We had a lovely Mother’s Day brunch here yesterday, with J.’s homemade caramel sauce, espresso ice cream with ribbons of dark chocolate and caramel, and Ina Garten’s Outrageous Brownies for dessert. Hello, decadence. There was watermelon on the dessert table, too, but I sure didn’t see too many pieces of the fruit eaten!

Monday: Grilled Honey Spiced Chicken, challah, Sweet Potato & Kale Bites (pretending it’s Shabbat)

Tuesday: Delicious Dinner Rolls, sliced cheese, Mediterranean Eggplant & Barley Salad

Wednesday: Spaghetti & Slow Cooker Italian-Style Turkey Meatballs, garden salad

Thursday: Easy Chicken Chili (from the freezer). whole grain tortilla chips, garden salad

Friday: Chicken soup with noodles (from the freezer), challah, roasted cauliflower and broccoli

Saturday: Grilled hamburgers & hot dogs, grilled vegetables

Sunday: Picking up new foster pups! Eat out or order in

For more menu planning ideas, check out Laura at Organizing Junkie.

We ate with abandon while on vacation last week, so healthy salads like this one, inspired by Mighty Grain Salad on Happolks, are both necessary and a relief to get back onto our normal eating path. (The recipe comes from Laura at The First Mess, but she guest-posted on the first site.)

I used bulgur (about 2 cups cooked), brown lentils (about 1 cup cooked), carrots (3), red pepper (1), mushrooms (about a cup), kale (3 huge handfuls), and goat cheese (2 ounces), plus balsamic vinegar and olive oil to make my version. The trick, which J. reminds me time and again, is to dice the vegetables quite small. Yes, it takes more time than rough-chopping, but having the petite vegetable pieces mirror the size of the lentils makes this salad feel like something you’d pay for — polished and put together.

This salad is fantastic. Along with a bit of homemade hummus, it made a tasty and satisfying meal that is a far cry from the foie gras meatballs I was eating last week. But, just as delicious in its own right.

It’s always hard to get back into cooking after vacation, but I did succeed in making a full dinner tonight. Actually, it was a double dinner, since I brought a meal to a local family in need as well. That was really my motivation for cooking — someone else was depending on me.

Monday: Mrs. Jones’ Mac & Cheese, garden salad, fruit salad

Tuesday: Bagels, Hummus, Mighty Grain Salad

Wednesday: Spaghetti & meatballs (from the freezer), Pasta with Lentils & Kale, celery and carrot sticks

Thursday: Make Your Own Pizza, roasted broccoli

Friday: Roasted chicken, challah, Sweet Potato & Kale Bites

Saturday: Grilled skirt steak, grilled vegetables, Mediterranean Eggplant & Barley Salad

Sunday: Mother’s Day! I’m letting J. figure it out

For more menu planning ideas, check out Laura at Organizing Junkie.

There is a lot of wine at the end… and start… and middle… of that rainbow! J. and I just returned from five days in the Napa Valley, and we loved every minute of it.

Wine-wise, we did a cave tour and tasting at Schramsberg Vineyards, which uses méthode champenoise (the French way of making champagne) to make its line of sparkling wine; a tour of the bottling line at Francis Coppola Winery, which makes our favorite claret; and a great tasting at St. Supéry (so good we shipped a mixed case of wine back home), a winery recommended by an old camp friend of mine. We also spent a day on a Platypus Wine Tour, and our guide Scott took us and four other couples to Ballentine, Tudal, Madrigal, and Summers Estate. By the time we hit the third winery, I’d hit a wall on being able to notice much of a difference in the wines, other than “like” or “don’t like.” Thankfully, J. kept tasting for us both and found a nice muscat that we liked at our final stop.

Everything we ate on this trip was fresh and fantastic. Whether it was grabbing burgers outside at Gott’s Roadside in St. Helena (I had the most moist, flavorful turkey burger ever), or sitting down to a three-hour tasting menu with a wine pairing at the Restaurant at Meadowood (and we got a kitchen tour, and met super-chef Christopher Kostow!), the food almost universally made us murmur through a full mouth, “this is sooo good.” We also had a chance to eat at Redd (foie gras meatballs? yes, please!), Mustards Grill (which has a sign outside apologizing, “Sorry everything is delicious”), Brix (where we drank a cabernet made from the vines we were looking at), Rustic (a side of Asian-style slaw was the real stand out), and Michael Chiarello’s Bottega (“polenta under glass” set my heart aflutter).

Now that we’re back, I’m shell-shocked that there’s no menu to order from at each meal. Wait, I have to plan the meal, cook it, and clean up? I want to go back on vacation.

J. and I enjoyed this salad last night, alongside Slow Cooker Vegetarian Lentil Soup and grilled asparagus. It’s a nice, grain-based salad with more protein than you might expect to get in a vegetarian dish, thanks to the chickpeas and quinoa.

A. saw the quinoa cooling on the stove before I mixed it into the rest of the ingredients, and was eager to taste it. He loved it, and wound up with those cute little quinoa tails all over his lips. He had a full bowl of it, plain, exclaiming the whole time how delicious it was. G. felt compelled to ask for a taste too, but he did not care for the flavor.

I’ve always been lukewarm about liking quinoa, but I find that lemon is the key ingredient in a quinoa dish for me: it breaks up some of the grassy flavor and allows me to think of it more as a grain than as something a sheep would like to graze.

Quinoa, Chickpea, & Carrot Salad
Adapted from Bulgur Chickpea Salad

1 c. quinoa, rinsed
2 c. water
4 green onions, minced
1 15-oz. can chickpeas, drained
1 c. parsley, chopped
1 c. carrots, peeled and grated
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 lemon
salt & pepper to taste

Combine quinoa and water in a small pot, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, and simmer for 10-15 minutes, covered, until all the water is absorbed. Remove from the heat and set aside, uncovered, to cool.

In a medium bowl, combine green onions, chickpeas, parsley, and carrots. Toss with olive oil and the juice of 1 lemon. Then, toss in the cooled quinoa (still warm is OK, just not HOT), and season with salt and pepper. Serve room temperature or cold.

A new spring schedule means we’re not home until after 6 more weeknights than not, which is new for us. I used to find time to cook dinner in the morning, but now I am finding myself using those bits of time to volunteer at our local SPCA instead. And hey, I usually get a warmer reception from the dogs I’m walking than I do from my kids receiving a home-cooked dinner.

Monday: Make your own pizza

Tuesday: Slow Cooker Vegetarian Lentil Soup, Quinoa Chickpea Salad, roasted asparagus, Italian bread

Wednesday: Spaghetti & meatballs, garden salad, Fig & Carrot Slaw

Thursday: Hummus, leftover Slow Cooker Vegetarian Lentil Soup, spinach salad with sauteed red pepper and onions, bagels

Friday: Chicken soup with noodles, challah, roasted broccoli and cauliflower

Saturday: Out to eat

Sunday: Out to eat

For more menu planning ideas, check out Laura at Organizing Junkie.

I had a good coupon for prepared pizza dough, so I bought two and fed them to my unsuspecting children tonight. They were not fooled. A. thought it was fine, but G. complained that I keep changing around the types of crusts I use, when we’ve already found one he likes. That winner is a homemade dough, which I also like a lot. It’s only drawback is that he likes it less when I add whole wheat flour, in any proportion, to the mix.

Can you guess which side of the pizza the boys ate, and which one was mine? They had good old marinara and shredded mozzarella. My side included caramelized onions, chopped green olives, and havarti cheese. I’m still avoiding tomato sauce, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to bet that my third tasted better.

We made a great family meal tonight: salmon, baby potatoes, and asparagus on the grill; plus Baked Ziti for the non-fish eaters. And, because we were celebrating a birthday, there were homemade brownies and Mint Chip Ice Cream for dessert.

J. did at least half of that cooking, but today’s puttering in the kitchen plus a batch of Chocolate Chip Banana Bread muffins make me feel somewhat primed for a week of real dinners after a long hiatus.

Monday: Easy Chicken Chili, whole grain tortilla chips, sugar snap peas

Tuesday: Spaghetti and Meatballs in Red Wine Sauce, salad

Wednesday: Leftovers

Thursday: Make your own vegetable stromboli, salad

Friday: Grilled chicken, Citrus & Garlic Grilled Broccoli, Pull-Apart Challah

Saturday: Eat out

Sunday: Grilled hot dogs & hamburgers, Grilled Steak Fries, salad

For more menu planning ideas, check out Laura at Organizing Junkie.

This past week we became foster parents for the first time. That is, fosters of two shepherd mix puppies that are about 3 months old. I have been volunteering at the SPCA of Westchester since the beginning of the year, and I love it. I’m a dog walker, and I also help the dogs learn more “adoptable” behavior (like, not lunging at the front of their cage and barking their heads off when someone comes close) using clicker training. Taking in two foster pups was the next step, and these dogs — named Monkey (the darker one) and Pouch by my boys — were fantastic sweetie pies.

Because they are not yet housebroken, we had them gated into our entry/dining room, which has a tile floor. This also meant there were two safety gates separating my kitchen from the rest of the house, with eager-to-play puppies in between. So, the dogs became yet another reason to make a quick batch of pasta for dinner rather than having a meal plan and cooking something more well-rounded.

They are definitely my cutest excuse for not cooking yet. The pups were reluctantly returned to the SPCA Thursday morning, and they found new homes the same day. We miss them, but I’m trying to teach the boys that it’s OK for an experience to have been both happy (having them) and sad (returning them) at the same time. We did a good deed fostering them, and we do hope to foster more dogs in the future.

Yesterday, I made a fresh batch of chicken soup, and tonight I roasted Brussels sprouts and cauliflower. We may actually be on our way back to a varied diet. I’ve made a promise to myself to create a meal plan for this coming week. If you want to help me out, let me know what you’ve been cooking — I could use some inspiration.

I find all kinds of photos of recipes on Pinterest that make me lick my lips and wish there was someone in my family that would eat the recipe if I made it. Smitten Kitchen’s Cheddar, Beer and Mustard Pull-Apart Bread is one of those recipes. I fell in love with the look of this loaf, with its peel-apart slices.

Having recently bought a 10″ x 5″ loaf pan, I decided to use my tried-and-true Pull-Apart Challah Rolls, but stacked layers in a loaf pan instead of rolled balls in a cake pan. It worked beautifully, thought the layers did not pull apart as delicately as they would have if I’d have put cheese or butter in between each one.

The boys loved the challah baked this way, and G. said he even preferred it to the rounded version. Although I’d still like to try the cheesy mustard version, I felt very satisfied with this result.