I’m back to eating meals in the middle of the night again…
On my first night back at the hospital, I sipped from a big Thermos filled with bone broth and ate sous vide sirloin steak and leftover roasted Portobello mushrooms and broiled summer squash.
(If you’re admiring the cool stainless steel food container, it’s a medium-sized LunchBots Clicks. I LOVE them.)
One of the pluses of being back at work is that I find myself eating only when I’m hungry. (You know – the way I’m supposed to eat.) But all bets are off when I get home. My discipline and self-control have a tendency to fall by the wayside when I’m within striking distance of my fridge and pantry. I sometimes don’t even realize that I’m grazing on all sorts of treats until the carton of mac nuts is empty.
Ugh.
On a related note, one of my favorite snacks at the moment is Dastony’s coconut butter.
Other brands can be pretty gritty (including my own homemade coconut butter), but this one’s stone ground to be silky smooth. (Although I prefer smooth coconut butter, I like my nut butters chunky like MeeNut Butter. Why? Because I’m one finicky mother.)
I slept all afternoon and when I woke up in the evening, it was time to start prepping dinner. As I told Diane when I was on the Balanced Bites podcast, I’m not very good about planning out my meals in advance. My only form of meal planning – if you can even call it that – is to pull some meat out of the freezer and thaw it in a bowl in the fridge.
Tonight’s protein du jour was a couple of shanks from Lava Lake Lamb.
“But wait!” you exclaim. “Don’t lamb shanks take a few hours to get tender?”
Not if you’ve got a pressure cooker in your kitchen arsenal!
In fact, I used two pressure cookers to get dinner on the table in about an hour. As soon as I stepped into my kitchen, I preheated the oven to roast some green beans. While the oven came up to temperature, I seasoned and seared the shanks…
…before tossing it in my Bubba with veggies, bone broth, and a new seasoning blend I’ve been working on (recipe pending).
As that pot was simmering away, I stuck a tray of green beans in the oven.
For my last vegetable side, I used my other pressure cooker to make a cauliflower purée with chopped onions and bone broth.
A useful trick I learned to bring the pressure up quickly is to pre-heat the liquid before pouring it into the pot.
By the time the green beans were toasty…
…the shanks were ready, too.
I used an immersion blender to puree the cauliflower…
…and then I clanged the dinner triangle to get everyone to the table.
Here’s my dinner plate:
I’m so excited that Laura Pazzaglia, the pressure cooking maven from hippressurecooking.com, will be visiting from Italy and doing demos all over the Bay Area next month. I’m definitely attending one ‘cause she’s THE expert on all things pressure cooker. Check out her schedule right here. And if you’ve got a pressure cooker and you’ve never visited her site, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Later, skaters.
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