Check out my brother’s blog for an account of his experience with Monday night cooking at my house last night. He was in town visiting this Saturday through Tuesday. We got to enjoy lots of good restaurants, including The Flying Biscuit, Red Mango, The Brickstore, Meltons App & Tap, and The Nook… with lots of good friends. We went on Sunday to the Dekalb Farmer’s Market and got lots of fresh food to make our dinner last night. Patrick loved the experience, and the meal was great!

We had…

Black bean and rice salad with balsalmic/orange/cinnamon dressing.

Ingredients: 1 can black beans, drained. 4 servings quick cooking brown rice. 3 stalks celery, finely chopped. 2 oranges, peeled and sliced. 3 scallions, thinly sliced. 1/4 C chopped fresh cilantro. Salt and pepper. For the dressing: Juice of 2 oranges. 3 T balsalmic vinegar. 2 t olive oil. 1 t ground cinnamon. Salt.

Instructions: Cook the rice. Mix it all together. Whisk together the dressing and pour over the rice salad, stirring well. Season with salt and pepper. Yum!

Homemade hummus with pita.

Ingredients: 1 can chickpeas. 1-2 lemons (the juice). 1-2 T olive oil. 1 clove garlic. 2 T tahini. 2 T minced onion. Salt. 2 T fresh parsley.

Instructions: Just put it all in your blender/Magic Bullet! 🙂 Start small on the lemon juice and olive oil and add more as you go to get the right consistency/taste. We ended up using the juice of 2 lemons. Very lemony, very yummy.

Sauteed vegetables.

Easy peasy. Just slice onions, portobello mushroom, green bell pepper, and a clove of garlic. Sautee onions with garlic until brown. Add in peppers and mushrooms with herbs. I used a dried Italian blend that had basil, parsley, and rosemary along with salt and pepper.

Salad with cherries, sesame seeds and balsalmic/brown sugar dressing.

Dark greens. A couple of handfulls of fresh dark cherries, sliced and pitted. 1/4 C sesame seeds. The dressing that I whipped up had 1/4 C balsalmic vinegar, 1/2 C olive oil, 2 (heaping) T brown sugar, and garlic salt to taste… don’t worry about being too precise here. Just taste as you go.

It was such a fresh, delicious, healthy meal! Here’s a picture of the table:

…You also see there some Port Salut cheese with Fuji apple slices. (Patrick’s favorite!)

The entirety of my time with Patrick was fabulous. I was really sad to say goodbye today because in 5 days he moves to Japan! He is going to be a singer/dancer at Universal Studios in Osaka for a year. I’ll hopefully get to visit Japan sometime between May and August… we’ll see!