Thai Citrus Chicken with Rice Noodles

I've been sitting on this photo for a few days, trying to decide what to say. This was a pretty tasty dinner - chicken and baby bok choy cooked in a peanut and citrus sauce served over a mound of rice noodles.

For a while I had been making a lot of recipes from a cookbook by Sandi Richard called The Dinner Fix and on the whole I'd liked most of what I'd tried, so I picked up another of her books called Dinner Survival and I don't think I had quite so much luck with that book. In any case, I decided to go back and try some of the things that had interested me before, but that I hadn't got around to. This is one of those recipes, though Richard cooks it with shrimp in place of the chicken.

I wound up changing, as always, quite a few little things - I didn't have fish sauce (and didn't want to buy it) so I whisked some oyster sauce into some soy sauce instead. I used fresh (blood) orange juice and slices of blood orange in place of canned mandarin oranges/juice. I used rice noodles rather than egg noodles. I used no-sugar/no-salt peanut butter instead of regular. And of course, since I don't eat seafood, I used chicken rather than shrimp.

On the whole, it was pretty good, though I was a little disappointed that the peanut taste so much overwhelmed the citrus taste. It reheated surprisingly well the next day, and even though I stunk up the breakroom, everyone thought it was Duk, who claims to eat cat, and so I didn't feel too guilty.

Sweet and Sour Curried Pork and Peppers

This photo is a couple days old now, and I wasn't sure about posting it, but I decided to anyway. Mostly because it amuses me and as an object lesson in drawing mental lines and sticking to them.

Let me back up a little. When I first read the recipe for this, I thought to myself gross. It looked like sweet and sour (Chinese?) curry (Indian?) by way of 1950s casserole cookbook for the discerning housewife (Campbell's condensed soup?). Gross.

Which is where I ought to have drawn a mental line and said No, I won't try this. Instead, I thought, Well, it sounds gross, but I can make myself a kind of mushroom gravy in place of the soup and then try it with that inside. Maybe it'll be one of those weird combinations that actually works out. It wasn't. It made a kind of thick pineapple gravy that was sweet and curried and nasty and gross.

I picked all the pork out of it, scrapped off the sauce, diced it smaller and mixed into into some leftover rice and just ate that instead. Maybe I should have made it properly, with a can of soup, and maybe that would have made it better, but I still sort of doubt that.

Ew.

Broccoli and Feta-stuffed Chicken with Basmati Rice

So, yeah. Food. With other food inside it.

This is another of those dinners that is pretty much just what it says on the tin. Chicken, stuffed with broccoli and feta. There's also a little onion and garlic in there. And some black pepper on top.

It was pretty tasty, but the feta didn't really make that much of an appearance, which sucks because I love feta. I think the pepper on the top kind of over-powered the rest of it because that's really what I tasted.

In any case, it was still pretty good. So was the rice, which had shallots and cumin and a little garam masala in it. (Not that the flavours match, mind. I think I just had Indian food on the brain. And the flavour is very subtle.)

Apple Zucchini Asparagus Pizza

This is, you know, pretty much what it says on the tin. MacIntosh apple slices, zucchini slices, asparagus, and underneath a mound of caramelized onions. It's also got feta, Swiss and Parmesan cheeses.

It was a strange thing, and I didn't really eat it because I over-baked the crust and the skinny little asparagus sticks were remarkably tough to chew through. But I really liked the taste of the cheese baked on the apple with the caramelized onion, so I picked all those tasty bits off and ate them before throwing away the rest.

I think it would be really great reworked as a tart of some sort, minus the zucchini and asparagus. I'll have to think about it, see if I can talk myself into making pastry dough one day.

Pignoli-Coconut Crusted Salmon with Steamed Boy Choy

It's been ages again since I cooked fish, so I thought it was probably time I sucked it up and cooked it again. I really don't understand why I have such difficulty with fish because it always tastes good and it's easy to cook. And yet I hum and haw about cooking it and sometimes can't talk myself into buying it. It's completely ridiculous.

Never mind that, though. This was really quite good. I singed it a little bit and so I was worried it would taste like burned nuts, since it's crusted with ground pine nuts and coconut, but it was really just wonderful. The fish was really moist and cooked perfectly. The sweetness of the salsa was a nice compliment to the salmon.

I didn't wind up eating much of the bok choy because it got cold very quickly while I was taking my pictures. I thought about reheating them, but didn't bother because I didn't think they'd taste very good reheated. Shame about the missed opportunity, though, as I love bok choy.

Udon Miso Soup with Chicken and Mushrooms

I do love chicken noodle soup.

I got a little scared of this one when I sat down to eat it and was staring at those big fat white noodles and thinking about them tasting like paste, but it was all lovely and delicious. I liked the thick noodles, but I think I'd like this as much with cellophane noodles in place of the udon and a mound of bean sprouts on top. (Though that'd probably be mixing my food culture references, unless miso is used also in Vietnamese cooking.)

I think I probably killed my miso by cooking it at too high a heat, but the flavour of the broth was quite delicate and nice. Not too salty, as I was afraid it would be, but just nice. I did get a lighter miso, a white one rather than something dark, so it probably was easier for an unaccustomed palate to eat than if I'd used a brown or golden miso instead.

Now the challenge is to find more recipes for miso, because I've got a whole tub of the stuff to use.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

This is the last of my backlog of photos to post, except for one that I'm skipping over (a soup and pizza combo, because you can't get a good enough look at the soup, which is the only interesting thing, and that not very. This I made... on Sunday and because it's a sloppy mess, it would be a good guess that it's a Sandi Richard recipe, from Dinner Survival.

Like many of her sloppy mess dinners, it tastes pretty good, but it also pretty sweet. I think I need to learn just to cut back on the sweet parts of her recipes and add more sweetness later, if it seems to need it. It did taste better on the second day, when the sauce had a chance to turn saucy, and somehow the sweetness seemed less overwhelming. (There still wasn't enough sour to balance it, but it wasn't so sickly sweet.)

I had used chicken thighs in this recipe and ugh... was that a gross experience. I had forgotten how much fattier than chicken breast they are, and how much more work you need to do to make them edible. (Or how much work I need to do, anyway, since I have a thing about always cutting off the fat and making sure there aren't veins and things.) It's just that they're cheaper and in some dishes much tastier (because they are so fatty, I suppose) and if they came without so much excess fat on them I'd probably cook them more often.

Cinnamon-Salsa Chicken with Rice and Cauliflower

Another of Sandi Richard's sloppy mess dinners that taste very good. I don't really have anything else to say about it, except that it was good. There was nothing special about it, and I'd probably not serve it to guests, but it was good.

I used leftover rice that got really sticky when I thawed it, so I mashed it into the bottom of a bowl until it stuck in the shape of the bowl and turned it out onto the plate. It sort of looks silly like that, really. Still tasted okay, though.

Goaty McGoaterson Goat Cheese-Stuffed Pasta

All I can really say about this is that it's a good thing I made a salad because I didn't really eat so much of the pasta. I tried. But that was the goatiest goat cheese I've ever tasted.

This, actually, is a five-cheese stuffed pasta shell: Feta, Parmesan, Mozzarella, Ricotta, and Cottage cheese. Talk about a heart attack in a cute little pasta shell. Well, really, I made a four-cheese stuffed pasta shell. I didn't want to buy ricotta, so I used low-fat cottage cheese in it's place, and I had low-fat everything, really. Extra spinach, less cheese, lower fat cheese. But the feta that I had, I didn't notice when I bought it, but it was actually a goat feta. Feta style chèvre.

I'm pretty hit and miss with goat cheeses. Sometimes I like it. It's particularly nice (I find) if you bake it until it's all melty and then serve it on a salad. But I really, really prefer it in small doses and if it's quite mild.

This was not mild. This was full-on goat. All I could taste was goat. You wouldn't think the one thing that I used the least of would be so very over-powering. But.

I need to go scrub my tongue with a wire brush and some bleach because the taste still hasn't gone away.


ETA: I saved four of these and took them to work for lunch - I work in a grocery store so if I still couldn't stomach them, I'd have options. They were much less goaty the second day, somehow. I ate them mostly cold (just barely warmed in the microwave) and they weren't so bad. In the future, I shall try this with regular feta and see what happens.

Roasted Pork Loin Chop with Salsa-topped Baked Potato, Buttery Carrots and Salad

I've had nearly a week of nothing for dinner but nothing, fast food, beans on toast, or pizza from a box. So I went a little bit all out tonight with lots of sides and delicious things.

Some sad carrots in the bottom of the vegetable drawer, cooked, with a bit of a butter and parsley. Tomatoes and cucumbers with the most delicious lemony, garlicky dressing ever. A small baked potato with slightly spicy salsa. In other words: Vegetables! Just what I've been missing this past week.

I mean... my last photo was on the 14th, when I did have vegetables. But then after that was at least a day or two of nothing at all, one McDonald's chicken nuggets and fries dinner, a meal at Nicastros (potato skins - hold the vegetables! no onions or peppers - and chicken fingers), canned beans on toast (the kind with tomato sauce, but no meat products), and pizza, which did have spinach and mushrooms on it.

It's good that I was eating fruit and salad at work for lunch, but still. That's just kind of ridiculous. It's no wonder I've been feeling so rundown. It's no wonder I kept piling more of the salsa on my potato.

Anyway, the pork part of tonight's dinner was ever-so-slightly overcooked, but was based off a recipe in Sandi Richard's newest book, which might maybe be called Dinner Survival. It's actually a recipe for an all-day pork roast, but I don't need a roast that serves 8-9 people, and I don't think a single pork loin chop would do terribly well in the oven all-day, even at low low temperatures. So I gave this a quick browning on the stove top and then finished it in the oven. I left it a bit too long as I based the cooking time on a recipe I made half an age ago that had a much thicker chop. It was pretty tasty, even over-cooked, and of course the vegetables were divine, so I'm happy anyway.

Ginger Lime Chicken with Sauteed Zucchini and Mushrooms

It's too bad really that this isn't a more impressive looking dinner, because it did taste very good. The lime is a nice bright taste with a spark of chili (sweet chili sauce and I also added some red pepper flakes) and of course the ginger.

I was going to make a pea pilaf, with cumin and onion, but I forgot the cumin and it turned out I had no peas. Huh. I could have sworn... Anyway, it was fine with just the onion in the rice, even if it was more boring that way. Peas probably wouldn't have suited the ginger-lime anyway.

This is another recipe from that new cookbook I've got by Sandi Richard. It's still in the kitchen (and I'm still not) and I still can't remember what it's called. But one of these days I'll remember to make a note of it so I can mention it here.

I'm sort of slowly working my way through the first week of recipes, this and the potato soup and a chili sauce to serve on pasta, which I ate on a baked potato and didn't photograph because... it's chili. Tomorrow will be pork, though I'm going to do a pork loin chop rather than a proper pork roast, and then after that another of her ugly (but usually tasty) chicken dishes of indeterminate origin containing dried fruit and condiments like salsa. With any luck, it'll be interesting, anyway.

Baked Potato-Cheddar Cheese Soup

This is a sort of... slightly lighter version of baked potato-cheddar cheese soup, with more broth than cream, skim milk, and low-fat cheddar cheese. It tasted nice, if a bit too cheesy, but even without all the extra cream and full-fat cheese, I found it too rich. It didn't take long for it to upset my stomach. (I'm usually okay with dairy, but I eat so little of it that it doesn't generally have a chance to bother me. When I eat too much or eat it in combination, then I tend to react to it. )

I think I would have preferred a soup that was more potato based, a bit more like a chowder, maybe, with just a touch of cheese instead of a cheese soup with baked potato in it, if that makes sense? I suppose I just need to keep looking for different recipes.

Tonight my brother-in-law is making Sour Cream Chicken, which is this slightly nasty looking dish made of chicken legs (skin on, bone in) and cut up potatoes cooked in a whole lot of sour cream and hot sauce/soy sauce/Worcestershire sauce. It tastes ridiculously good and I half wish I'd skipped my soup and stole some of his and my sister's dinner instead.

Steak with Peppercorn Gravy, Cheesy Mashed Potatoes and Green Beans

Another of the Sandi Richard recipes, from the new book, the title of which I don't think I mentioned in my last entry. Actually, I don't really remember the title of the book, and it's downstairs, but I'll be making something else from the book fairly soon, so once I get to that, then I'll have to remember to talk a bit more about it. Really, the book is pretty similar to the other one I've got.

Richard's focus is all on how to streamline the dinner making process so that five days out of every week, dinner can't be the most stressful part of your day. This book, and the other (The Dinner Fix) contain 10 weeks of 5 meals each - complete meals, that is. I modified this dinner, but if I'd made it her way, I'd have seared and cooked the steak first, then got started on the gravy, then I'd have put corn on the cob on to boil, and prepared a salad. Once those things were ready, the gravy would also be ready and the steaks rested, and dinner is ready to be served.

I started out with the potatoes, since they had to boil. And I felt like doing something a little bit more interesting than usual, so I added some torn up Havarti and Provolone cheese (since I could buy those by the slice at my work - I bought one 30g slice of each, and used about half of each in the two servings of potatoes that I made). Yum. All stringy and cheesy and delicious.

The beans are just steamed beans. I didn't even spritz them with a bit of lemon or add butter today. I've been having a little love affair with green beans lately. I wish the fresh ones in the stores looked a little nicer, because they always taste so much better than frozen, but these frozen ones are quite nice as well.

And then the steak. It was good, but not spectacular. I think it could have been better, but it was good enough for me to make a second attempt some day. I think next time I'll crack the peppercorns first, because, really, who wants to eat whole peppercorns? And I think the flavour would get into the gravy a lot more if they were cracked.

I think also that the gravy would have come together more easily if I'd made the full six servings, rather than 2 servings of it. It certainly wasn't bad, but I think it's one of those things that don't translate overly well to a reduction in the recipe.

Hoisin Beef with Green Beans

It's been a few days again and this is what I've come back with? Blah. One of the problems with stir-frys is that they all sort of look more or less the same. A dark sauce on vegetables and meat. And then this one has only one colour of vegetable - green beans - so it doesn't even get a bit of interest from carrots or... something.

Worse than boring, it didn't even taste that good. I didn't know it was possible to make a stir-fry sauce that was made of several ingredients but actually tasted like nothing.

This tasted like nothing. Not green beans, not steak, not soy sauce, not hoisin sauce, not chili sauce, not ginger and garlic. Just an unrelentingly sweet and salty mask for otherwise tasty things.
I knew it would be sweet - hoisin and sweet chili sauce are both made of a lot of sugar. I knew it would be salty - soy sauce and hoisin are both very high in sodium.

In this respect, I think it's the worst thing I've made from one of Sandi Richard's book. The soy sauce soup was pretty awful, too, but this was worse. Maybe I'm so much more bothered by this because I, most of us I imagine, could make a basic stir-fry in our sleep and have it taste better.

Sandi Richard does basic, family friendly recipes very well. She makes things I can imagine eating for everyday occasions. Things I could have imagined my mom making, had my mom been more inclined to try out new things. (Rather more steak and fish than my mom would ever use, but otherwise...) I have had far more successes than failures from her books, so maybe that also is why it bothers me so much. She says in her notes that her family could eat this meal again and again, but I just... why? Why would you want to? Maybe it just didn't translate well to single serving cooking, but this sort of thing usually does translate very well. So I don't know.

The rice was exquisite, though, for brown. You can see how to make it yourself here. I've made, per usual, enough for five meals, so I've got it all single-serving frozen and ready to go. Yay!

Apricot-glazed Ham with Sautéed Spicy Green Beans

I'm trying this week to eat no added sugar because I've found myself having weeks where every day I need a mid-morning pick-me-up donut and I hate that. So this week, it's all very explicitly planned meals.

I'm also trying to keep using up food that I've got in the freezer. I don't really like things that have been frozen, somehow, so it bothers me that I just keep on buying things that are frozen and then leaving them to sit for half an age. (I have a box of chicken burgers, unopened, in my freezer that I've had since I moved here. In February 2007.) I tend to freeze leftovers a lot too, but once they disappear into the freezer, I sometimes forget about that.

This black forest ham was one of those forgotten things. When I was looking for healthy recipes for the week (though this one does contain sugar, the very thing I was trying so hard to avoid!) I ran across a recipe for baked ham and suddenly remembered the dish in the freezer. The meat, on inspection, was a bit freezer burnt, but otherwise fine. It smelled, from the first cook-through, of cloves, but that was okay because the recipe also contains cloves.

This apricot glaze smells and tastes like fall to me. It's sweet and sticky and fruity and tastes of cloves and cinnamon. It'd be perfect for a fall dinner, Thanksgiving maybe, followed up by a spicy pumpkin pie with mounds of whipped cream. (Oh, wait. Probably not so much, if I'm aiming for healthy, eh?)

The ham looks so prominent in the picture because it's propped up on a pile of deliciously spicy green beans. I just steam them lightly, then sauté quickly with a dash of oil and some red pepper flakes. Wonderful.

Beer-can Chicken

I haven't got a picture of the complete dinner that I ate with this chicken; well, I do, but I'm not going to post it because it's boring. This chicken is so much more interesting as a chicken than as a piece of chicken on a plate.

My sister and I haven't wanted to try out beer can chicken for a while, but it never quite seemed to happen and we'd never think about it at convenient times. But then my sister wanted to cook dinner for me because of my birthday and wanted to know what I wanted her to make. What I'd really have liked was lasagna, which I haven't had in AGES, but her husband doesn't like it, so that seemed a bit silly to ask for when we were having a family dinner. I'm not sure what brought this to mind, but it's what popped into my head, so that's what we had.

We ended up cooking the chicken in the oven, rather than on a bbq as you're meant to, because it was miserable and cold outside, but if we ever do this again, it'll be on a barbecue because it made such a mess of the oven. It tasted quite moist, though, and the flavour was nice, if a little bit too subtle (since I don't eat chicken skin). If we try it again, we're going to try putting the spice rub under the skin, rather than over it.

What I really like about this picture, though, is how completely hilarious it looks. It looks like it should be animated and dancing or something else completely ridiculous. It's like something out of some violent cartoon like Itchy and Scratchy where one of the characters catches the other, butchers it, roasts it, and then it pops out of the oven like some kind of zombie and chases the other one around.

Anyway a friend, Tanya, came around for dinner and brought cupcakes! So these are my birthday cupcakes. They are chocolate with chocolate icing and chocolate on top. (At least the ones with M&Ms have chocolate on top.) There is never too much chocolate.

When we arranged the cupcakes for the photo, we didn't notice that we'd arranged it to look like the food table at some kind of convention for children of the Ku Klux Klan - KKK down either side. Which was a kind of funny contrast to my OTHER birthday cake from my actual birthday which was an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen and which my sister bought decorated with the Sikh insignia.

She tells me that most of the cakes were either ugly or childish and then there was this one cake with a purple blob on it that looked like some kind of alien. Another friend who was here on the day I got that cake said she thought it was kind of alien sword. Meanwhile, they walk in with it and I go, "You bought me a cake with a Sikh symbol on it?" It was ridiculously funny.


(This, by the way, was from Sunday. The Sikh cake was photographed 27 Aug 2008.)

Spicy Peach Glazed Chicken with Roasted Rosemary Potatoes and Sautéed

Yet another dinner from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix. At some point I'll run out of things to cook from that book and you'll get to stop reading about it. On the whole, the book has been worth whatever I paid. (Which wasn't a lot, I don't think, though I can't really remember.) There are some things I don't like about the book: her sides are generally boring and rotate through three or four items and she relies a bit too heavily on certain condiments that I'm not likely to use again (and thus don't want to buy). But on the whole, worth it.

Anyway, this chicken dish was... simple. You dredge the chicken in herbed flour, then cook it in a touch of oil for 20 minutes (flipping at half time). Next coat it the peach glaze (made of peach jam, barbecue sauce, and soy sauce) before returning to the oven for a while. It was remarkably tasty, for something so simple. The peach added just a touch of sweetness, less than I was expecting really, and the barbecue sauce added a nice spicy flavour.

I do think I'll make this again sometime, though maybe I won't bother putting flour on the chicken, and maybe I'll barbecue it instead. Hmm.

The rest of my dinner was MY old standbys (her suggestions were plain rice and mixed peas and corn) - roasted potatoes with rosemary and sautéed broccoli with a bit of crushed red pepper for some heat.

Spicy Meatball Sandwich

By the time I had dinner cooked tonight, I wasn't terribly hungry anymore, but I dutifully ate my dinner anyway and it was very good, even though I wasn't very enthused about eating it. (I have issues about wasting food and didn't want to throw it away, though I do do that sometimes.)

The sauce on the meatballs wasn't meant to be a teriyaki sauce, but it sort of reminded me of one, and I think it would have been really tasty with some pineapple. It was made mostly of ketchup and sweet chili sauce, with some Worcestershire, mustard,... and some other things I can't recall. The meatballs themselves had celery seed in them, of which there was a bit too much for my taste, but would be easy to cut back on in the future. The red onion was really nice with the meatballs, but definitely some pineapple too, if I try this again.

This recipe was another from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix - I'm determined to try all the recipes from the book that I can stand. (So... eliminating most of the seafood, some of the big roast type dinners and a few that just look gross.) Most of what I plan to make this week will be from this book, and then I'll keep picking away at it after that - I've mainly got fish recipes left and fish is rarely a top choice for me when I'm thinking about what to cook.

(By the way... check out the new plate!)

Fettucine Carbonara

I cooked a couple of times while I was on holiday, but I kept forgetting to take pictures, so it's been a while since the last update. Mostly I just made barbecue. Actually, that's all I made. Barbecue sausages and barbecue burgers and barbecue... what my mom calls hobo packages and... I'm certain there were other things as well, but I can't think of what just now. It was barbecue weather all week, so that's all I did.

I've even done barbecue since I got home, but a barbecued sausage with barbecued corn and a bit of salad isn't really that interesting to look at. And so.

This is maybe not so interesting either - just a plate of pasta - but I'm pleased with myself for having made it, and it was quite delicious. This was another of the recipes from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix. It was, happily, quite easy to cut down to one serving and happily quite easy to make.

I very rarely cook bacon. It's not that I don't like the taste, though I often find it far too salty, but I just don't like it well enough to bother with it. And I always, always burn it. Except this time! One day when I was watching some show or other on the Food Network, the host suggested cooking lardons in a little bit of water so that you can cook them through without overcooking them. Probably there is some other way to manage crisping bacon without turning it to charcoal, but this worked for me.

My only real difficulty is that I turned the sauce a little too high for a little too long and I wound up with slightly scrambled egg in my sauce. But I don't think it's too noticeable in the picture.

Anyway, I don't do cream sauces all that often. Or pasta all that often. But I can see myself making this again someday.

Chicken in Cream Sauce with Whole Wheat Spaghetti and a Salad

A while back I was cooking my way through a cookbook called... i think Fixing Dinner, which is about family meal planning and that sort of thing. Which, whatever, but I was interested in the recipes. I kind of went off track and got distracted by other things, but this is one of the recipes I hadn't tried yet.

I had planned to cook something from a Gordon Ramsay cookbook, but I took out chicken by mistake, rather than pork, so I needed to find something else, and this was something I had all the ingredients for. It was really quite easy to cook this, which is part of the point of Sandi Richard's book, and it tasted very good.

And I'm sort of falling asleep here, so I'm going to be off to bed, rather than taking time to think of more to say.