Weekly Gourmet

Today is Saturday. I think mainly just to annoy me with his perfectness, my husband makes pancakes from scratch most Saturday mornings. He just couldn’t let cooking be my thing, could he? I can’t stay mad though because his cakes are so fluffy and delicious. But this particular Saturday he slept in longer than I needed to and, I am in my new "I have a food blog so I need to make some food” mode so I made the pancakes. Since I can’t compete with his, I had to resort to making sourdough pancakes. I get that not everyone has a starter. During the quarantine I held out for a long time making regular old banana bread, but at some point, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon. I murdered the first starter gifted from a neighbor, but when my best friend gave me one, I was determined to make it work. So now we eat even more carbs- yaay. I haven’t found a lot of recipes with which to use my leftover starter – they all seem to require more leftover than my little guy can muster up each w...

  Today is Friday. Liz doesn’t cook on Fridays. However, it has become my favorite day to bake. I love nothing more than being alone, in a sunny kitchen, with some music playing or maybe a baking show on TV and baking the afternoon away. It also comes in handy to have sweets on hand over the weekend, when we stop caring about being healthy and make up for all the calories that we denied ourselves during the week. I’m also ready with treats if we hang out with friends or family. To that end, we were invited over to some friends’ house for pizza tonight. When I asked what dessert I could bring I got a very specific answer of “chocolate chip cookies”. Hey now, I can do better than that for the first time I hang out with people! I just couldn’t bring myself to make such a plain treat. They must not know I am a professional blogger (ha). I decided to make “monster cookies” which are basically ramped up chocolate chip cookies. Or maybe indecisive cookies. They usually have peanut but...

Today is Thursday. Thursday is my last night to cook dinner for the family and this week I am mentally army crawling to the final stretches. I am usually almost out of fresh vegetables and I can taste Friday cheat day coming tomorrow. Today I made the world’s easiest dinner, the pre-seasoned pork tenderloin. I was hesitant to make pork twice in the same week, especially in my first week of bloghood, but I had it in the fridge, and still only had sweet potatoes and Romaine on hand, which go perfectly with it. Here’s what I did for this meal: Liz’s Sweet Potato Mash  Ingredients 2 ½ lbs. sweet potatoes (see I measured for you) 3 T. salted butter Cinnamon Nutmeg 1 tsp. salt About ¼ cup milk, more or less Whatever you have is fine. We have 2% here. 1) Peel and dice the potatoes. Put them in a pot of salted water to cover. Bring to a boil. Start your pork now. 3) Stir often with a fork. Check if they are tender by piercing a big piece with the fork whenever you sti...