Today in La Cocina de Chen

It's not often that I roll out not one but two restaurant-quality meals in one day.  It all started by my telling Sam, "I have steak, and we can either have it for lunch or for dinner, and I don't have 2 meals in me today, so choose when you want a good meal."  However, inspiration apparently struck.  I should have taken pictures.  I'm going to have to recreate these one day--soon.

We had steak for lunch.  Our afternoons tend to go much better if we're all well fed with a good lunch.  If only I had it in me to make a great lunch every day.

Skirt steak, seasoned with salt & pepper, cooked (in a glob of butter) on the cast iron skillet, served with:
Red onion marmalade: one red onion, thinly sliced, sauteed until tender, then cooked for just a few minutes with equal parts sugar and red wine vinegar (about 1 T each).  Trust me, it's an amazing garnish for steak.  And just about anything else you might want a sweet pickled vinaigretted (I just made that word up) onion flavor on.
Yellow rice (in the rice cooker: rice, chicken broth/water, a spoonful of ground turmeric, and a dash each of: oregano, coriander, and cumin), with the addition, when finished, of:
microwaved peas & carrots.

It was the most delicious and colorful and easy meal I've made in a long time.  The colors were remarkable.  The whole plate was beautiful. 

And for dinner, I wasn't feeling like making dinner, and our refrigerator had a strange hodge-podge of ingredients:
A somewhat questionable package of baby spinach, 5 eggs, half a package of bacon, half a package of hash browns and 3 overripe bananas.  Plus the leftover sauteed onions.

Brinner!  Of course!  No, there's no of course about it.  I was grasping at straws, and got lucky.

I mixed up a dozen banana nut muffins, omitting the nuts, and instead adding oat bran for a portion of the flour.  While those cooked, I threw bacon on a skillet and let it do its thing on low heat.  You can never go wrong having bacon cooked.
In the meantime, I browsed cookbooks.  There's not much to be made with the remaining 3 eggs.  So, one egg per person, and it has to count.
Once the bacon was done, I used the same pan (and the grease; don't judge me) to fry the hash browns.  Which were originally shaped like tater tots, but I overcrowded them and they fell apart, so they became hash browns.  Amazingly, the timing of everything came together at the end.

The assembled meal was such:

Spinach on plates.
Bacon crumbled (or not) on the spinach.
Onions on the spinach.  With, or without, salad dressing.
One egg, fried to order (or as it comes off the frying pan, and scrambled for the tot), atop the spinach.  (The tot's plate was sans spinach.  She did try it.  For a second.)
Hash browns on the side.
Amazing banana muffins to polish it all off.

Seriously, I've eaten 2-1/2 of the muffins.  They are that good.  I can't wait to be hungry again in the morning.