up to the end of 2008!

We had a huge pile of mushrooms from Costco. So on Monday night, I made mushroom stroganoff with most of them, then used the rest in salads the next couple of nights. For the stroganoff, I basically sautee onions, add mushrooms and cover. Then I take some of the mushroom juice out and mix it with a little flour (and perhaps some cayenne and other spices), and return the mix to the pan. Stir in sour cream (I used "light") and voila. We served it over whole wheat spaghetti.

For sides, I steamed asparagus (not from around heah, bad locavore), then tossed it with toasted sesame oil, apple cider vinegar, and soy sauce. We also had a fairly elaborate salad.

Last night, we used the non-peppered half of the roasted smoked salmon. I heated it up and served it over whole wheat fusilli. I topped it with cilantro paste mixed with sour cream ("light"). The paste was a frozen leftover from this summer; I use just a little at a time. And frankly, over the salmon, it was hard to taste, but it was great mixed in with the pasta.

For sides, I steamed broccoli and tossed it with chopped ginger, umeboshi plum paste, tahini, and soy sauce. And there was an elaborate salad.

Tonight, New Year's Eve, we were supposed to go to a fancy dinner at a friend's house. With scary reports of a terrible snow storm, the dinner was postponed and we'll be unable to attend. But because it was snowing, I didn't want to stop too many times or for too long to pick something up for dinner. So I made an emergency stop for champ-er- sparkling wine and came right home.

For our NYE dinner, I fried some potato and cheese pierogis that widowed grandmothers made with their own hands for the local Russian Orthodox church fair. (Well, I don't know if they're actually widowed, but that's what I imagine, and they probably wear black, too. No one else could make such perfect little pierogis.) For appetizers, we ate steamed vegetable dumplings with a secret sauce made of soy, vinegar, scallions, ginger, and perhaps something else (Mr. P was in charge of the secret sauce). Then we served an elaborate salad on the side, but that's the last time we'll have salad until we go shopping again.

Oh, and for dessert, I found some fairly good birthday cake from 11 months ago, way in the back of the freezer. Yum. There's more back there too, and we'd better eat it up before the next birthday smacks us in the head.

I keep stumbling on frozen hot chili peppers from the farm. I'm thinking of trying to bake them and process them somehow. They're taking up a lot of space and they're not very usable in their current state. Perhaps that will be one of my projects this weekend.

Otherwise, the kitchen is likely to be closed for a couple of days. We are attending a NY party tomorrow and it's unlikely we'll be hungry afterwards. It's probably time, however, to do something with rice (like make some up and eat it) -- for some reason, we haven't had rice for a while now. We have some good (homemade) frozen food at this point -- stuffed shells, spanekopita, soup base, possibly a few other things. We also have some paneer but we need some veggies to go along with it. I'll do some archaeology soon and figure out what else we can take out of the freezer.