What we ate: Coconut Ginger Chicken, Cauliflower Pizza, Salsa Verde Beef

Coconut Ginger Chicken & Vegetables

The first time I made this (a few weeks ago) I thought, oh wow, this is better than a restaurant. And I made it. At home! COOKING IS AWESOME.

Make it as written, though, because the second time the store was out of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. They had whole chickens on clearance (I guess not as many people bought them for Easter as expected?) so I threw the whole thing in there. The chicken itself turned out great. When it was done, I broke it down and put all the dark meat back into the coconut ginger sauce and saved the white meat for other days. The sauce ended up watered down from the juices of a whole chicken, though, and it was just blah.

Cauliflower Pizza

To paraphrase Shalini: this is not pizza. But it's pretty good not-pizza.

My biggest beef with cauliflower pizza is not that I expect it to taste like pizza and it doesn't. I do not expect pizza. But I DO expect to be able to eat it like pizza, namely, by picking up a slice. But you can't do that, either. The recipe (which, to be fair, doesn't promise anything about picking it up) says to cook until it's good and crispy and we've cooked until it's burned around the edges, but it still disintegrates when you try to pick it up. So this is fork pizza.

That said, I still like it a lot. I put it on the meal plan this week because I was craving it, actually. I love that the base of dinner is basically a big ol' pan of vegetables. I like that it makes cauliflower edible for me since I don't like it in floret form. I topped it with the white meat from that chicken, green peppers, and Roma tomatoes. Delicious.

Salsa Verde Beef

We've been making this ever since Katie wrote about it on Food Lush forever ago. She recommended it with chicken, but we use it for any cuts of our beef share that are especially tough because it will turn anything, no matter how tough, into yummy goodness. We eat it over brown rice and lettuce because apparently that's how Thomas' family always ate stew-like things. (Like chili. They serve their chili over lettuce.) I was skeptical, but you know what? It's pretty good. I'm a fan.