Dinner time

What is your fallback plan for nights when you just can’t get your act together to cook a “dish”? Takeout? Frozen pizza? Spaghetti with jarred sauce?

I admit that we have a Mama Cozzi frozen pizza about once a week, here. Something about chasing Mimi around all day has destroyed my ability to plan for dinner. My backup plan is a “basic” dinner–a basic vegetable, a basic starch, and a basic protein. I have these things, or at least some of them, in the house all of the time and they can be cooked in the hour before dinner without any forethought required. My usuals are:

PROTEINS (all frozen, and speed-thawed in warm water or the microwave)
Steaks
Ground beef, in burgers or kefta or added to jarred spaghetti sauce
Salmon
Tilapia
Chicken breasts
Sausage
Pulled beef or pork from previous roasts
Shrimp

STARCHES
Potatoes, sliced and skillet-fried or baked in the microwave
Rice, plain or with butter, bouillon and Rotel for Spanish rice
Pasta, if I can find a sauce like marinara or pesto to dress it up
Wheat berries, dressed with oil and vinegar and salt and pepper
Bulgur wheat, with whatever herbs or cheese I can find to make it interesting

VEGETABLES
Broccoli, fresh, steamed in the microwave
Asparagus, fresh, roasted in the oven
Green beans, canned, simmered with onion, salt, and pepper
Lettuce, with Good Seasons Zesty Italian or Ranch dressing, both made from the packet
Tomatoes, fresh, with salt and pepper (when they’re good in the summer)
Spinach, frozen, “creamed” with garlic and parmesan and half-and-half or sauteed with garlic and balsamic vinegar
Peas, pureed with pesto
Cabbage, as coleslaw in summer, sauteed with fennel seeds in winter

100 Things #5: Lighting

This is the last of the “boring” topics before I delve into the housekeeping fun. And unfortunately, I just don’t have much to say about it.

Your house will have some light fixtures installed, in the kitchen and bathrooms if nowhere else (and overhead lights are becoming rarer and rarer in new houses because it’s an extra cost to the builder). If you want more light you need to wire new fixtures yourself or buy lamps.

The lightbulb landscape is changing rapidly. For a while it looked like incandescent bulbs were on their way out, but now the watt ratings on them have been changed to keep them legal; bulbs are now slightly-less-than-60 watts, slightly-less-than-100 watts, etc. Incandescent bulbs give a warm light that we are all used to but fluorescent bulbs have improved enormously in the last few years and I expect they will continue to improve in the future. CFL (compact fluorescent lights) bulbs take longer to reach full brightness than incandescents, but are getting faster. They are also getting a warmer, more flattering spectrum as time goes on. There are also LED bulbs available, mostly at IKEA it seems. I know nothing else about them except that LED lights are ultra-low energy usage.

Phew. I’m ready for some fun.