This past Sunday we did some epic meal planning. Since we had a week and a half before Thanksgiving, I only wanted to go to the grocery store once. We planned for 7 meals plus whatever we had on hand in our fridge/freezer/pantry already, hoping to get us to the holiday.
Here's what we picked:
Roasted Chicken with Squash and Broccoli (a recipe from this book)
Squash & Cabbage Quesadillas
We did the roast chicken first because I needed stock for almost everything else and the chicken for the chicken pot pie, and we even had more chicken left over for lunches. The squash we cooked with it was the top end of a butternut squash and I saved the bottom part to cut into rings for this recently discovered fall yumminess later in the week or on the weekend. I went ahead and made everything between Sunday and now, so my fridge is full of premade meals that we can just pull out and eat. I have the feeling that I'm going to be a little frenzied between now and Thanksgiving and want to simplify as much as possible.
So far, we've demolished the roast chicken and the chicken pot pie, with rave reviews all around for both. Today I made the potato soup, the tikka masala and the wild rice soup. The first two turned out perfect. The third? Complete failure-turned-amazing-dish.
See...when we went to the store on Sunday, wild rice was something silly like $10.99 a pound, while the forbidden rice right next to it was $3.99 a pound. I had never cooked with forbidden rice and had no idea that it would turn everything purple. PURPLE CHICKEN. Not only that, but as I was cooking, I accidentally grabbed what I THOUGHT was chicken stock but in fact was an apple-boozy-concoction made my a good friend for Christmas last year when I was pregnant so I waited until chilly weather to drink it...and when I stored it, as I do most things, in a Ball jar, I didn't label it, and it looks a whole lot like chicken stock. I may have been able to say, "Oh well dumb luck," if this isn't the second time in as many weeks that I've done this. The first time was to some brown rice that ultimately became unsalvageable but since this was a giant pot of food and I was NOT going back to the store, I had to get creative. In my defense, last night my mom gave me a second-degree burn when she spilled some hot tea on my leg that I had to get treated today so my head wasn't entirely in the right place.
At first it was off-puttingly sweet and I doubted that we were going to salvage the thing. I had everything in the pot and had to figure out a way to save the meal because I hate throwing out perfectly good food. So I started adding savory spices like a madwoman...big chunks of garlic, onion powder. Still horrid. Then we added smoked paprika and cumin, then tomato sauce and more cumin and finally decided to make chicken chili and threw in a bunch of chili powder, then some beans...and it started coming together.
We decided finally that we had made a sweet chicken chili that tasted a whole lot like chicken mole. And thus, a new dish was born! Not that I'll ever make it like that again. I was proud that I could improvise enough to save the dish. We ended up serving it with cilantro, tomato and sour cream, and it was delightful and my husband is taking it to work for lunch tomorrow. Bam.
