Yellow Chicken with Ginger Vegetables and Baked Tomatoes

The yellow chicken is supposed to be an anti-cancer recipe because the ingredients - garlic and turmeric - apparently counteract the negative effects of grilling meat. I didn't grill this chicken, so it was kind of pointless, but I decided to give it a taste test. It's not very flavourful. In fact, it's surprisingly unflavourful. I think if I were to try it again, I'd add some cumin or cayenne or something to add a bit of interest to the taste.

The rest of my meal was a bit of a mish-mash since I was recipe testing and wasn't thinking too hard about how the flavours would interact. The carrots and cauliflower were supposed to be spicy - alas the red pepper I bought was anything but spicy and so added no real flavour at all. They were still quite good - very gingery and a little bit sweet.

The baked tomatoes were also fantastic, and I could have eaten a whole plate of just them, I think. (I ought to have blanched them first, though. You can see where the skin was slipping off the one of the right.) And the asparagus was just an excuse to eat salty, roasted asparagus because I love them and wanted to eat some before my most recent bunch of asparagus goes bad.

Anyway, in spite of the near miss with the carrot/cauliflower and the slightly bland (but gratifyingly yellow) chicken, it was a good meal.

Dr Oetkers Pizza Speciale with Baby Romaine Salad

Dr Oetkers Pizzas are remarkably good, really. I don't eat pizza very often, but I'll definitely keep buying theirs when I do want it.

A tasty, lazy meal.

I don't know what's happened to me lately that I can't seem to take a half decent picture of anything - such a strong yellow cast to this one.

Mushroom Burger on an English Muffin with Steamed Green Beans and Salad

A kind of boring supper, I guess. I've just started working full-time and my schedule is so effed up that I'm having a hard time working interesting meals into my days. This week I worked two evening shifts, and one that only got me home at 7PM, so this is what I made for dinner at 7PM. Took about... ten minutes.

Tasty though, even if I singed my mushroom burger a bit...

Chicken Stroganoff on Wheat Rotini with Roasted Veggies and Corn

This isn't really chicken stroganoff - I've never actually read a recipe for that - but it's similar in some ways: mushrooms and sour cream. It was very tasty, but probably could have used more sauce.

I over-cooked the broccoli and cauliflower a little by mistake - I forgot to reduce the cooking time for making it in my toaster oven. So instead of melting parmesan cheese over their dessicated corpses (as I meant to do, had I not cooked them till they were far too dry), I doused them with lemon juice until they perked back up. They were ridiculously good for having been my big eff up for the meal.

Spicy Tomato-Red Pepper Soup with Chicken and Noodles

I had a very sudden craving for soup tonight, and so I made soup. I found a recipe for soup made with roasted red peppers (and canned plum tomatoes), and just happened to have (what I thought was) a half a roasted pepper in the fridge and a can of crushed tomatoes. (I don't like chunks of tomato in soups, so I always used crushed.) Well, it turns out that my half pepper, which was still half of what the recipe asked for, was actually maybe, at most, a third of a pepper. So I just let the tomato take over the taste.

I also added noodles because it's too low calorie for a supper and I needed to bulk up the end of my day a bit. You can't really see the noodles though because they were in the bottom of the bowl before I poured in the soup.

Mushroom Burger with Cheese and Sautéed Mushrooms on an English Muffin

So I'm kind of an idiot because I decided to buy mushroom burgers to see what I thought of the taste. These mushroom burgers are made with cheese and (you guessed it) mushrooms. And instead of seeing what I thought of the taste, I added more mushrooms and cheese... It was tasty, anyway, whether it was MY cheese and mushrooms or their cheese and mushrooms that did it.

The rest is just sautéed sugar snap peas (YUM), a cut tomato, and cold peas with creamy cucumber dressing. Tasty all around.

Curry-Cinnamon Tuna Salad Stuffed Pita

Today's lunch. This was surprisingly good - the cinnamon was strong enough to drown out the tuna taste almost entirely, which was odd, but good because I don't really like fish that much.

The rest is pretty standard for me - a tomato cucumber salad, carrots, and an apple.

Lentil-Basmati Rice Croquettes with Mango-Lime Salad

My dinner is ethnically confused - I used tzatziki again in place of raita. (Still too lazy to make my own. And also, I always just end up throwing away the remainder of the tub of plain yogurt. Why can't I buy small containers in the stores here, hm?)

Anyway, this was so ridiculously delicious and it's such a damn shame that the lighting was so bad because it was completely gorgeous on top of being completely tasty and this picture doesn't do it justice at all.

This recipe came from Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen.

Scrambled Eggs with Fake Meat Patties and Sauteed Potatoes

I love breakfast for lunch. Or dinner. I don't know why I never make breakfast for breakfast.

Anyway, more fake meat. This - Yves Breakfast Patties - was one of the better ones I've tasted, though it still has a faintly salty taste to me. They weren't terribly high in sodium, so I don't know why that's the taste that came across most to me. Maybe it's the fakeness of it that I'm tasting, like when you drink a juice that has too much of a fake sugar taste, and I'm lining it up in my mind with salt. I don't know. Anyway, as I said, it was one of the better ones I've had. It was very obviously fake meat, but I prefered the spices in this one to the ones in Yves Breakfast sausages (which I have to slice very thin, cook very dark, and then eat with maple syrup - the texture of those is so awful).

When I used to cook for myself at home, I liked to make fried egg with cheddar and chives (we had a giant lump of chive in the garden, until the dog started peeing on it and we had to stop using it). I haven't had that in ages, so this was the nearest recreation I could do without chives. I used a little green onion instead, and kinda sorta scrambled the eggs instead of frying them. I don't really like scrambled eggs in general, but these ones were pretty good - I didn't overcook them for once and the lumps of egg were big enough I didn't feel like I was trying to eat peas with a toothpick.

Italian Scallion Sandwich with Sweet and Sour Cucumbers and Carrots

This was from last week, but I had company all weekend and didn't get it posted until today.

The sandwich recipe came from Fit-Fresh, which is the company that makes the lunch container. (The recipe title - Italian Scallion - comes from them too.)

The cucumber I'd bought that week was not very good - yellowish flesh and a slightly bitter, weak flavour. So to make it edible - top with vinegar with a little fake sugar stirred in. I remember my parents growing cucumbers out in the garden and when they were big enough to use, my mom would peel them and put them in a bowl with a big splash of vinegar. I think I prefer them that way (minus the sweetness), but this was nice to try as well.

The carrots are fantastic. I should have bought more of them at the market yesterday. Next week, I guess.

Big Leafy Salad with Lazy Chicken Cacciatore

I was going to make salmon cakes tonight, however it's hotter than hell outside and cooking anything did not really appeal. In fact, microwaving my Chicken Cacciatore didn't really appeal, but I let it sit for an extra five (or ten) minutes so that it cooled back down to a reasonable temperature before I ate. (I love cold food...) It's a Maple Leaf brand microwave meal - surprisingly good and surprisingly filling. (The sweet and sour chicken isn't very good. But this and the sirloin beef are probably the two best microwave meals I've had. I don't eat microwave stuff often, but of everything I've tried, theirs are the only ones I'd recommend without saying "it's okay... for a microwave dinner.")

I didn't end up eating the salad until much later because I was too full. (Kind of turned into a big leafy snack.)

Balti Vegetables with Pita triangles

It's really far too hot outside to be cooking something so warm and wintery, but.... I wanted to make it, so I did. (And anyway, I'll head to the basement soon enough where I'll catch a chill and be grateful for the warming food.)

I don't really know what to call this - I don't know if it's really a curry or not. I suppose so. It's maybe just not very similar to the curries I usually cook. Anyway, it was really tasty. Surprisingly sweet (the carrots and onion and sweet potato and peas), with a hint of spice.

Spicy Minted Beef on Rice Vermicelli with Cucumber and Tomato-Onion

I hadn't realized this photo was so blurry somehow until it was too late and I'd already deleted all my original shots. Oops.

The beef is either a Vietnamese or a Thai recipe that I found online, I can't remember which anymore. I don't think I made it right - you were supposed to mortar/pestle a couple chilis with some onion and garlic and oil, but I just pushed all of that stuff through one of those garlic masher things and called it good - and probably I should have used red chilis instead of green ones. Anyway, eating an entire serrano pepper on that little bit of beef makes for a very spicy dinner. (It's also got a ton of mint leaves cooked down with it.) I think it'll probably give me heartburn. Seriously delicious though.

The tomato-onion salad didn't come out nearly as spicy as it did the last time I made it. I'm not really sure what I did so differently this time around, but it's possible it just didn't seem spicy when compared to the beef.

Still practising my chopsticks skills. I don't think I did too bad, but maybe I'm doing it wrong. I don't know.

Swamp Soup with Sesame Rice Crackers

This is the spinach/white bean soup I made. I hadn't planned to take a picture but then I don't know. I had the sudden NEED to do it today. Except I forgot to try putting it in a shallow bowl (which I meant to do so that maybe the beans would show) and all my attempts to make some beans float on top were total failures. (I tried propping some up on the spinach leaves, and I tried floating some on a cracker... no luck.)

I broke a tooth yesterday on one of those stinking sesame rice crackers. Jerks. (Why must they taste so good?)

Garlic Roast Beef Sandwich

Tonight's supper was made of ugly (spinach and white bean soup) so I didn't take any pictures of it. Instead, I'm posting a picture of my (boring) lunch.

I found some frozen garlic roast beast, and the rest was just stuff in my produce drawer (I keep cheese in there too): green onions (halved lengthwise and cut to fit the bread), provolone cheese, and tomatoes. With mustard.

I might take a picture of the soup tomorrow - it does taste good - but it depends if I can get some of the beans to show or not. (Beans are heavier than spinach, so mostly in the deep bowl I used tonight it looked like floating greens in broth. Maybe if I use a shallow pasta bowl... hm.)

Panzanella

I haven't cooked much in the last few days; it's been too hot, so I've been relying on frozen foods. (I finished up the last of some turkey chili I made two months ago.) I decided that I needed something really fresh, so I dug up a recipe that I scratched down on a pad of paper a month or two ago. It came from somewhere online, but where I'm not sure anymore.

I've been on a cucumber and tomato binge lately. So so good.

I thought the bread-soaking-up-dressing part would be nasty, but it was actually really good. It didn't get soggy, just absorbed some of the flavour and softened up a bit. (I used one of those bread bowl breads, left on the counter a couple days so that it'd stale up a bit.)

Green and Yellow Bean Salad with Rice and Radishes

I somehow messed up my boiled eggs when I cooked them the other day - I can never remember which way to cook them so that they don't get that grey line around the yolk.

When I was a kid, one of my friends used to raid her mom's garden for radishes and she'd dump them in a tupperware drinking cup and then pour a mound of salt over them and then we'd probably eat a couple days worth of sodium in one go. I haven't had plain radishes with salt in ages, so this was really yummy. (I, however, was a little more sparing with my salt than that girl was...)

Chicken Tikka on Basmati Rice with a Tomato-Cucumber Salad

I had a sudden urge for curry yesterday, so I picked up a jar of Tikka curry paste. (An urge for curry, but no urge to make it the hard way... you know, the way thousands of people have been making it since forever. By hand.) (I was feeling lazy.) I hadn't tried Tikka curry before, but the jar claimed it was mild, and since I've had a very upset stomach for the last four or five days, I thought mild was probably a good idea.

It was delicious. I really like Patak's brand curry pastes.

I wanted to make a proper Cucumber Raita to go along with the tikka, but... I was feeling lazy. So lazy in fact that I bought a little tub of tzatziki instead. (Yes, I am mix and matching my cultures here.) The thing is, though, that tzatziki and cucumber raita have their two most basic building blocks in common -- plain yogurt and cucumber. The difference is really in the rest of the flavourings. So to make mine just a little hint more Indian, I spiced it with some chili powder and garam masala. (I should have stirred in some chili pepper too, but I was... say it with me... too lazy to chop one up.) Properly I should have had more of the tzatziki and less of my added vegetables, but I rather liked it this way, stirred in as a dressing.

The presentation of this is... not so hot. I should have put them both on the same plate, but I wanted to keep everything seperate. It tasted ridiculously good, anyway.

Pasta Fagiole

Yum. My very favourite soup. It's so yummy and delicious and good and I want to eat it all the time.

It's getting much too hot for soup, but I've had such a soup craving lately. Every time I look through a cookbook, my eyes (and tummy) go straight for the soup recipes.

Ham and Spinach Frittata with Sauteed Potatoes

This frittata is so delicious. The recipe I used asks for Canadian bacon, but for all that I'm Canadian, I don't really know what that is. I just used some sliced up ham steak instead. It was a tiny bit salty, but really, really good. (I put in cheese, too. Everything is better with cheese.)

The potato recipe is pretty standard for me, but I somehow managed to burn my potatoes a bit. Apparently you have to stir them once in a while...