meal planning

The boy's father, who I adore, is coming over for dinner tonight! We are going to have:

* Cook's Illustrated's French Chicken in a Pot, except with different seasonings (lemon! probably lots of lemon!)
* Rice
* Cucumber, basil and tomato salad
* Chilled watermelon with mint for dessert

homemade lemon ricotta

This is one of those recipes where there's no good reason to make it except that spending a little time messing around in the kitchen sounds fun. That said, if messing around in the kitchen sounds fun, this makes some really very tasty fresh lemony ricotta, and the active time is pretty short. It's also not too difficult, and it's a cheesemaking process that requires no specialized equipment (and no rennet or bacterial cultures), although you do need some cheesecloth or muslin or a clean non-fuzzy dishtowel.

This makes a couple of cups of ricotta, ish, but you can scale it up just fine.

( fresh lemon ricotta )

I'm serving mine crumbled over a fresh tomato and cucumber salad, and if there's any left, I'll drizzle it with honey and serve it alongside the watermelon for dessert.

Recipes! (Chicken, Salad, and Watermelon)

This is what I made for dinner tonight. It was a Saturday dinner for a guest, and so it's got some of the "stupidly complex" about some of the steps, but, eh.

The dutch oven chicken is adapted from a Cook's Illustrated recipe, as is the salad. The watermelon is a fairly standard recipe, but the direct inspiration was from Vegetarian Times.

The tomato and etc. salad is vegetarian but not vegan; the minted watermelon is vegan.

( Dutch Oven Lemon-Garlic Chicken )

( Tomato, Cucumber and Etc. Salad )

( Minted Watermelon )