Sticky Lemon Chicken with Champ

So this - the sticky lemon chicken and the champ - comes from a Gordon Ramsay cookbook, Fast Food. I've made a couple things from this book and it's all been good, which makes me happy. The chicken wasn't terribly lemony, it tasted a bit more of sweet soy sauce, but it was still quite delicious. I think if (or when) I make it again, I'll use less soy sauce and add some extra lemon juice or lemon zest to add some more lemon flavour to the dish.

The champ - mashed potatoes with green onions - was pretty tasty too. I'm not really a big fan of mashed potatoes, but they're a favourite with the other two people at my house, so I made it and I'm happy I did because it was good, even if I wouldn't want to eat it once a week or anything.

I meant to make grilled asparagus to serve with this, but I sort of ran out of time because I didn't think to prep it before I got half way into making everything else. So my brother in law made some extra garlicky Caesar salad and I thawed some frozen peas to have alongside.

I said in the blurb on flickr that I'm so full I could puke, which is nearly true, even though I didn't eat everything from the picture. One of the things I need to learn with photography is how to better plate foods so that I wouldn't feel like I have to fill up the whole plate just so that it shows well. (I don't like when there are weird gaps of plate showing through. For instance, I had to pour extra peas into the middle so that there wasn't a big red space between the chicken and the salad.) Sometimes I'll kind of plate everything to one edge of the plate and then crop out as much of the excess as I can, but if I do that, it seems really dependant on the angle, so that I don't wind up having to crop out bits that I like, which are surrounded by too much empty plate.

I guess I could just take pictures like some people that are focused really closely on one element or another, but I don't know the settings on my camera well enough to fiddle around with that, and have mostly chicken showing with just a slight blur of green and white vegetables behind it. Or whatever. Hm.