Tonight's dinner started off with me trying to figure out how to utilize a quarter of a loaf of leftover free bread and ended up being a masterpiece. I think this is my favorite meal this year next to Does God Like Enchiladas? I loved every morsel of every dish that I made tonight and I'm not ashamed to tell you so. If you've ever enjoyed garlic, lemon, butter or chicken, then this meal is for you. What a wonderful way to wrap up the first month of A Food Year.

I have no idea what Chicken Paillard means, but this dish with caper brown butter is
awesome. Shannon picked the capers out because she doesn't like them, but she loved the dish itself. The chicken is crispy, despite the dressing, and infused with a wonderful lemony butter flavor.

The Garlic Baked Cauliflower is tangy and flavorful and right up there with my favorite cauliflower recipe, which is mashed havarti cauliflower fauxtatoes. I'm sure those will turn up when I decide on doing a low-carb inspired dinner.

I was a little skeptical about the Mediterranean Eggplant Cakes, but since I had leftovers from the Vegetable Napoleons I made a week ago that were going to go bad quite soon, I figured I'd make use of them somehow. Even with week old eggplant these were absolutely delicious. If you have ever tried eggplant and disliked it, try this recipe. Try all of them!

I was challenged via e-mail to do a vegan dinner. I think that I do an alright job of having vegetarian dishes or ones that are easily adaptable to a vegetarian diet for the most part, but vegan is a little harder for me. Aside from the fact that I love dairy and eggs, I find vegan cooking to be generally either time consuming or expensive, especially in the winter. I am also not a fan of soy or soy products, so my options are pretty limited. All of the recipes used in this meal were inspired by those on The Vegan Chef.

As an entr we had Spaghetti Squash Pomodoro. I personally like spaghetti squash and used to eat a lot of it while low-carbing because it's the next best thing to real pasta, but this recipe didn't do it for me. I sort of went against my better judgment and followed the recipes word for word. Perhaps if I had prepared an actual tomato sauce and cooked it as though I normally would (just bake and scrape and top with sauce) the flavor of the tomatoes would not have completely leeched out.

While I've never been a fan of soy, I do enjoy a wide variety of beans. I love simple bean salads and the Balsamic 6 Bean Salad is no exception. It's a very simple dress and refrigerate salad that will have marinated sufficiently by the time the other dishes are finished. It's a nice meaty alternative with a tangy vinaigrette that's full of vitamins and fiber.

Finally, I'd never actually had polenta before, but it's always seemed easy enough to make. I've always enjoyed watching cooking shows where people would bake it and cut out fancy shapes for gourmet plating, but I just made a simple Creamy Polenta with sautéed zucchini and garlic. I used margarine as a substitute for butter to give it a creamier consistency, making sure I didn't have any whey or lactic acid or anything in the ingredients. Polenta is very much like a yellow cream of wheat. I can see how it could be dressed up quite easily since I thought it was very good with residual dressing from the bean salad.

There are as many ways to make a Quesadilla as there are to make a sandwich. My favorite is with goat cheese and roasted red pepper. A close second is the standard salsa, meat and cheese variety. Warm and gooey and dipped in some sour cream it's an easy fix for dinner. The Cream Cheese Corn is creamy, cheesy and corny and fits perfectly with the gooey cheese from the quesadilla. This is definitely not a low-calorie dish, but very filling and very satisfying.

I still have plenty of chipotles leftover from last night, so I thought I'd look for some recipes. I found several recipes for barbecue sauces that combined chipotle and coffee. I'd never cooked with coffee before, but have been interested in doing so ever since a friend of mine came back from Costa Rica and said that they'll use instant coffee for seasoning over drinking it. I altered the recipe to make Chipotle and Coffee Beans instead of sauce. The flavor of the coffee comes through, but it helps to develop the smoked chili flavor rather than flavoring it like an espresso shot. Very simple and very tasty, I recommend trying it some time!

We had a huge lunch today at a local restaurant, The Barcelona. Then we went to the Marble Slab Creamery where we managed to stuff copious amounts of ice cream into our aching bellies. Hers was a pina colada inspired coconut and pineapple mix and mine tried to imitate Chunky Monkey (my personal favorite) with banana, chocolate and walnuts. Those folk definitely know a thing or two about ice cream.

We weren't feeling very well afterwards and took a long nap. When we woke up it was already dinner time and neither of us were feeling hungry. We tried to think of the lightest thing possible so, of course, we ended up settling on a light Asian theme utilizing what was left in the fridge.

I didn't like the Stir Fry, but I don't particularly like stir frys in general. To me they all end up tasting relatively the same no matter what you put in them, the flavor of soy sauce drowning out everything and leaving a sort of bittersweet aftertaste in your mouth. Shannon, on the other hand, really enjoys the sweet and sour Asiany sauces and enjoyed this dish.

The Curried Beef Rolls are something that we have had before and tried to recreate. Since the only elements are curried beef and egg roll wrappers, we figured it wouldn't be too difficult. Thankfully we were right and they turned out pretty much as imagined, a nice crispy egg roll shell with a gingery curry flavored beef in every bite. Unfortunately we didn't have any plum sauce and had to substitute with crab apple jelly, but that managed to work out quite nicely since apples and curry tend to compliment each other.

Every time I look through the freezer to decide what to have for dinner, I can't help but noticing that a large portion of it is taken up by rhubarb. Every summer we get bags upon bags full of rhubarb and it all ends up in the freezer. So, I decided to make use of it by making a rhubarb sauce. Other than cobbler, I couldn't think of anything this might work with other than pork.

I often rely on salt to really bring out the flavor of the foods that I cook, so I thought I would try to make a salt free meal. To go with the rhubarb sauce I made some Chipotle Potatoes and Cabbage and Apple Slaw.

The Rhubarb Pork was delicious. The sauce has a tart bite upfront but a very mellow apple sauce-like consistency that is very pleasant. If you like apple sauce with pork, this might be something you'd like to try.

Shannon really enjoyed the cabbage and apple slaw, especially the big chunks of cheddar. There's something about cheddar that goes with pretty much everything and the sweet taste of apple is no exception. On the other hand, I'm not particularly fond of cabbage unless it's been cooked, so I didn't like it as much.

The potatoes would have been greatly improved upon if we had any sour cream to top them with. The heat is easily overbearing without something more suitable than lemon yogurt to take the edge off, but they definitely make a good side dish. I do think they'd benefit from a pinch of salt, though. What can I say, salt makes food taste good.