This week’s dinners

Here are a couple of meals I have made in the past week. These were all made from scratch and delicious and I want to remember them.

Saturday night we had chicken katsu, saffron rice (normally I’d make plain steamed white rice, but we had some left over from the previous night’s rice with black beans), goma-ae (spinach with sesame), and daikon salad with bean sprouts. Plus a boatload of pickled ginger. I could eat an entire jar of pickled ginger in one sitting. Everything is sprinkled with white pepper, toasted sesame seeds, and furikake.

Tonight I made soup with pork and shrimp wontons from scratch. Jamie and I learned to make this during a cooking class we took at Central Market a few years ago. They’re surprisingly simple (pork, shrimp, scallions, ginger, and seasoning). I served the soup with pickled Japanese vegetables, some rice, and bok choy roasted with ginger, sambal oelek, and garlic. And of course the aforementioned boatload of pickled ginger, white pepper, and furikake.

This dinner was make-your-own rice-n-beans bowls with fresh veggies. I make this a lot, probably to the chagrin of my family. Today we had shredded cabbage, sliced zucchini, diced green bell pepper, halved grape tomatoes, and pickled red onions to go alongside saffron rice (basmati cooked in the instant pot with turmeric, a bit of saffron, and a packet of sazon con culantro y tomate) and some black beans that we had previously made and frozen in ziplocs. Here’s the black bean recipe; it’s very easy in a pressure cooker, tastes outstanding, and freezes well for later use.

Often I also serve sour cream, shredded cheese (sharp cheddar or jack, or vegan cheese for Jamie), and diced avocado with lime and salt, but I didn’t have any of those tonight.

This meal was delicious and super easy. The bowl as shown above was about 450 calories, so a pretty light meal as well.

• I grilled up some chicken breasts in a marinade that contained a little bit of brown sugar, to help get some of those delicious charred spots on the chicken.
• The pasta is cellentani; I coated it in melted butter in which I had sautéed about 6 big cloves of medium-minced garlic until the garlic turned lightly golden.
• Then I added some thawed frozen spinach, squeezed dry (but you could also use a couple of cups of chopped fresh baby spinach).
• I squeezed the juice of a small lemon in, too, then added salt and pepper.
• On the side is homemade kimchi, not because it really goes with this meal flavor-wise, but because I’ve been craving it this week.