Update

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/barefoot-contessa-turns-make-kid/story?id=13238578

Creamy polenta with a red sauce, and then if you have leftover polenta, create another meal later with grilled or sauteed firm polenta triangles with greens.

Another simple and tasty thing to do with creamy polenta or grits is to top them with poached or sunnyside up eggs.

Your menu sounds lovely.

Since it is Christmas Eve, is it not possible to say this is the Christmas Eve Menu, and give the elderly couple a gift certificate to somewhere for Christmas day where they could have their "proper" Christmas dinner?

How about two different kinds of chowder? I made a New England style clam chowder with bacon, and a red Manhattan style minus bacon to suit a vegetarian who does eat clams (and all shellfish and fish) in two pots at the same time. This worked out really well. If your vegetarian doesn't eat fish, you could go with a vegetable chowder, corn maybe? You could make or buy crackers and other tidbits to serve along with the chowders.

I've found that many stovetop risotto recipes can be adapted to make in the oven. For me, this turned risotto from being an occasional weeknight menu item to one that we make much more frequently. I'd say it's about 85-90% as good as stovetop in most instances, and is much tastier than a take-out alternative.

The last one I made I changed up by adding hickory smoked chicken apple sausage, and adjusting herbs and spices to compliment its sweeter flavors.

One thought- a lot of people are are suggesting sandwiches; I find them kind of awkward in meetings. At a working meeting, I'm assuming you need hands clean to write notes, or type on keyboard, potentially shake hands...

I find things like yogurt, cottage cheese, fruit salad- things that don't smell, and that I can eat with a spoon or fork are preferable to things I need to handle with my hands, or potentially get caught in a situation where I am trying to bite through chewy sandwich bread or end up with too big a mouthful of what's inside the sandwich.

A gourmet pb&j might address some of my concerns, but then I'd be somewhat concerned about peanut butter or bread sticking in between teeth.

Hope the meeting goes well!

roasted romanesco broccoli, some type of macaroni or tube pasta, gorgonzola sauce and roasted walnuts- yum!

Mario!

I have a lot of French cookbooks. I have turned to these two more than any of the others.

Julia Child's The Way to Cook

Anne Willan's La Varenne Pratique

Happy browsing!

I'm glad you asked this question. Lately we've been trying find some new things to put into our regular rotation. This is one of my new favorite:

Ellie Krieger's Pork Medallions with Cherry Balsamic Sauce
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_70269,00.html

It is so fast and tasty. Have served it with mashed potatoes of a couple different sorts, wheat couscous, and the last time with a rice pilaf and sauteed spinach in the pan of the the medallions and sauce.

I am curious about the rice recipe in the Seattle Times article. I like the list of ingredients, but It seems like the order in which to add the ingredients isn't right...? I am also curious about 3 cups liquid to 2 cups basmati where 1 cup is white wine, sake or vermouth. Has anyone made a recipe similar to this?

There was a thread on chowhound a few months ago about favorite paella recipes. I am re-posting below what I wrote there.
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...I've been sort of obsessed with learning how to make paella over the last year. It's been quite fun learning about regional differences and approaches. I had reached a point where I was very comfortable with risottos. I was curious to learn about similarities and differences in the cooking processes of risotto versus paella. Current favorite books: La Paella by Jeff Koehler, My Kitchen in Spain by Janet Mendel, and The New Spanish Table by Anya von Bremzen.

Most of the recipes I've been happy with begin with a sofrito of olive oil, red peppers, tomatoes and garlic, and later pimenton and toasted saffron with wine. I haven't yet tried a recipe with onion in it. Some say that onion can make the rice mushy.

I start off making the sofrito on the stovetop, but when I add the rice, I move the process over to a grill. I've tried both gas and charcoal grills, as well as using a friend's standalone paella burner for my largest effort.

So far I've been working on various seafood combinations, and using some form of fish or shellfish stock. I veer away from recipe instructions by grilling a lot of the seafood elements first separately and then adding them on top of the paella in the last ten minutes or so of cooking.

For vegetables, I've tried green beans, though I haven't found flat italian beans around here, and I've used various sizes of lima beans (like the small ones best) and peas. One time, earlier in the year when it was in, I added grilled asparagus and look forward to doing this again in a few months.
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After reading your post, I had a couple of thoughts about why perhaps your paella didn't turn out to wow you. First off, the combo of flavors and spices is really important. The saffron and pimenton you choose make a big difference. As I wrote earlier, so far, I haven't been using onion because of concerns about making the rice mushy.

I think your everyday pan, rather than a paella pan is probably fine, but what could be a problem is if your ratio of rice to the size of the pan is too great. It really needs to be a pretty thin layer or rice in the pan. For me, a great paella is one that has the bottom layer of crunchy, almost burnt rice (called soccarat). The only way I achieve this layer is when I finish the paella on the grill. I've been able to do it on both a charcoal as well as a gas grill. In both cases I used soaked wood chips to get wood smoke flavor into in the cooking process.

America's Test Kitchen has a recipe for paella that I've heard good things about that is started on the cooktop and finished in the oven. My take is that it would be a tasty rice dish, but not really paella without soccarat.
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/login.asp?name=&did=2269&LoginForm=recipe&iseason=6
(login required)

The Spanish Table has some good info on paella, paella pans and you can order online from them if you decide you do want a paella pan. They also have a paella recipe that is pretty good.
http://spanishtable.com/recipe.html

I currently use a recipe that is sort of a cross between The Spanish Table's and one from My Kitchen in Spain by Janet Mendel. The recipe is modified depending on what kinds of seafood and vegetables I decide to use.

Hope this is helpful!

I suggest roasting the broccoli first next time. I have been roasting broccoli, carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, broccoflower and broccoli romanesco a lot this winter. It really changes the depth of flavor for all of them.

The last soup I made, I oven roasted broccoflower, first tossing the broccoflower with garlic infused olive oil, meyer lemon juice, a mild curry powder, cracked black pepper and sea salt. The rest of the soup process was pretty similar to yours above. My SO isn't a big veg person, and he really enjoyed it, even having a couple of bowls voluntarily (!) the following evening.