More spring meals

Although I've been planning meals for a long time now, we have (over the last six months) come to realize that, with Elsie eating full meals now, our three-meal per week plan was no longer working.  At the end of every week, we'd come up short.  In addition, we've been receiving weekly produce boxes and (sometimes) a Blue Apron delivery of ingredients for pre-planned meals.  Finally, although she's always been a good eater, even as a little baby, Elsie has started morphing into a picky eater before our eyes.  With that in mind, we've instituted some new food rules in our house, with the most important being that we eat a starter vegetable course with every meal.  We figure that if she's hungry enough, she'll eat (or at least try) her veggies.

With all these different infusions of food and food rules, I've had to take the planning up a notch.
  And so, for the last few weeks, I've been scribbling out a menu and posting it on the fridge.  It's been fun but has certainly involved a lot more time in the kitchen. 

I need a place to record not only some of the new recipes I've gathered but also some of the alterations and tips I've used when cooking the recipes.  For next time.  So here they are.

Meal 1

Green salad with carrots, green onion, and feta
Tempeh reubens (Veganomicon)

Meal 2

Cold cucumber soup
Grilled tomato bruschetta (Bittman)
Strawberry tart (Bittman)

• Tip: use more fruit than you think you'll need, and don't pour the sauce over the tart when it's finished.  Leave it on the side for drizzling.

Meal 3 (Picnic!)

Deviled eggs (Bittman)
Lentil Cornish pasties

• No real recipe here.  For the filling, I just sautéed carrots, onion, and celery with thyme, cumin, and paprika until they were super soft.  I cooked French lentils separately until almost done.  I mixed everything together and cooked for a few minutes with about a half cup/one cup of turkey stock and a little flour for thickening.
• I used pre-made pie crust for the pastry, rolling it out and cutting it into rounds using a saucer.  I had to keep putting the dough back in the fridge, because colder dough is easier to shape into pasties.
• I filled the dough rounds and sealed them into half-moon shapes.  I brushed them with an egg wash.  I baked them at 400 degrees for about 35 minutes.
• They were pretty delicious, although next time I think I might add some cheese in the filling and season with a bit more salt and pepper.

Blueberry custard (Bittman)

• The real thing to remember here is that a full-sized custard needs to bake at least TWICE AS LONG as the recipe in the Bittman cookbook.  (At least an hour, I would say, and probably at 350 degrees, rather than 300 degrees.)

Meal 4

Creamy broccoli soup

• I am not sure I'd make this one again.  It tasted predominantly of turkey stock, and was a bit grainy and thin.  I like the idea of a pureed soup, though, and Elsie really like this one, but I wasn't wild about it.

Baked potatoes

Meal 5

Carrots cooked in coconut milk and rosemary

• This recipe was quite lovely.  It took a bit longer to cook than the instructions (40 minutes instead of 20), and I made the parcel out of tin foil instead of parchment paper, but the carrots came out delicate, just barely soft, and lightly sweet.  Elsie loved them.

Tofu and cabbage stir fry

• This also was a real winner, as we all love a good stir fry.  Per the usual, the tofu is messy and takes longer than the recipe, but everything else came together quite quickly.  (FYI, I did most of the veggie chopping the night before, so I could just throw everything in.)  I added some sweet onion (because I had it), and omitted the ginger and veggie stock (because I didn't have it).  It was still delicious.  We ate it with rice.

Meal 6

Bok choy with crispy shallots and sesame seeds (an old standby from Veganomicon)
Baked sweet potatoes