Autumn Dinner

I'll spare you the excuses for not posting. Especially since I don't have any. However, The Pedant and I are back with a vengeance! Mwahaha!!

Starting off with a weekend of eating well. We, like oh so many, have decided to pinch some pennies and try eating out less. Our goal is to go to fewer restaurants but when we do go out, we'll eat only at top notch establishments and spend wisely. No shlock for us!! So, Friday I happened to be off from work and decided to make a nice meal for TP. (I also made bran muffins, ala Mark Bittman. Quite tasty!). Speaking of Bittman, I took a hint from his menus for "Autumn Dinners" and made a 3-course meal for us (oo-la-la! But also: leftovers!)

The Menu:

French Potato and Leek Soup
Spicy Autumn Burgers
Caramelized Onion Chutney
Whole Wheat Couscous
Apple Crumble

The soup was a Weight Watchers recipe that I'd made before and was nice and thick and warm and tasty. I slipped with the fake chicken soup and it's a bit salty for my tastes, but it's so good I don't mind too much.

The burgers, made with kale, white beans, sweet potatoes, panko and spices, were lightly (like a total of 2 tablespoons EVOO for 8 patties) fried and really good. It was a Bittman recipe and he suggested (in the menu, from which I stole the soup and apple crumble from too) to serve it with the caramelized onion chutney and millet mash (hence couscous) and was really great. It was sweet and spicy.

The chutney was super easy to make and the perfect opportunity to try out our new food processor. It gave a lot of extra flavor to the burgers.

The dessert, a WW recipe for apple crumble, was good but not fantastic. First, you are to bake the apples with some splenda and cinnamon in the oven for like 10 minutes. Then, you take some rolled oats, egg whites, splenda, and cinnamon and roll it out thinly on a baking sheet and "toast" for 2 minutes in a hot oven. The apple part was tasty - very autumn-y and soft, but I didn't roll out the crumble topping enough and it was clumpy and hard. However, very low calorie and really good. We even ate on our balcony - perfect for DC fall weather!