Tonight we were inspired by a website called feedfeed.info/Healthy-Kids-Recipes that our friend (and amazing cook/photographer) Christine Wong mentioned to us.  We made turkey sloppy joes, lemon-dill-quinoa-chickpea salad and sweet potato and regular potato oven-roasted fries. We also made apple pie that we decorated with pastry pumpkins, bats and stars. The apple pie was NOT from the website but it was still delicious. What we are liking now is playing around with recipes…changing things a little . For example, we weren’t sure that we would like the taste of Worcestershire sauce (an ingredient in the sloppy joes) so we only added half the amount. Then we added a little more. We also suspected that the amount of tomatoes in the sloppy joes might overpower the turkey, sp we only added 2/3 of the suggested amount of tomatoes (STILL TOO MUCH).

It was also fun to cook the quinoa. It starts off as a tiny seed and then when it cooks, it opens up and a tiny sprout comes out and curls around. We liked it but it definitely needs to have other stuff with it.  It was good in the salad but by itself it was a little bland.  Next time we are going to try it with chunks of avocado and maybe corn.

Full dinner

Cutting onion for sloppy joes and potatoes for oven roasted fries

Fries ready to go in oven

Ingredients for sloppy joes, grated carrots, onions, garlic, turkey & tomatoes

Cooking sloppy joes

Final product…sloppy joes

Cooked quinoa

Lemon-dill-quinoa-chickpea salad

Cutting apples for pie

Cutting slit in pie crust so steam can escape

Pie about to go in oven

Baked Apple Pie!

Tonight we made roast boneless leg of lamb, roasted asparagus with gruyere cheese, boiled fingerling potatoes with melted raclette cheese on the side and a tomato/avocado/bacon salad on butter lettuce.  Mom also made sweet potato and parsnip fries as a side because we had some left-over sweet potatoes and parsnips.  Our friend Wyeth helped out, especially with the marinade for the lamb, and he and his mom brought us delicious pastries for dessert from Eric Kayser (our favorites were the apple tarts and the chocolate eclairs).   The dinner was really good but Max thought the lamb was almost too sweet (it was very tender compared to, for example, lamb chops–melting in your mouth).  We also had to put it back in the oven because even though the meat thermometer said it was cooked, it seemed really rare when we cut into it.

Full Dinner

Butter lettuce (also known as Boston lettuce)

Tomato/avocado/bacon salad

Snapping asparagus stems.. cleaning fingerling potatoes

Asparagus–pre roasting

Roasted Asparagus

Lam Roast resting (with Halloween decorations:)

Tonight we made pasta all’Amatriciana and an arugula salad with roasted root vegetables with a dijon mustard-maple syrup-sherry vinaigrette. We made the pasta because we wanted to make a simple pasta that was a little different from our usual tomato sauce.  This one is different because you start by sauteeing pancetta (thick bacon), and then add onions, before adding tomatoes.  It has a deeper (almost sweeter) taste than just tomato sauce.  (Special thanks to Mark Bittman’s Quick and Easy Recipes for the recipe.) We chose the root vegetable salad because we wanted to take advantage of the fall vegetables, plus we could make extra oven-roasted french fries for us at the same time.  The salad was good but we all decided it would have been better with a little goat cheese (wouldn’t everything?).

For dessert we decided to try to make apple roses based on a video we saw on TV. Ours weren’t we quite as pretty as the ones  on the video, but they still tasted terrific, especially when we added fresh whipped cream.  We also got to experiment with puff pastry (we didn’t make it; we bought it frozen and then let it thaw).  Puff pastry is fun to work with if you don’t have to make it from scratch.

The full dinner (except for the apple roses:)

Arugula salad with root vegetable fries and pepitas.

Side of home- made roasted fries

Apple roses…baked!

Roasted sweet potato, yukon gold potato and parsnip fries

Pasta all’Amatriciana

The steps of making apple roses:

1. Slice apples for apple roses

2.Squeeze lemon juice for apple slices to soak in (with a  bowl of water)

3. Roll puff pastry out before cutting into six strips

Layer apple slices on puff pastry, fold bottom layer of pastry over bottom of apples, sprinkle with cinnamon, roll up

Bake rolled up apple roses at 375 for 35 minutes.

For tonight’s meal, I (Max) chose to make a chicken/chorizo/seafood paella, an avocado, tomato salad with lemons, and cooked apples with cinnamon sugar and vanilla ice cream (the ice cream was store-bought). I chose to make paella after watching Bobby Flay make it on America’s  Worst Cooks, as a demonstration for all the contestants to follow. I am also studying Spanish in school and I thought it would be cool to explore that culture at a Sunday Night Dinner.  Apples were not only a major component in today’s dinner, but also a major component for today’s breakfast. We devoured cooked cinnamon apples for breakfast (in crepes–thanks Mom), making two great meals a little better.

Although Bobby Flay made the paella look simple, it was actually a lot of work.  It wasn’t hard…just lots of steps: marinating the chicken, cleaning the seafood (especially scrubbing the clams), cooking the ingredients in steps: first chorizo sausage, then the chicken, then the onions and garlic, then the tomatoes and rice and saffron and chicken broth..before adding in the chicken and chorizo, and then shrimp and clams, and finally peas. Whew. But it was worth it.

Paella! with chicken, shrimp, chorizo sausage, clams and vegetables

Spice rub for chicken (for paella)

Chicken with paprika/oregano spice rub

Cuttingonions. (Even though they were sweet onions, we had to wear goggles to cut them)

Scrubbing the little neck clams for paella

Browning chicken (after browning the chorizo)

Rice, onions, garlic, saffron and tomato simmering

Avocado/Tomato Salad with olive oil & lemon

Cooking cinnamon apples

Apples cooked with cinnamon and butter

Cinnamon apples with ice cream (not homemade this time but still delish)