Menu Monday: Week of February 7

I am bone tired today. We hosted a fun Super Bowl party here last night (YAY PACK!) and I cooked up a storm for two days. I love when I have a reason to share a new recipe, so I went a little nuts.

Anyway, here's what's cooking at our house this week:

Sunday:

Kayotic Kay's Beer Cheese Soup* Kay is one of my favorite food bloggers. You can see what's cooking with her over to the left. She's Dutch, so I get a lot of my Dutch recipes from her. When I saw that she had a Wisconsin beer cheese soup, I knew I had found my Super Bowl soup. Funny thing is, when I made it, the hubs came up to sample it, and was immediately disappointed that I hadn't made more. He wanted to have leftovers! So we made a second batch. And we still only had two serving left at the end of the night.

Cheddar Beer Bread* Oh. My. Goodness. This bread is so easy, so moist, an utterly--should that be, udderly?--delicious. I will make this again for sure.

Roasted Chickpeas. This time they turned out perfectly crunchy. The trick I think was turning up the heat in the oven to 205 degrees Celsius. (My in-laws converts my stove to Celsius three years ago when they were here and we have no idea how to get it back to Fahrenheit!). I like to season with garlic salt, but here are some suggestions for other combinations.

Roasted Kale. Kale is a food that is much more popular in Holland than here. My only exposure to it prior to marrying the hubs was that Burger King used it as a garnish back in my fast food days. This is a surprisingly addicting snack, but go easy on the salt. I use about half of what this recipe lists.

Matchstick Carrots with Greek Yogurt Dill Dip*. I learned how to match stick carrots a few months ago and found it to be fun and relaxing. It also showed me that I need new (sharper!) knives. I LOVE this dill dip recipe because it uses greek yogurt instead of sour cream, meaning it's much better for you, and it can stay out longer without having to worry about that pesky salmonella.

Cinnamon Raisin Bread. I LOVE this recipe! It's becoming a weekly thing. The hubs will polish off a whole loaf as a snack at work.

Monday:

Leftovers! We don't need any more new food in the house! At least not for dinner...

Homemade Granola. My son LOVES granola. He'll eat it for breakfast, lunch or snack. Well, truth be told, he'd eat it for dinner, as well. It's super easy to make, and it's pretty forgiving so it's a recipe I let him be pretty hands on for while we're making it. I started out with the linked recipe, but it's quickly become one of those "what do we have in the pantry?" recipes. I usually use oats, pecans, slivered almonds, cashews, walnuts, pepitas (pumpkin seeds), sesame seeds, coconut, flaxseed, wheat germ, brewers yeast, cinnamon, apple cider, honey, maple syrup (the pure stuff), olive or canola oil and whatever dried fruits we have one hand. Today we used dried apple.

Tuesday:

Still leftovers...

Wednesday:

A Dutch dinner for my Dutch boys.

Oma Kitty's Peach Pilaf*. This is one of Niels' favorite dishes that his mom makes. No pressure, right? Last time I attempted to find the recipe online from an English site. Massive flop. This time, I got the recipe from the source. Stay tuned.

Vla*. The Dutch LOVE their dairy. Vla is awful lot like pudding, but different somehow. I found a recipe online so I'll give it a whirl and see what the expert says.

Braised Red Cabbage with Cinnamon and Raisins.* We had a bunch of left over cabbage from the Indonesian pilaf from last week, so the hubs suggested this recipe from one of my Dutch cookbooks. I'm not sure that I like cabbage that much, but we'll see how it goes...

Thursday:

Spinach Steak Pinwheels*. I've seen these fun looking pinwheels at the meat counter at our grocery store (off topic--I'd really like to find a local place where we can get like 1/2 a cow at a time). So when I saw a recipe by Taste of Home (LOVE their stuff), I knew I had to try it.

Friday:

Leftovers.

Saturday:

Elegant Orzo. This is probably the recipe we make the most here at the de Jong house. I can't remember exactly where I found the recipe I use, but I adjusted this one to replace the fresh tomato with 3 Tablespoons sundried tomato paste and a handful of sundried tomatoes. This week I'm going to use some ideas from this recipe, mainly adding the kalamata olives (yum!), red onion, dijon mustard and tarragon.

* New to me recipe