One thing I wanted to do during this trip is to make some my favorite pre-prepped items with Amy so that her transition back to work after the 2nd baby would be easier.

On Sunday afternoon, we made some sauteed mirepoix, since she had tried it before and liked the fact you can use it for so many different things, and add a boost of flavor.  Since she doesn’t have a food processor (I highly recommend her to get one!), I became a human Cuisinart.  I also taught her how to make onion and sausage mixture, because it’s also very versatile, from Appetizers to Zsoups.

For dinner party that night, I made stuffed zucchini flowers with rice, mirepoix mix, sausage mix with some Parmigiano Reggiano.  They were a hit!

Fast forwarding to Monday…

We met up with an old friend of ours Margeret from our pottery class.  She’s a great cook and a foodie, so we always have a great time seeing her when we visit Seattle, or she come visit her family in the Bay Area.

Here are the girls: Margaret, me, Amy and Anna.

We were originally just meeting for coffee.  Yet we had such a good time, Amy just decided to invite Margaret over for lunch.

What lunch?  Who’s gonna make our lunch?  I knew that Amy needed to make  “special lunch” for her baby, and during that time, she will not be able to make any grown-up lunch. That includes me and everyone but Anna.  To complicate things more, Margaret had a meeting in that afternoon, I needed to pre-prepped more stuff for her first few weeks back at work, and flying out that afternoon.

We’ve already chowed down all of my home-made artichoke spread I brought from home as gift for Hugo and the family from SF, so that’s not an option.  I knew that we had some copper river salmon leftover from Saturday, and some proscuito (another souvenir along with Zucchini Flowers). so maybe we could make some sandwich.    But Margaret is a major foodie, and an excellent cook…  I was secretly panicking on our ride back home.

As soon as we walked in the door, I dig my head into the fridge.  It was like a treasure hunting, the good kind!  Since I labeled all the leftovers, and kept them in the front, it was super easy.  Small containers of leftover sausage and onion mixutre, and mirepoix and rice mixture, and grated Parmegiano Reggiano I used for these zucchini flowers the night before… Proscuito, tomatoes, the olive tapenade from TJ’s we opened on Sunday…  The extra rounds of french bread I toasted…  A ball of rice from the freezer…  Pre-cut halves of cucumbers, grape tomatoes, and salad… Pretty much all leftovers we saved from last two nights.  Prewashed, precut, pre-prepped.  The only thing completely new was a can of chickpeas.  All we needed to do is just to assemble a few different dishes!

So here’s the menu of the fancy, last minute three-course lunch Margaret and I whipped up in 10 minutes. The longest it took was heating the oven and broiling.

• Bruscetta with olive tapenade,
• tomatoes stuffed with mirepoix, sausage and rice mixture with proscuito and Parmigiano Reggiano on top  (this was sooo good, especially the crisp prosciuto on top with a bit of PR…  drool…)
• Farmer’s market salad with chickpeas (I named it because it has lots of veggies and healthy.  Much better sounding than leftover salad with chickpeas.)

Healthy yet very yummy…

Actually we had the 4th course, Polenta Pie with Pears and Rosemary.  But Margaret only had 30 min before she rushed to the meeting.

So this is a great example of eating well without spending much time… Just by a bit of pre-prepping, and mixing and matching leftovers. It’s really fun to play with food this way too.  Without them, this lunch would have taken 1 hour to prepare.

I’ll share the recipes for this luscious lunch on my next posts…