A crazy cooking frenzy today
I must be recovered, because today I was inspired to cook up a storm. Making up for time lost earlier in the week, I guess. Homemade tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, home-baked oatmeal cookies and from-scratch egg noodles topped with lemon sage sauce for dinner. Phew.
Lunch: Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich = the dependable American classic
Why make tomato soup when it comes in a can and is cheap? You get what you pay for; canned tomato soup is way over-salted. Not only is the excess salt unhealthy; in my opinion, the salt is a cheap substitute for the flavor that should be there, but isn’t. Tomato soup is surprisingly inexpensive and easy to make. This soup recipe is a “The Best of America’s Test Kitchen” magazine of Spring 2010. I substituted one minced Jalapeno pepper for the pepper flakes. It’s a really good soup.
A classic accompaniment to tomato soup is a grilled cheese sandwich. This sandwich contains slices of roast chicken from Wednesday along with cheddar cheese. Half a sandwich is ample, this is a filling lunch.
Oatmeal cookies and guests may drop by.
Dorie Greenspan is my go-to girl. I made her peanut butter cookies for the fourth day of the 2010 Hunger Challenge http://dhomefood.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/thursday-12810-day-4-learning-cuisine-rapid-fast-food/ and they were great. If it’s possible, her oatmeal cookies are even better. I learned with last year’s Challenge that having cookie dough in the fridge, so a few cookies can be baked every day, makes some of the week’s other deprivations more bearable. The smell of baking cookies warms a home and creates a welcome for guests. Eating the fresh cookies is good too. Now that’s Home Food, comforting, welcoming and eminently edible.
The cookie recipe is on Dorie Greenspan’s blog, http://doriegreenspan.com/2009/10/-i-was-delighted-to.html and is called “Mary’s House Oatmeal Cookies”. Pay attention to Greenspan’s notes at the end of the recipe. She makes the cookies smaller, so the recipe goes further. She also spaces them further apart on the cookie sheet, because as she says “they’re spreaders”. Spreaders they are; my first batch turned out one big (delicious) cookie. Oh yeh, I added a half cup of chopped walnuts to the recipe, just because.
Dinner: Homemade egg noodles for chicken in lemon sage sauce
Friday’s chicken soup calls for egg noodles. What to do? Money for egg noodles wasn’t in the budget this week. Suddenly a thought, I have all the ingredients, bought for other menu items, why not make my own egg noodles? So I made a big batch of egg noodles, half for soup tomorrow and half for sauce today. 
The lemon sage sauce is also the happy result of combining some of the ingredients I had purchased for menu items on other days. It is a basic white sauce (milk, flour, butter and a dash of half & half). Flavoring is sage, salt, pepper, fresh lemon juice and lemon zest. The sauce is enriched with a handful of grated mozzarella cheese.
More grated mozzarella cheese tops the egg noodles, which are covered in the lemon sage sauce, chicken cubes and sautéed mushroom slices. The assembled dish is browned under the broiler.
