This week’s double box arrives today, so in anticipation I spent Monday and Tuesday eating up all the odds and ends left in the fridge. And, just for the record, while I like to cook, most of my home cooking tends to the quick, dirty, and one-pot variety. Anyone looking for recipes for roasted parsnip-leek cakes with braised lentils and a hand-squeezed demiglace should … not be here.

Monday, breakfast, was Milk and Honey Granola with Greek yogurt from Trader Joe’s, followed by an uninspired turkey wrap with jack cheese and some roasted red peppers for lunch.

Which left me plenty hungry for …

Roast chicken! A perfect roast chicken is one of my favorite things ever. This one may not have been perfect, but it was still a very satisfying dinner. One small organic, pasture-raised bird, roasted for 90 minutes with lots of garlic, butter, lemon, thyme, and salt. Served with bread, the remains of a hunk of piave cheese, and lots of winter-grown spinach from my neighbors at Green Grocer Chicago, sauteed in more garlic and lemon.

Tuesday was a little more ambitious:

Breakfast was a piping bowl of instant Irish oatmeal spiffed up with cashews and unsweetened coconut, with a little Wisconsin honey drizzled over the top.

In the afternoon I went out to work at my “office” (aka the Writer’s Workspace, in Uptown), so I packed a sandwich made from the remains of last night’s chicken and the tail end of a going-stale baguette. So far these lunches are sort of lame.

When I got home I whipped up some white bean dip, a “one-food-processor” recipe of which I am quite fond. Combine one 15-ounce can white beans, one garlic clove (peeled), 2 tablespoons tahini, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and the juice of half a lemon in the Cuisinart work bowl. Blend till smooth. Eat.

Served with pita chips it’s tasty, low-fat, and healthy. If I had some parsley I would have thrown that in as well — would have given it a bit of color and a nice fresh bite.

But, even before I’d  fortified myself with the beans, I pulled out the chicken carcass from the fridge and threw it into a big soup pot along with some aging carrots and, left over from my FP box two weeks ago, half a leek, and most of a head of limp celery. I added a few cloves of garlic, a fistful of kosher salt, and a dozen or so peppercorns. Filled the pot halfway up with water and set to simmer. In a few hours I had 2 gallons of chicken stock (most of which I froze in small quantities to use down the road) — and had used up most of the fading vegetables in the produce drawer. Not bad!

Now, I wonder what today will bring?