pork and chorizo kebabs and french potato salad

This weeks dinners are exclusively the July/August 2009 issue of Everyday Food.

While busy cooking through the Everyday Food cookbooks, I let the magazine fall by the wayside. I remember getting issues in the mail, flipping through them, finding many recipes intriguing but never really jumping on board. Recently, I've been pulling out the corresponding months issues of Everyday Food dating back even 5 years when it comes time to plan dinners for the week. Then I can't hold back from the many, many different recipes I want to try. 

Tuesday night we decided to try the Pork and Chorizo Kebabs from this issue (and also included in the Everyday Food Light) with a side of French Potato Salad (this was the reader's published recipe) and Quinoa and Cucumber Salad (a summer staple we all enjoy since discovering it in Everyday Food Fresh Flavour Fast 2 years ago). Similar to tabbouleh, this quinoa salad is really good. I don't know how many times I've made it to use up extra parsley and cucumbers we have laying around.

We used a pork tenderloin and my in-laws chorizo for these kebabs and they are meat-madness! They came out looking like Brazilian Churrasco. Really tasty when you are having a spicy meat craving. Barbequing the chorizo dried out a little bit, but the pork was perfectly done. The potato salad is very reminiscent of a salad a neighbour of mine made when I was a child. Not to my taste when small, but super-nice as an adult. The dijon being the main flavour coming through, there isn't any sort of dairy or creamy element, so it's nice and light.

Owen was pretty funny with this dinner. We usually let him try everything in our dinners, and of course there is a reject pile. This dinner in particular (with all the onions, dijon and spice) didn't seem the most kid friendly, so I added peas to the quinoa salad and made that salad the main portion of his dinner. Since we eat something different everyday, Owen tries everything but he definitely loved this salad. He asked for some avocado to be added, so we did and he became very passionate about his concoction taking each bite with an over-the-top & passionate "mmmmm".