Today, steak-baked potato- salad. Monday, barbeued ribs- baked beans-potao salad, Sunday, who knows, lol.

Waiting on when thunderstorms are coming. Dancing between the lightning strikes.

Tonight, like every Saturday, we’re grilling steaks. Splitting one nice, thick ribeye is usually plenty for both of us. We’ll have salad and potatoes in some shape or form. I have some baby red potatoes, and DH likes them cooked with onion, garlic, bell peppers, dill and Hidden Valley Ranch Seasoning. We’ll see. Tomorrow will be kind of Greek-style with chicken kebabs, rice and panzanella. I already made the croutons for the panzanella. Unless things change, we’ll be gone on Monday, so that’s easy!

We cannot split a steak, because he has to have very well done and I like very rare..

Ha, Sherry - maybe split it before you cook it 😃

Yesterday I roasted a spatchcocked chicken with smoked salt, lime juice and curry powder to season, made a green salad with the last few of my garden's tomatoes and lettuce & lots of fresh basil, and roasted some yellow potatoes with olive oil and fresh rosemary, sprinkled with lime juice when they came out of the oven.

That made a few days' worth of meals - I like to put it all together in one bowl for a sort of chef's salad, dressed with balsamic vinegar 😊

“…maybe split it before you cook it.”

Right…and easy since we usually get a boneless ribeye. We both like medium rare so no need to split before grilling.

Sherry, I feel you! I'm the well done, but so not into sharing for the same reasons. My favorite aunt once made a tritip when she had us over--I think I was a tween--but the tritip was smaller than it seemed and was way over cooked. That was when I learned that I didn't hate tritip, just the dried out corners that were done past eating on "normal" tritips. The lovely, moist, well done slices from the middle of that roast were delicious!

Yum, love the flavor of tri tip! I know what you mean about the dried out corners. I often buy these long tri tip ”steaks” at Sam’s Club that can be easier to grill to desired doneness than the whole roasts.

I've slowly nudged my husband closer to rare, but the only portion of his steak I find edible after he grills it medium rare is the thick middle.

Tomato harvest has begun. Tonight we're having a fresh (uncooked) tomato sauce, using Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, over thin spaghetti. Sides will be jalapeno mango chicken sausages and a salad with sliced mushrooms and strawberries. I made a honey mustard vinaigrette.

Tomorrow will be the first burger of the season. Have 2 ripe Cherokee Carbons just waiting to be sliced. I may make a batch of caramelized onions for the burgers. Sides will be confetti corn and roasted rosemary seasoned carrot "fries".

Lamb kebabs

Dessert

Judi, those fresh, uncooked tomato sauces are so good!👍🏻

Mutton! Hogget! Yummy. They're not that commonly available here so I buy them whenever I see them. We get them at a farmers market.

We have the first local artichokes of the summer for lunch. They will be served warm with a vinaigrette to dip the leaves into. Followed by upside-down apple tarts as I have a couple of tired-looking apples that need eating up. I'll make a proper custard to serve them with.

Dinner will be an experiment. I have a rib of beef ( probably tiny by U.S. standards!!!) which I'll de-bone and cook it in the air-fryer nice and rare. Apparently this is an eye-opener way of cooking. I'll make a nice garlicky marinade for it to sit in all afternoon. We'll see! Served with green beans and crispy roast potatoes.

I hope your mushrooms turned into something pleasing for you.

Just a thought. One of my favourite things to eat is mushrooms cooked simply in butter, garlic and parsley served on toast with lots of lovely, crispy bacon.

Floral, I love your dessert picture. :)

Thanks, IC, I over-salted the mushrooms (just to salty tasting, not obnoxious), but they came out fine. Just a dab of butter and some "cooking EVOO" (good quality Californian, but no particular distinction), S&P and the nice Riesling nobody drank. Baby bella wedges and shitake slices. Maybe for quiche or a sauce? I had originally thought cast iron, steak, crusty, but then bought some nice chicken sausages and thought to make them into a dish with the mushrooms, then thought they needed to go in the oven, instead, but then came Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (to the tune of Mommy Buy Me Chiny Doll). Between prepping the mushrooms and cooking them, I used the presence of a minion to get help unboxing the new Breville toaster oven I'd gotten on Prime Day (half a year ago). But that meant emptying the things that had gotten into the toaster oven spot (over years--it was a loss leader and not a great toaster like my college toaster oven which was a toaster that did bagels rather than a wannabe oven and not really worth leaving on the counter). The Breville is supposed to make really good toast and toasted bagels.

Toasted bagels remind me of my grandpa, and the caramelized surface with the malt and a little drippy salty butter is just a pleasure. This toaster also tap dances, including air fry. So the grain mill had to go back to the corner of the baking counter, where the meh air fryer has been in the way. The latter has served its purpose and will go to whichever of the minions wants it. My big oven will do a similar job, but on a large scale, and I'm no longer cooking for dozens. We'll see how the new Breville does, but if it toasts a bagel worthy of Grandpa, it stays. :) Still, the grain mill and the new attachments for the FP and the spice bottles waiting to be delabeled and cleaned, and such stuff got relocated to the induction (and crowded the gas burners), so needed to be dealt with before I could cook the mushrooms. And that meant reorganizing a drawer, boxing up the spice bottles, etc., etc. Now I need to find room for gifts (a Demeyere smoke pot and a Le Creuset tagine). I did find the cake boards, however. They were in the bean pot. :)

Cooking? I have some general veg that need cooking, so I've been thinking of taking a container of beans out of the freezer and making them into a big pot of stew or chili with whatever needs using up. Maybe get a minion to help. :)

Islay, I used to sing in a barbershop chorus that had their rehearsals in an old theatre that had been revamped to have a homewares shop and cafe at the front of the house. As I lived out of town, I would have a light dinner in the cafe before rehearsals. They did creamed mushrooms on thick artisanal bread toast that was just divine. I've never been able to recreate it :-(

colleen, what now happens to all the mutton that used to be in the shops? Is it exported, or used for other than human consumption?

I'm not Colleen, but as a fellow Aussie, I can answer John's query...

" Historically mutton was one of the staple diets of Australia but not anymore if you look at the amount processed in Australia and the amount that ends up on Aussie plates.

In 2020, the year of COVID-19, 97 per cent of mutton processed in the country left for overseas markets, meaning there was only 3 per cent left for Australian palates."

What Happened to Mutton?

I have a very good butcher and I asked him this question. He said they simply don't butcher older animals any more.

The live export market probably takes up a lot of the older animals, but this will soon be stopped. I wonder if mutton and hogget will become available again after that?

I imagine with what's left, if they aren't sold while they are still lambs, the farmers eat them themselves (or use them as pet food), sell them for breeding stock or eventually shoot them themselves and dispose of them.

I also work as a school lab tech, and in the past we have obtained various (mostly internal) body parts from the butcher for class dissections. During and since Covid, these have become hard to impossible to obtain. My butcher tells me that few abattoirs supply them any more as they don't have the expertise among their workers any more to essentially surgically remove such parts.