What's cooking in your kitchen this weekend? Chicken? Spring vegetables? A new loaf of bread? Or maybe you're just sipping a glass of wine and watching the new sunshine warm up the earth. That's a very appealing idea just now. We're planning our garden and washing dishes, eating leftovers and plotting a batch of biscuits. Here are a few more ideas for good eating, drinking, and kitchen-keeping from the last week.
Also, the light-filled kitchen above is from this Apartment Therapy house tour.
• Almost time for spring cleaning! Organize your pot lids, and label your jars.
• How to protect a laptop in the kitchen.
• Do you save the best bite for last?
• Have you seen Virginia and Mateo's lovely renovated kitchen (and their adorable baby, too?)...
• There was a lot of chicken cooking this week. There was finger-licking fried chicken, oven-fried chicken, Ad Hoc's fried chicken, roast chicken with garlic and thyme, and Jamie Oliver's chicken braised in milk.
• But it's OK if you have leftovers: freeze them, then use them in one of these dishes (or maybe an Italian chicken sandwich).
• Good ideas for spring wines to sip.
• Three cakes: a carrot and apple cake with coconut, one tiny cake for two, and a very hungry caterpillar.
• A new color (and bowl) for the classic KitchenAid mixer.
• Menus for mixed dinner parties of vegetarians and omnivores.
• Two cookies: triple-threat chocolate cookies with ganache, and Mexican-spiced wedding cookies.
• Spring cooking: sweet pea soup!
• Looking for a good gift? Teach a cooking class for a friend.
• A sweet dinner: Czech plum dumplings.
• What's your favorite discontinued food product? Join the thread of nostalgia here.
Have a good weekend, and happy cooking to you all.
(Images: Janel Laban for Apartment Therapy)

Comments (17)
Im cooking mexican roast. The meat will be shredded into tacos! Yum. Also, starting my seeds. Already have dirt under the nails and all.
I'm making a red velvet cake.
I had to try that parmesan-rind broth! That's in the Crockpot, and I'll be making a golden vegetable soup with it for dinner. Dessert will be the carrot cake I've got cooling with maple cream cheese frosting. I also threw together a white-bean and pesto dip for a post-workout snack that I think is my best batch ever.
This is all clean-out-the-fridge stuff and feels very Spring Cleaning.
Ugh...I just got home from a catering job. I'm not cooking for the rest of the weekend. 8 pounds of tuna for poki (Hawaiian marinated raw tuna) took hours to cut up and prep. That was the appetizer. Asian Slaw, roasted red beets and goat cheese over greens, garlic roasted green beans, and miso glazed salmon, not a bad menu. I'm ready to be waited on!
We just got done planting our spring garden: strawberries, rhubarb, sugar snap peas, asparagus, and blueberries.
I am making a Vegetable Lo Mein because we are hungry now!
I'm baking a banana walnut snacking cake!
I tried the no cream mushroom pasta sauce for the first time last night. I'm not quite sure I got the roux right - I did it in the mushroom-full pan since the recipe didn't indicate otherwise and it didn't really thicken very well. It was still very tasty, though best with more parmesan than my lactose tolerance could handle.
I also gave in to my week-long craving for beets. I don't care what the president says, those things are tasty.
All the fried chicken posts from this week made me go out and buy some for dinner tonight. I don't have a kitchen in the dorms. :\
I made cauliflower kurma today, to be shared with our neighbors at our new (old) Danish modern dining table! They were so kind and lent us their truck and their manpower to help us bring it home--I thought it only fitting that they should share the first meal with us.
Tomorrow will be mushroom and proscuitto pizza--a quick dinner as school starts on Monday, and I've got loads to do.
I'm making sweet pork for a salad in the crock pot. Just put it all in so it can go overnight and then get shredded and will marinate all day tomorrow. I also plan on making my Joy of Cooking Carrot Cake tomorrow. Hello, cream cheese frosting!
http://www.carinagardner.com
My cupboard is pretty bare so I whipped up a pot of beans and rice and it's been lasting me all day! So filling, so low-cal. Love it!
I'm grilling asparagus (green) for the first time with some salmon. Can't be too hard can it? :)
Nice rainy spring day here, so I'm going to try that milk roasted chicken that people here were raving about the other day. I'm going to use coconut milk for mine though, and serve it with rice and spinach.
Yesterday was gorgeous, so we make some steaks on the grill.
It snowed last night...in St. Louis. Ugh! Luckily it's all gone and the sky has turned blue and the temp is rising. Needless to say, we still had a winter-y breakfast of french toast w/ blueberry syrup and coffee w/ cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla.
I tried Jamie Oliver's chicken in milk recipe. So yummy! Served with asparagus and roasted squash.
I'm making mom's old standby of meatballs in tomato chipotle sauce. I use turkey instead of beef, though.
i made a batch of bread dough and broke it down into 25 little round rolls...they came out too hard on the outside and too chewy on the inside...any suggestions?
I planned my garden: tomatoes, peppers, herbs, melons, beans, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuces and strawberries plus a container of onions and garlic.
today for dinner i just had some roasted root vegs, parsnips, carrots and onions, yum.