Spring and the flu. Not a fun combo. The flu isn't fun whenever you have it. But, at least in the winter you can totally hibernate under the covers. Spring's a bit too warm for that. At first I thought maybe I had listeria from a blue cheese we inhaled and THEN found out was recalled. But, then Connie got sick just as I was improving. So, who knows what it really was. At this point what matters is that we're both feeling better. No more banana and water days. We were ready for a real meal. Nothing spicy. Nothing fancy. Just some nice tortellini and mushroom sauce. I've never been big on the white sauces. Tomatoes are my addiction. Yes, my dirty little secret is that if I need to work late on the evenings that Connie plays bridge, he goes through the drive-up window and I sit down in my chair with a jar of Trader Joe's Arrabiata sauce and a spoon. Seriously. That's only about once a quarter but it's often enough to scratch that particular itch as my father would have said. Needless to say, tomato sauce didn't sound good to Connie. He'd graduated to chicken broth for lunch but this was going to be his first real meal. So, I created a white sauce. I used what was easily accessible and not what was the least for the old calorie count. The good news is that it made about six servings of sauce...
Mushroom Cream Sauce
Ingredients:
2 T butter
2 T flour
8 oz white wine
4 oz cream cheese
1 c cream (or you can substitute broth, water, lowfat milk... to lower the calorie count)
2 g grated gruyere
8 oz mushrooms, sliced
1 T olive oil
Directions:
Saute the mushrooms in the olive oil while you're making the sauce. Melt the butter. Stir in the flour. Cook for a few minutes until it's lightly browned. Slowly whisk in the wine. Reduce the heat to low. Add the cream cheese and allow it to melt in. Stir in the gruyere then the mushrooms. Serve with your choice of pasta sauce.
So, that was dinner. And, it tasted pretty darned good. We've been on a kick of using the Food52 Genius Recipes cookbook. It's actually pretty good. I'm not a huge fan of their site because I find it clunky. There are too many bloggers with fabulous and easy to use sites for me to deal with one that's clunky. Two other examples of clunky (in my book) are Food Network and Martha Stewart. Either they take a ton of clicks to get where you want to go or they don't easily get you back when you finish with a recipe. With me it's easy to get to or I'm on to something else. In spite of that, when we both picked up the same cookbook at Costco to look at, I figured I'd give it a try. The first recipe was Connie's to claim: granola. It was (and is) amazing.
Then, I tried a butternut squash salad with kale. It fell flat. I wound up sautéing everything the next evening to rescue it. Then, there was a very simple green lentil salad. I made MUCH less than it called for but we wound up with green lentils in what felt like everything for a week. That was ok because they were fabulous. I'd never used anything but the larger brown lentils. Now, I'm officially hooked on the green ones! And, there were pork burgers with roasted red bell pepper sauce. YUM!
The other fun happening was a trip to Columbus to celebrate Rosie's 6th birthday. We got to watch both kids play hockey. And, we made some killer strawberry buttermilk ice cream from the Jeni's book. Unfortunately, I never got photos taken... Here are a couple of photos from the weekend:
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