Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner- 3/28/09

For this project, I have now made over 100 recipes and reviewed them on this blog but you will notice that 99.9% of the recipes I make are for dinner. Some of that is due to the fact that most recipes in Gourmet, and for that matter, most cooking magazines, focus on food for the evening meal. Here in the States, dinner is the main meal of the day. We eat the most variety of food at that time of day and usually the most calories too. This is not true all over the world, however. I remember my mom telling me about living in Japan and eating fish and rice for breakfast. In much of the Mediterranean, a mid-day meal is the largest one of the day. I lived in Spain for 2 summers and we ate our largest meal at around 2 and then had a break (siesta) until 4. However, this schedule doesn't work with the average American work day. Most people work too far from their homes to go home for a meal in the middle of the day and with most adults working, no one would be around during the day to prepare a large meal anyway. The scenario in most homes is that the spouse who gets home first, or in some cases, the spouse who traditionally cooks, makes a meal for everyone else when they get home from work or school.
Today, I made one recipe for breakfast and one for dinner. Ok, I admit, I made the breakfast recipe yesterday so I wouldn't have to get up an hour early and make it but we ate it today, so I'll review it today. I made the Savadoran "Quesadilla" Cake on page 16 for breakfast. The caption above the recipe said it could also be a dessert. I was glad I made it for breakfast. It did taste a lot like a pound cake, if a pound cake was topped with sesame seeds. I think a fruit compote of some kind over the cake would be excellent but by itself, it was a little dull.

For dinner, I made the Pork Cutlets with Smothered Parmesan Green Beans on page 49. I had green beans, though they were not french cut, they worked just fine. I liked the cream sauce on the beans. I've mentioned that I like my vegetable to still taste like vegetables and this sauce was not too heavy or rich. It was thick enough to hold to the beans but not thick enough to feel fatty. I served the pork with rice and the cream sauce tasted great on the rice too.

Salvadoran "Quesadilla" Cake- C

Cost-$2.22

Calories per serving- 250

Pork Cutlets with Smothered Parmesan Green Beans-B

Cost-$15.14

Calories per serving-830