cook: meal prep for the week

Tis Sunday, a day for cooking for the rest of the week. I soaked pinto beans and boiled them with a pork rib bone and some onion ends and a few cloves of garlic plus 3 eggs in their shell, which I removed 10 minutes later to either make into egg salad or for snacking with hot sauce. My morning also was spent slicing and julienning a daikon radish and baby carrots for a pickle to add to some kind of Vietnamese dish. And then I left for swimming.

 

My condo was redolent from the beans when I returned to my kitchen. I decided I was going to cook some of the beans into chili in order to use up ingredients in my fridge: pancetta, half a shallot, and the remains of tomato paste. And I had to cook the pinto beans in lard and add some chipotle pepper to them. I used that moment to chop up the chipotle peppers as I'm more apt to use them if I can just spoon them in bits in their adobo sauce.

And while I was at it, I needed to roast chicken thighs for Sadie's protein to go with her kibble.

And then I got caught up in cooking chili and completing an art assignment and forgot about the chicken in the very hot oven. I pulled them before they burned to a crisp. Yikes. Oh well. Sadie won't notice, and I can add the thighs to the rest of the Greek egg lemon soup that is leftover in the fridge. I did manage to finish pickling the daikon and carrot pickle for bahn mi sandwiches if I ever get to prepping the pork belly that's also in my fridge. I also bought a package of kalbi or Korean beef and a jar of kimchi last week at Costco, and so decided to make a banchan of the bean sprouts to go with them.

And dang it, I've a lot of protein in my fridge. There's ground pork I had intended to make into an instant Dan Dan mixture as well as ground beef I didn't use in the chili for dinner to turn into hamburgers for the brioche buns I bought yesterday after clay class. And yikes I had bought on a previous Costco run, porchetta. I had tried to invite Rosanne and her family to dinner, but she had to return home to San Francisco. Our dining table is no longer able to host guests for meals because it's turned into our greenhouse to grow tomato seedlings, and so I'll put the Italian pork roast (it's already cooked and merely needs to be broiled to crisp the fat) in the freezer to reheat and serve later maybe for Easter. Hamburgers will be easy, and I'll prepare the ground pork for my Sichuan meal later this week when I've a night free from working out.