We finally branched out and tried a recipe from somewhere other than Chungah’s or Beth’s site and… it actually worked out really well. This is a week where I’m glad to have food available, since work is dialing up in the classic pre-spring break fashion. Our four recipes (all with doubled portions) were:

1. Pasta Alla Vodka (NYT Cooking). I was absolutely blown away by how good this turned out. After we finished cooking it, it tasted absolutely amazing. I’m typically averse to eating up reheated pasta, as I feel like it loses a lot of flavor and moisture, but this has kept surprisingly well in the fridge. Despite the insane amount of cream used, I don’t think I’d alter this recipe next time we make it, beyond perhaps adding in some blackened chicken on the side or doubling/tripling up on the amount of pancetta. The comments suggested adding Italian sausage and/or sundried tomatoes - I can see those modifications also being a hit. In any case, I’ll never look at vodka sauce the same way.

2. Carrot Feta Salad (Budget Bytes). This was solid, though doubling up on the recipe just wasn’t enough to feed the three of us for a week. I ended up eating my entire portion the night we cooked it, since I was worried about how to properly reheat this - I found the warmth of the roasted carrots combined with the coolness of the feta and parsley was incredible, and a uniformly warm reheated salad didn’t sound as amazing. Solid, but overall I think there are better salads and better oven dishes.

3. Slow Cooker Rosemary Garlic Beef Stew (Budget Bytes). Due to starting incredibly late at night, we chose to ditch the slow cooker and ended up using the Instant Pot. 25 minutes at high pressure seemed to do the trick (version 4 hours in the slow cooker). A very solid, hearty dish. The amount of potatoes is actually quite high, and if we were to do this again I’d probably fudge the ratio to 4:3 beef:potatoes instead of the other way around. Nevertheless, I’ll be making this again once things turn cold.

4. Jerk Chicken with Pineapple Black Bean Salsa (Budget Bytes). Phenomenal. Akshay decided to 6x the seasoning (instead of 2x) and rub it into the meat very well, which created an intensely spicy and flavorful piece of meat that gave off a highly aromatic scent while cooking. I think 4x seasoning would be ideal - that way, you don’t have too much extra jerk seasoning lying around when you plate things up. The pineapple salsa wasn’t anything all that special in my opinion, though we did use frozen pineapple for that.

This was a week of solid hits.