Life is weird, but food is good – Retirement Confidential

The news sucks, I mean, things get weirder by the day, but perhaps a wee bit of food porn will brighten your week. If there’s a theme, it’s toppings!

I modified a recipe from the NY Times called Summer Roll Noodle Salad. Cold cooked rice noodles go in the bottom of a bowl, then that is topped with mixed baby greens. Over that goes shredded carrots, bean sprouts, shredded cucumbers and pan-seared shrimp. Then on top of that goes chopped mint, basil, cilantro and peanuts.

If that’s not enough, each salad is topped with a dressing made from peanut butter, fish sauce, hoisin sauce, lime juice, hot chile peppers, garlic and ginger. The dressing was great, but I think a simple nước chấm would be even better. That would include almost all the same ingredients but without the peanut butter.

Flavor bomb! Sadly, it also looked like a bomb went off in the kitchen. A huge mess. Once again, I had an early morning tee time, and Dale got stuck with the aftermath. I love it when a plan comes together.

He made an America’s Test Kitchen recipe we’ve been enjoying for years. Crisp-Skin High-Roast Butterflied Chicken with Potatoes. The chicken is brined for a few hours. He lines the broiler pan with foil and then adds sliced potatoes tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper. He pre-cooks those for maybe 10 minutes, and then puts the rack on top with the chicken on it to cook at 500 degrees.

I don’t know how long. Until done?

As the chicken roasts, all those yummy juices drip onto the potatoes. Because the potatoes get a head start, some are super-crisp like potato chips and some are soft and succulent. He served it with fresh corn-on-the-cob, which was great, but we were like animals going after those potatoes.

We had leftover chicken, and Dale made chicken tortilla soup, which is on a regular rotation at our house. His recipe features a spicy tomato base with poblano peppers and shredded chicken. We each top our bowl with freshly fried corn tortilla strips, cilantro, diced avocado and crumbled queso fresco. Oh, and a squirt of lime. Two servings go in the freezer.

Yes, there was still leftover chicken, so I made a batch of chicken divan. It’s a retro thing, and one of the few times we eat processed food, but we both love it. I make it in a rectangular casserole. Par-boiled broccoli goes on the bottom. That’s topped with shredded chicken.

More toppings drill sergeant!

Over the broccoli-chicken base goes a sauce made from canned soup (that’s the processed part), mayonnaise, a little wine and curry powder. Most recipes call for cream of chicken soup, but I use cream of mushroom. Then comes a generous shower (more like a downpour) of grated cheddar cheese. All that is topped with buttered browned breadcrumbs.

The whole thing gets baked at 350 degrees until it’s all bubbly. I like to make it ahead of time, so the cooking time varies if I’ve pulled it out of the refrigerator. It was great, as per usual, and we froze a couple of extra servings.

That chicken got a workout! The carcass is in the freezer. I use that to make stock.

Dale also made what he calls Schnitzel on a Stick. It’s basically a bone-in pork chop pounded thin, breaded and then fried crisp in lard (ignore all the bad things you’ve heard about lard). We had that with big salads featuring farmers market tomatoes and topped with walnuts sauteed with butter, brown sugar and lots of cayenne pepper.

That also made a big mess, but as I told Dale, making messes is our super power.

Friday’s pizza was Dale’s specialty featuring a white parmesan cream sauce on the bottom topped with smoked salmon, capers, more farmers market tomatoes, red onion, mozzarella and smoked gouda.

As is our tradition, we watched a bad sci-fi movie. This week’s selection was It Came From Beneath the Sea, circa 1955. A submarine gets caught in the tentacles of a massive sea creature that’s heading for San Francisco Bay, leaving a wave of destruction in its wake.

Our goal is to make it through the pizza, and we often quit after that. But we watched the whole thing. Of course, there was a female scientist, and there was a lot of corny dialogue about gender roles. But we suffered through that to see the octopus try and take down the Golden Gate Bridge.

Finally, my masterpiece of the week was jalapeño cheddar sourdough loaf. This was my first attempt to make anything other than the standard boule, and all I can say is holy kapoopers it is good. You get the heat and brininess of the pickled jalapeños, then the gooiness of the cheese and the tang of sourdough.

We had some this morning toasted with a little Irish butter and a couple of strips of crisp bacon on the side. The only thing that would have made it better is a bloody Mary, but I seriously would have been comatose.

Life is weird, but food is good.