I did all my big cooking at the end of last week. Froze some of the dishes so will be eating out of the freezer for the rest of week. Other than cooking fresh veggies for sides, I think that will be the most of my cooking this week. Tonight I did a quick stir-fry with lotus root and sugar snap peas to go with the leftover braised taro root.

I roasted a chicken. I stuck an orange in the cavity (usually I use a lemon but I didn't have any lemons) and I rubbed butter and salt on the skin.

I also made a bistro steak. Bistro is what they call the cut and not a "bistro" recipe. It's kind of confusing. It is from the teres major which is from the shoulder and sometimes called a shoulder tender. It looks a lot like a tenderloin but is a third the price. The only place I have seen it around here is Whole Foods. It's a nice, tender piece of steak that has good flavor.

I use these for dinner and then use the leftovers for lunches.

Then I made pizza for dinner. Pizza has become our standard Sunday dinner. I usually will make a big batch of dough that will last for two to three pizza nights. I make five pizzas and save some for lunches on Monday.

My wife has a ground turkey recipe for me to make tonight. I hate the texture of raw ground turkey so shaping patties will not be pleasant.

There are two Whole Foods (WF) in town, one with a more skilled butchery than the other. The more skilled butchers have always had bistro steaks and they are labeled as such without the teres major designation. When I was working there I tried finding it on the internet only to find recipes for how to cook steaks like in a bistro - not very useful for helping customers. My more knowledgeable colleagues told me where the cut was located and using diagrams of cattle I figured out where it was from and what it was called.

The second Whole Foods only began carrying this cut recently and they actually have it labeled "teres major" bistro steak but they do not know what the "teres major" is. The people there are good people who try to provide customer service but very few of them go home and study after work (a few in the specialty department do).

I bought roasted turkey and roast beef for my kids lunch. Now I am buying chicken breast and bistro steaks and roasting them myself. It saves some money and I have a little more control over what I am feeding them. And they do not know the difference.

The turkey breasts we had didn't have any sodium injected in them according to the packaging.

I have been slicing short slices diagonally against the bias. I may try slicing it the long way to get longer strips.

There was a lengthy article in the NY Time years ago that talked about nitrate-free. It included an interview with the head of Applegate at the time. He said that "nitrate-free" is a USDA designation that the feds require them to use because they do not add chemical nitrates to their meats. They do however, use celery salt as part of the curing process and this has a chemical reaction which causes the salt to produce nitrates so he felt uncomfortable using "nitrate-free" but did so to keep the feds happy.

I cooked lamb loin chops last evening. I guess all this talk about salt is affecting me. After eating one, with no-salt raw veggies, I thought there was a lot of salt in the meat. I didn't put salt on them. I don't think they were injected with a sodium solution, but there was definitely something prolonging in them.

I have a large pot of tomato sauce on the stovetop. It'll cook for 4 hours. Most of it is for the freezer. I want to use some of it for pizza sauce, which leads me to a question:

Is pizza sauce supposed to be thicker than tomato sauce for pasta?

It always seems to me that pizza sauce is just a bit thicker than spaghetti sauce, though I know restaurants that use the same marinara for both.

Most pizza enthusiasts say pizza sauce should be applied rather sparingly. I've actually been known to use tomato paste straight from the can on a pizza.

With the salt in the crust, sauce, toppings like sausage or pepperoni and the cheese, pizza is going to be largely absent from my diet. :sigh: