and when he is done, I look at my son and sigh.
“I wish I were having that for dinner,” I say. “So do I,” he answers, and we sigh again and fall back into silence.
So this week — Monday, most likely, in light of the Sunday burgers-at-the-inn thing — we’ll be having brisket, which I will cook Sunday. Not that brisket (which in spite of being described as “easy” lost me about the fourth time you took the pot out of the oven to add something or take something out).
Since I don’t have a go-to brisket recipe, we’ll probably try this really easy-looking oven one: Brisket in Coffee-Barbecue Sauce, unless it’s a beautiful day and I want to fire up the grill, in which case we’ll have Sam Sifton’s Cheater’s Brisket. And potatoes. Sweet potatoes, roasted. And something green. Think one could roast brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes together? That sounds good. (I did bookmark the Steven Raichlen recipe. In case, the day after giving a party, I feel like spending my whole day moving a dutch oven around my kitchen.)
On Tuesday, we’ll have fried rice (leftover rice from the Chinese takeout, although I’ll almost certainly need to make more this weekend to have enough). Wednesday brings a repeat of the pot pies. On Thursday, some nice kielbasa with the bean and kale mash from Jenny Rosenstrach’s “Dinner: The Bootcamp.”
And Friday is Halloween, when parents across the nation feed their children some obligatory meal that they barely touch before rushing out to forage for their preferred diet. All I know about ours is that I won’t be cooking it (we live too far out of town to trick-or-treat from home; we go to a friend’s). Pizza seems likely. What will you feed your crew this Halloween?