Stampede Postcards

For my Art2Mail postcard exchange, I decided to do a couple of series of postcards (as well as the Doctor Who card I posted earlier). The first series, because we started up our exchange just as Calgary Stampede 2008 was about to start, I decided would be cowboys. I've done cowboy postcards in the past, so it feels a little bit like it's just my thing now. I like the image, even though I'm not all that interested in cowboy culture or the West or whatever.

Because I wanted the cards to have something to do with the actual Calgary Stampede, I bought up newspapers during Stampede week so that I could mine them for interesting photographs and images of cowboys that I could turn into silhouettes for the cards. So each of these images actually comes directly out of local papers. I wish I'd kept notes on what was happening in the cards that came from photos of actual people.

This card isn't based on a picture of a real person during the Stampede, but came from a graphic in the newspaper. I found the real photographs surprisingly difficult to work with because often parts of the scene would be blurred out or cut off so that only the most interesting part was showing, but to make them into silhouettes, it often made unrecognizable shapes of the animals. (The card following this is an example of that.)

I've had a lot of mixed reviews about this card. I've been told it looks like a whale with a dog sitting on its tail. I've been told it looks like a turtle with a teddy bear on its head. I've been told it looks like a blob. I think it could look a bit like a Rorschach blot, if only I'd done a mirror image.

I think I knew too well what the picture was to see what the postcard looks like. It is actually a cowboy wrestling a steer. He's got his arm wrapped around the steer's head, with one of the horns rising up between the cowboy's arm and body. The actual image blurred out the steer's legs and tail and the angle the animal was standing at, in reference to the camera, really shortened the body so that it turned into a big blob. It was, if nothing else, a good exercise in looking at the shape of an image, rather than the image itself. At least if I'm intending to make a silhouette out of it.

And then finally there is this card. One of the things that I was trying to do with this series was to use backgrounds made of fabrics that felt sort of country to me - wheat or things that might have been shirting material or something. I think this card was the least successful, but I was running out of options in my stash. (Or at least running out of options that were in large enough sizes to make into cards.) It seems a little too much like an ocean fabric or something, rather than something cowboy-esque. Ah well. The shape of the cowboy itself is quite interesting, so I think it's excusable.

Who? postcard

I mentioned in my last entry that I'd joined a quilted postcard exchange, one that is set up through Art2Mail. I'm not sure how long Art2Mail has been around, but my exchange group was the 49th, so it must have been going for a while. I don't think I'd realized that fabric postcards were quite such a common thing in the quilting world, but I suppose I am very much on the outskirts of things - I don't read any of the magazines or often go to shows or belong to any groups. I haven't even been to a quilt store in months.

At any rate, a friend joined the same exchange, so I decided to make something special for her - a Doctor Who postcard, since we're both fans of the show. I found the base image on some colouring pages that the BBC put out. (See them here.)

The tough thing with this card was figuring out where to stitch in the clothing. I didn't draw on any of the lines, just started sewing and hoped things would come out more or less where they needed to. Some of it didn't work out so well, but on the whole, I think the errors blend in well enough that you don't really notice them.

I wish I could have figured out how to give him a face, a basic one at least, but I think anything I could have done would have come out a little bit too cartoony. (I also wish I wouldn't have forgotten the part of his coat that hangs behind the leg propped on the rock, but nobody ever notices that it's missing unless I point it out.)

Fabric Postcards

It's been nearly a year since I updated here, which is a shame for two reasons. First, I just haven't been sewing that much. I do go through stages with sewing, but it was a very, very long off stage for me. Depressingly, distressingly long. But it was largely because I was distressed and depressed for a lot of the time. So.

Second, I kept forgetting to update, even when I did sew. And I've gotten to a lot of intermediary stages on things, but mainly on things I didn't want to update on until they were finished. So I've got this entire quilt put together, but I can't figure out how to quilt or tie it, so I've just not finished it. And there's another quilt that I don't even have any photos of any longer, which is finished but needs to be sandwiched and tied or quilted. And then there's ANOTHER quilt which is sandwiched, but I'm not any good at quilting, so I haven't finished it. One of these days. Maybe.


In any case, I joined an exchange for fabric postcards. I thought something small like that, 4x6 quilts, would be a good way to break myself back into the quilting habit. This card wasn't for the exchange, but it's the first one I'd made after a long while of not doing anything, and just before I started up making cards again.

This particular card was a thank you to my boss's wife, who helped me out with some scrapbooking stuff. I must have been feeling a little crazy when I made it because the colours are so bright and the quilting completely insane. But I like it: it's so bright and cheerful.

Leek and Oats Stuffed Chicken with Grilled Zucchini and Asparagus

This turned out to be a bit of a hit and miss dinner. I loved the chicken, but could have done without the vegetables.

The chicken is a recipe for stuffed turkey breast that I found in the Clean Eating cookbook. It's stuffed with chopped leek, onion, rolled oats, and some herbs - sage, thyme and rosemary. The herbs make it taste just like fall, sort of warm and cozy. It was a nice way to cook chicken, and much cheaper than buying turkey breast. (Less wasteful, too. What would I do with a 3lb turkey breast, serving only myself? That'd be a lot of leftovers.)

The vegetables were less successful, which surprised me because they were so basic. I actually roasted them in the oven on a grill pan, with just a little olive oil and salt and pepper, but they tasted very bitter, so much so that I couldn't eat the zucchini at all and the asparagus was only barely passable. I know it's long past season for asparagus, but I don't think I've ever had it taste so bad. And the zucchini was strangely, incredibly awful.

I think I'll definitely keep the chicken recipe in mind for the future, because it was quite nice. And looks nice for serving, too, if I were to make it for guests.

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.

BBQ Baked Salmon with Potatoes, Red Peppers and Broccoli

A while back I talked about instituting a Fish-for-Supper Sunday, which I haven't quite managed in the sense of actually having fish every Sunday, but the point really was to eat fish once a week, if I could manage it. I think I've probably missed a time or two, but I've come pretty close to eating it weekly. So this is my most recent fish dish.

The store I shop at recently brought in individually packaged 4 oz salmon fillets, which is perfect for someone like me who only cooks for one and who doesn't eat big portions of protein at a time. I don't know that I'd buy it again, but that's mainly because it isn't terribly cost effective to buy food in small portions like that (and it's wasteful, just in terms of the packaging). At any rate, it came with a recipe on the back of the packet for a one-pot dinner, where you coat the fish with a sauce (bbq or peanut, were their suggestions), the place it in a baking dish surrounded by baby potatoes and sliced red and yellow pepper, and then bake for 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, 20 minutes wasn't enough time to bake the potatoes, so I wound up with rather overcooked salmon. It was still edible and tasty, but about the texture of salmon from a can. And it didn't hold a candle to the medium-rare salmon I ate at Redwater at my birthday dinner. I do think it would be interesting to try again, with a peanut sauce, but I think I'd parboil the potatoes else start baking them 5 or 10 minutes before adding the peppers and fish to the baking dish.

Tandoori Fish with Nutted Rice Pilaf

This was my most recent Dinner From a Box and also Fish for Dinner dinner. (Most recent, but from some time last week - I think last Tuesday.)

I mostly try to avoid eating a lot of stuff out of boxes because I do worry about all the additives and things that are meant to make it shelf-stable and the amount of sodium and unnecessary sugar and all sorts of things like that. I don't eat exclusively things I've made for/by myself, but I definitely lean strongly in that directly.

This, though, all boxes. The rice pilaf is by the same company whose whole wheat couscous I buy. (I can't think of the brand name just now.) They do a number of boxed tabbouleh and flavoured couscous and rice pilafs, so I thought I'd give one of their pilafs a try. I don't think it was worth it. It tasted too much of a very salty broth and the nuts had no flavour and neither, really, did the spice mixture that went into it. It smelled a little of cumin, but I certainly couldn't taste any of it over the saltiness.

I think I could probably do something similar, but better, myself. Maybe toast the nuts first, so they have a strong nutty flavour and then stir them in at the end so they retain crunch, rather than cooking the taste and texture away. And the spices, I have a recipe for yellow rice that would work for flavouring, though I'd probably leave out the turmeric for something like this.

And then the fish, well, it didn't all come out of a box. (You can get some bagged fish things in the meat department that would probably come out similar to this, though.) The spice mixture did, though. All it was was a bag of spices that you stirred into plain yogurt with some oil and then used as a marinade. It had a really nice flavour, a bit spicy but not too hot, but it had a terribly grainy texture that I didn't really care for. I'm not sure what I could do to get rid of the graininess, though.

I used Basa fillets for the fish, which seemed to work out quite well. It was nice and firm and plain enough that the Tandoori didn't compete with the taste of the fish.

Beef, Barley and Mushroom Soup with Cheese Quesadilla

I'm still behind in my updates, but I was sure that I'd posted this before so I didn't do it yesterday, but looking through things today, it looks like this will be a first after all.

So this I made yesterday when it was cold and miserable and feeling like winter. (It's only going to get worse from here, but still.) Soup is the perfect thing for that, warm and filling and you can throw in nearly anything you've got and it's perfect. This one is mostly filled with mushrooms and barley, but it's also got a little diced steak and then the usual sorts of things - onion, celery, carrots. Tasty, that.

Something like Niçoise Salad

This isn't, I know, a proper Niçoise, but it's a vegetarian (ovo-veg, anyway) variation on it. I can't seem to get a particularly definitive answer about what does and doesn't go into Niçoise, but I'm pretty happy with this, even if the French would turn up their noses at it.

There isn't really a whole lot to say about this: it's boiled new potatoes with hard boiled eggs, green and wax beans, red onions, tomatoes and a vinaigrette. I ate it warm (last week, for dinner) when I first made it, and then took the leftovers to work at had them cold. It's delicious either way.

(I've also photographed this before, without the potatoes, but we'll just pretend I didn't. I like the look of this, even though I could have made it more interesting looking than just a lot of food scooped on the plate, and so it's getting posted. Maybe next time I'll stack it up instead of spreading it out so that I can photograph it again.)

Steak, redone

Well, this photo is several days old now, but somehow I just haven't felt like updating and talking about it. Maybe because it's just a variation on something I cook relatively frequently (steak and eggs) or maybe I've just not been in the mood. I don't really know.

At any rate, this is my recreation of the previous day's steak, this time cooked through and served over scrambled eggs with a fresh garlicky tomato salsa. I ate it on a baked to slightly-crispy corn tortilla, up until I realized just how much I (apparently) don't really like corn tortillas unless they're deep-fried. I wound up scooping the filling off the tortilla and throwing the tortilla away. It had become slightly soggy and it just had a funny taste that seemed somehow faintly chemical to me.

The eggs cooked up nicely - I'm getting much better at making scrambled eggs with large "grains" of egg, rather than too many dried out small bits that hardly stay on a fork. I don't mind scrambled eggs like this, where the bits are big enough to properly spear on a fork.

The salsa was quite nice, though I don't particularly like the hot sauce i used to add spice. I forget the name of it, but it didn't really have much of a flavour. I prefer the old standbys like Tabasco, I guess, to some of the odder off-brand hot sauces that are out there.

Marinated Flank Steak with Spicy Broccoli and Baked Sweet Potatoes

I'm running a day behind on my posting here: this was from yesterday evening. It was one of the more involved things I've made in a while, though it wasn't really very involved. It's just that I had to make a marinade for the steak on Sunday, and obviously that extra step somehow made it seem like a nearly insurmountable amount of work.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the steak in the marinade because it looked like a ziploc bag of grass soup with a raw steak in it. Mmm grass soup. It was actually more or less equal amounts of cilantro, parsley, and basil with some olive oil, spices, and chicken stock, but was bright bright green and looked like grass soup.

I have a hard time cooking steak. Usually I overcook them, this was slightly undercooked for my tastes. I mean, it tasted great and the texture was perfect and I KNOW that steak is better like this than cooked more well-done, but I have issues with juices and so I had to close my eyes and take a mouthful without looking at the redness or else I'd have thrown it all in the garbage.

Much like I threw the sweet potatoes in the garbage. I knew before I photographed it that I wouldn't be eating them, but I wanted to add that extra colour to the plate. They were soggy. No amount of baking would dry them out or crisp them up. They were in the oven almost double their intended baking time and still they came out damp. I've made sweet potatoes like this before and not had this problem, so I'm not sure what did it this time. Shame, anyway.

The broccoli, though, yum. And the steak, too, yum. I think I'll make the steak again, but next time I'll cook it a little longer, just to get a little less juice and a little more personal comfort.

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.)

Beef and Pepper Stew on Basmati Rice

This photo is a couple days old now, and I've even finished the leftovers. But I do want to get it posted before the end of the month and also there might be something new tonight, if I can keep myself up long enough to post that new potential photo.

Anyway, this was one of those dinners where I didn't pay enough attention to the instructions - it's got a 2-1/2 hr cooking time, and suddenly it was 6 in the evening and I had to get up early for work the next day and didn't need or want to be eating dinner at 8:30/9 at night. So even though I'm about to say that this was a braised dish, it maybe wasn't quite, since I cranked the heat up a fair bit and cut the cooking time down by half.

So delicious. My succinct explanation from my flickr account is probably the best one I could give: a braised beef stew with lots of luscious red peppers (which, though not roasted, tasted as if they were) and a sweet tomato sauce.

The meat was fall apart tender and the peppers were sweet and soft and even the skins didn't bother me as they sometimes do when left on in something like this. It tasted like it'd be cooked for ages. Definitely a make again dish.

Mushroom and Spinach-stuffed Chicken with Green and Wax Beans

I have no fish pictures again this week, but I did actually eat fish once this week. I went out to a restaurant here in Calgary last night, Redwater Rustic Grille, for my birthday and had Salmon with Pear and Thyme Gastrique with Roasted Red and Yellow Peppers and Asparagus. Tonight's dinner was plated as an homage to yesterday's dinner, this time with chicken stacked up on the vegetables rather than salmon.

I'm not sure that I've actually got anything else to say about this meal. It tasted very good, the beans especially, but I am a fiend for fresh beans. (My favourite thing about going to my parents' house in summer is raiding their garden for fresh beans and peas.) It probably wasn't a special enough dinner for a birthday, but I got to combine two of my favourite food things - stuffed things and yellow things - and also I cooked it for myself and ate it alone, so it's just lucky I didn't eat peanut butter on rice crackers or something.

Five Spice Pork with Basmati Rice and Spicy Vegetables

So... I got another new plate. I love this plate. I always get like this with new dishes, and never want to use any of the others, at least until the sheen wears off. Isn't it pretty though?

So this. This is a kind of weird combination of the two main components (the meat and the vegetables, that is, the white glare of rice makes it look more important than it is and I could have done without), since the meat is quite Asian in flavour and I guess the vegetables are a little more... American South or something.

The recipe for the vegetables called it an Asian-style Succotash, but I'm not sure what makes them Asian-style, except for the presence of snap peas. What it actually reminded me of was a Spicy Creamed Corn that I made a while back, except without the creamed bit and with some added peas. It was pretty good this way, but I liked it better as creamed corn.

I've made the five spice pork before, but it was a pretty different treatment, hence the new photograph. This was really very good, but I actually preferred it the other way. (See it here. So. Good.) It's slightly too sweet, which is something that I need to work at fixing, without ruining the sauce. You rub the meat with brown sugar and then later top it with Hoisin sauce, which seems to be primarily made of sugar, so it's a pretty heavy hit of sweetness. The sweet really works well with the cinnamon and licorice tastes of the five spice, but I didn't want to go quite so far. Probably I could just scale back the brown sugar a little more without ruining the taste.

Spicy Sausage and Mushroom Soup

It was soup weather outside today, miserable and rainy and very cold. I had planned to make turkey meatballs and spaghetti, but then I thought I wanted mushrooms instead, and then I wanted soup instead of that, and so I found a recipe online that combined all of them. I'm not sure anymore where the recipe came from (I guess I could dig through my history and find it, but that seems like a hassle) but I'm glad I found it because it was an interesting soup and something I could and probably will make again.

I ended up making my own sausage, since I had ground turkey in the fridge rather than actual sausage meat. The recipe I found was meant to be a variation on Andouille sausage. I've never had it before, so I don't know how close to the real thing it is. (Probably not close at all, even setting aside that I used a totally wrong meat.) The sausage recipe itself was really good, definitely worth the small work of making it, and I could use that easily in other recipes as well.

Recipe: Homemade Turkey Sausage

I sort of made my own sausage today. I mean, only sort of because it's not like a put it in casing or anything like that, and I only made a 1/4lb of it and uh, yeah. But it was really good!

I found this recipe somewhere online for a variation of andouille sausage, but I didn't have all the ingredients, so I had to kind of futz around with it, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I mean... really good. There's something oddly warm about it, which is probably that some of the flavours are very fall/winter flavours for me (clove and allspice and sage), and it wasn't as spicy as I'd thought/hoped it would be, but that's probably because I didn't have any cayenne and under-guessed how much red pepper flakes to put in instead.

Anyway, so I don't lose it, this is how I made the spice, for about 1lb ground pork (or turkey, which is what I used):

1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp paprika
1/8 tsp red pepper flakes
1/8 tsp ground sage
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp ground cumin
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp ground bay leaves
1/4 tsp thyme leaves
(and 1 clove crushed garlic, when you mix it all together)


Like I said, it wasn't as spicy as I'd hoped it would be, but I did like the flavour a lot, and I added a lot of spice into the soup that I used the sausage in. That had some similar flavours - thyme and red pepper flakes, anyway, and then onions, garlic, sliced mushrooms and pasta. It came out looking a little bland because of the colour of the sliced mushrooms, pasta, and sausage. But it tasted really good. I think I'd definitely make this again on a rainy day.

ETA: Since I didn't put it in a casing - I wouldn't have wanted to even if I had a machine to do it, since I was cooking it for use in a soup - what I did was put all the raw meat into a zip-lock bag, then cut off a corner and used it like a piping bag. I piped out little three-quarter inch lumps of sausage meat straight into the hot frying pan and cooked it that way before adding it to the soup.

Tagliatelle with Garlic and Tomatoes

It's kind of been a while again since I last posted. There are two excuses:

1. We had guests. While they were here, we either ate out or else someone cooked for everyone and I never got around to taking any pictures. It's funny, but I guess I actually felt a bit weird about taking food photos while they were here, though I don't know why since we took all sorts of pictures of all sorts of things. Still and all.

2. It was hot. There was a record-breaking high this week and the days before weren't all that far off. So I wasn't cooking. The only thing I made during those hot days was a Greek salad, which isn't interesting enough to photograph (and I have before). Mostly I ate nothing or else I ate out.

At any rate, after a week without making anything much, I had to ease myself back into the cooking saddle, so this is something easy and delicious: tagliatelle with a bit of garlic, barely heated diced tomato and some basil. So good. This is a really good way to use up slightly aged tomatoes.

Baked BBQ Chicken with Sour Cucumber Salad

Today I made may be the most boring thing I've made (and photographed) in ages. It tasted good, but... it's just boring. There's really nothing to be said about it. It's the most basic chicken you can make, short of, say, poached chicken. The salad isn't a salad so much as chopped vegetables, with vinegar on them. I guess I spent too much time cleaning today to spend any energy on food.

To make: coat one chicken breast with barbecue sauce. Bake. Slice, then eat.

For the salad: Slice cucumbers. Grate carrots. Drizzle over vinegar. Eat.

Chicken-Lentil Salad with Green Beans

I'm sometimes a little scared of lentils. I make plans to cook things with lentils, and then I don't. I think about ordering dahl when we get butter chicken, but then I don't. I'm not sure what makes me so uncertain - I feel like I must have had a bad experience with lentils at some point in the past, though I don't remember one - but I'm glad I finally got over my lentil fear. This was really tasty.

This salad is made up of green lentils, steamed green beans, diced chicken, diced tomato, green onion and a dressing made of mayonnaise, lemon juice... and I must be forgetting something. Dill weed. Salt and pepper. It still feels like I'm missing sometime, but at any rate, that is the basics.

Surprisingly good, a keeper recipe. I'm going to eat the leftovers for lunch tomorrow, stuffed inside pita bread.

Steak and Eggs with Fresh Tomato Salsa and Fried Potatoes

I'd thought that I'd posted a picture of this particular thing before, but I don't see it anywhere in the archives here, so I guess not. I know I have a better picture of it, when I made it some time back, but it's hidden in my archives at flickr. (I haven't got a professional account, so I have a limited number of photos that can be seen at any given time.)

Anyway, this is one of my favourite breakfast for dinner meals - steak and salsa on scrambled eggs with fried potatoes. It's a simple meal, the steak, eggs and potatoes are seasoned only with salt and pepper, and the salsa is just chopped tomato with garlic, some oregano and cilantro, and lemon juice. I had to use lime juice today, though, since we've run out of lemon juice and the stuff can't be found, fresh or bottled around here.

Yum.

Red Beans and Yellow Rice

Well, I don't know when or if this will get posted, at this rate, as my internet is up and down tonight and every time I try, I wind up having to retype this message. And that's nothing if not annoying.

At any rate, this is another recipe from a cookbook I recently picked up on Volumetrics - I think I mentioned it a couple days ago, with the Pasta Primavera recipe. Basically it's about a way of eating that lets you eat a lot of food in terms of volume, without eating a lot of calories. (IE. Eating mountains of vegetables.)

So this is a volumetrics version of rice and beans. I've never had whatever proper rice and beans would be, so I'm not sure how this compares to a more standard version of the dish, but it was quite tasty. Spicy and flavourful, even though it sort of had more bell peppers than I'd necessarily go after in any one sitting. I think it could have benefited from roasting the peppers first, just to get the skins off, because it bothered me to have little bits of skin peeling off here and there as I ate. (I don't like tomato skins in things either, if I cook them.)

The rice part I sort of made up on my own, trying to remember the ingredients for a yellow rice that I often make when I made Indian food. All I could remember is that it's got cumin and turmeric in it, so I did that again, and added some garam masala as well. It looks like it needed more turmeric to brighten up the colour, but I've never tried making yellow rice with brown rice before, so that might be why the colour didn't really take.

Anyway, this is what I'll be taking to work for lunch for the rest of the week, since the recipe makes a ton of the stuff.

Baked Salmon with Garlic-Dill Sauce and Vegatable Pilaf

I've been sitting on this photo since Sunday, trying to decide if it would be worth posting or if I should just trash it. I mean... it's ugly. Really ugly and I can't imagine anyone would look at it and think it's a good menu for a meal.

It all tasted good. I should say that. It was just a meal suggestion from a cookbook - this fish with that salad and this pilaf - and I maybe shouldn't have followed it, because it did seem a bit silly to me. (I don't know why, just the light, tangy sauce on the fish doesn't seem to belong with a heavy rice dish.) I could have done with just plain rice and maybe green beans or asparagus or a leafy salad.

Still, I think I'm a tiny bit in love with the taste of that pilaf and the method of cooking it. It's really flavourful, and it's got this great bit of crunch (from just barely cooked zucchini) and all kinds of flavour from all the vegetables and just a bit of tarragon. But the colour is atrocious. It's cooked with mushrooms, and the only thing I can think of to explain this mess is that the colour of the gills stained the rice. How else did white rice get to be so dirty and dingy looking?

And then the salmon was light and nicely cooked and the garlic-dill sauce was perfectly garlicky and wonderful. But it had bones in it. I usually buy fillets of fish, not whatever this was (steaks? I guess), so I'm not used to dealing with the bones. I mean, they were large enough to pick out easily, but they just sort of gross me out anyway. Still, I have now managed to have fish two Sundays in a row. So I'll have to, metaphorically, pat myself on the back for that.

Pasta Primavera with Tomato-Corn Chowder

A really tasty dinner, though clearly a bit much for one meal. I got this cookbook a week or so ago that's based on the idea of volumetrics, which is eating food that is high in volume, but low in calories. The idea is that most people in North America have lost the ability to know when they're full based on calories, and instead believe they're full when their body feels full. (Which is the difference, I imagine, between North Americans and the French, who seem to eat a lot of high calorie food, but who don't eat as much of it as we would.)

I can't remember if it was in this book or another one that I read about a study where people we given essentially bottomless bowls of soup, though they didn't know it, it would just keep filling as they ate it, and people would eat, say, four times what they'd have eaten if they'd been given a single bowl.

At any rate, the idea here is to eat the things you like, but to eat them in ways that volume is added without adding a lot of calories, so that you can feel full, without consuming too much calories or fat or whatever. So the pasta and the soup both have lower (or no) quantities of cream and other high calorie ingredients compared to similar, traditional recipes for the same things. They also have more vegetables in them, because vegetables are pretty well always big in volume, but low in calories.

The real test was how good it would taste, and they did taste good, though I should or could anyway have added some extra pepper to both dishes. (I love pepper.) It's fortunate that I like the taste of good fresh vegetables, because that's really what I got from these. They tasted bright and fresh.

I don't particularly like the colour of the soup, though; it looks like something from a can. Although maybe not because it isn't a fake bright red like canned tomato soup. At any rate, maybe it just needs some more tomatoes to bump up the colour a bit.

Orange-Soy Pork with Sesame Green Beans

I made this dinner several days ago, but I've been too lazy to upload it until now. Still feeling kind of lazy really - don't quite know what to say about it. I wanted to get it done before the end of the month, though.

It was very tasty, that I recall, though I was a bit annoyed that my sauce didn't turn into a sauce, despite a lot of reduction. I think it would have been quite nice with ginger. A thought for the future, anyway.

The green beans were a little boring. Usually I steam them, then lightly sauteed them with some red pepper flakes, but decided to try them with sesame oil instead and maybe I didn't use enough oil, but it didn't really enhance or change the flavour. Ah well, I love green beans plain or not plain, so it was fine, even if it was a little boring.

Old Bay-Lime Tuna Steak with Basil-Arugula Couscous

Every so often I have an "I need to eat more fish! Omega 3!" freak out because I really don't eat this stuff all that often. (I mean, how many entries in the past year have featured fish vs entries that have featured chicken? Do I even want to know?) I often say that I don't like fish that much, but that isn't really true. I think I've only had fish turn out nastily twice, and both times it was because I used the wrong sort of fish for the recipe. And whenever I eat it in restaurants, it's always fabulous and amazing and good. Maybe I just don't like to cook it. (I know I don't like the smell much. So that's probably part of it too.) At any rate, I decided I should institute a Fish-For-Supper Sunday. So today was my first Sunday.

This was really tasty. I mean... really, really tasty. Really overcooked. But so tasty.

I found the recipe over at All Recipes and most of the reviews said not to marinate for the full twenty minutes, and several also warned about the cooking time, since tuna should be rare or medium rare.

I tried. I tried so hard! I marinated the steak for about 8 minutes, rather than 20, and I only cooked it for 6 of the 8-10. And yet. And yet it was very well done. It was dry. It was texturally very uninspiring. I mean... drier than canned water-packed tuna. But the flavour! Yum. If I'd made two rather than one, I'd have eaten them both. Even overcooked.

The couscous was sort of a variation on a Rachael Ray recipe for rice pilaf. I didn't want to buy a rice pilaf just for the recipe and I didn't feel like taking the time to make my own, so I made couscous instead. Basically, I sautéed onion, garlic, and red pepper in a bit of oil, then added vegetable broth, and the couscous. After it had absorbed the water, I stirred in some torn up arugula and basil (that was the RR bit). It was quite good, though I think I didn't use enough water for the volume of dry couscous, since it didn't seem to expand very much, but had absorbed all the water.

All that said, I know I'm going to try the tuna again, and I'll very likely give the couscous another go as well (though I don't know when that'll happen, as I don't like buying arugula - I don't eat enough to warrant spending $4 on a giant tub of the stuff).

(Incidentally: Fish 8, Chicken 54.)

Vegetable-stuffed Omelet

Okay, I know eggs are boring. But you know what's even more boring? Eating nothing but cottage cheese, pudding, and yogourt for 2 days.

I had a root canal; biting is not much fun just now.

But eggs are soft, and so are all the vegetables stuffed inside these eggs: mushrooms, red and green peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini and onion. (It's a mix of frozen, diced vegetables by Europe's Best.) Delicious with some herbs and salt and pepper.

I didn't even overcook my omelet today, which is usually what happens when I try to make these. I'm a master at singed omelets.



I sometimes feel not-quite-but-almost-guilty about labelling something like this vegetarian, since eggs are obviously not vegetarian by its proper definition. But I don't want to label things for ovo-lacto-veg or ovo-veg or lacto-veg so I use vegetarian to mean "No animal flesh" and vegan to mean "no animal flesh or other animal products". Most of the things I label vegetarian COULD be made vegan (though this couldn't, unless someone's come up with a decent substitute for an egg-like omelet) or at the very least, properly vegetarian, so I don't feel too guilty unless it's something like this that relies so heavily on the animal product.

Recipe: Balsamic Lime Chicken with Fruit and Greens

This recipe comes from the diet/cook book The Fiber 35 Diet by Brenda Watson. It recommends this as a lunch or with brown rice for dinner, but I found it filling enough on its own - salad and chicken - for dinner. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I did find the dressing for the salad a tiny bit... boring. It all tastes good together, particularly if you have a little bite of each thing at once, but if you've got some lettuce on it's own it's just... boring. It maybe just needs something to perk it up a little bit, like some garlic maybe.


To serve two.
Ingredients:
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp lime juice
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tbsp dried thyme
1 small red chili, chopped [I used a couple dashes red pepper flakes as I couldn't find a chili]
2 chicken breasts
spray oil
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard
salt and pepper
2 1/2 cups spinach [I used a romaine/butter lettuce mix]
1 pear, cored and cubed
1/2 cup fresh raspberries


Instructions:
Mix 1 tbsp vinegar with lime juice, garlic, half the thyme (~1-1/2 tsp) and chili into a large ziplock bag or a bowl with the chicken. Refrigerate for about 2 hours to marinate. When ready to use, remove the chicken and discard the remaining marinade.

Preheat oven to 350F/180C. On the stove top, heat an oven-proof frying pan, coat lightly with spray oil, and sear chicken for 3 minutes on each side. Place pan in the oven until chicken is cooked through [~15 to 20 minutes, I think, I forget what I did]. Allow chicken to rest, then slice.

Combine and mix until emulsified the olive oil, 1 tbsp vinegar, remaining (~1 1/2tsp) thyme, mustard, salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle over plated spinach and cubed pear (or toss, like I did, but it doesn't look as pretty). Top with chicken and finish with raspberries.

Cassoulet Stuffed Bread Melts

Another of Rachael Ray's recipes. I have too many healthy cookbooks, so when I want to use something like pork or sausage, she's more or less the only person I have to turn to. (Or, you know, the internet.) But her food does taste good, so I can live with that.

You know, I almost wish I were a bigger part (or a part at all really :D) of the food-blogosphere because I'd love to start up a blog or group for people to cook all the way through Rachael Ray's 365: No Repeats cookbook. Just to say it's been done, because I can't imagine any one person (or family) would ever ever cook their way through it. A photo for each and a blurb about what was good and what wasn't and if it was worth the bother or whatever.

Anyway... this is cassoulet for the lazy and poor - not a dab of duck confit in sight and it wasn't a slow-cooked stew but a 20 minute from start to finish dinner. Still, quite tasty. And I've never had the "real" thing and also the real thing was peasant food to begin with anyway, so I suppose this is kind of modern day peasant - pre-cooked sausages and canned beans (I used Eden's organic navy beans - I can't say enough good things about Eden's canned beans) and cooked quickly because two-income families don't generally have time for truly slow-cooked dinners.

I wish that I'd gotten this a bit more saucy, but I didn't measure the liquid added toward the end and it really just cooked away too much. It was fine without a sauce or gravy or whatever, better than fine, but I had a thought that it'd probably be pretty spectacular on baked potatoes, if it were liquidy enough to keep the potato moist. As it was, on the crust of a bun (I scooped out the insides), it had just enough liquid to keep from being dry but not so much that it wound up soggy.

If I'd had a more plainly flavoured sausage - I had just spinach/feta sausages - I might have flavoured it with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. That's a mighty good combination with sausage and... ohhh, mushrooms, and a more proper white gravy. Yum. Now I've got ideas, and ideas can be dangerous things... (at least when it comes to not generally healthy foods like sausages).

Poached Egg and Canadian Bacon on Rosti

I made breakfast for dinner tonight. It was quite tasty, even though I had issues cooking the rosti - I don't know if I used too much oil or not enough or... I don't know. But it didn't really want to hold together and that kind of drove me nuts. I always have issues with anything vaguely pancake like - they just never want to cook properly. (This hasn't got flour or anything in it, so it's not really a pancake, per say, but it cooks similarly.)

I suppose I shouldn't call it a poached egg, since it wasn't cooked in water but was steamed. And I should have eaten it with a mound of ketchup instead of the cheese because that's the best way to eat ketchup, on eggs and fried potatoes.

Anyway, not too pretty, but it tasted good.

I seem to be having issues with my angles the last couple of days - I'm having a really hard time editing my photos so that they don't look like I was suffering from vertigo while drunk and riding a mechanical bull. I mean, okay, it's not THAT bad, but it looks like I took the picture with the camera tilted oddly and I really didn't. Or didn't think I did. Or didn't mean to.

Cumin-Lime Pork Chop with Spicy Creamed Corn

I'm too busy watching Doctor Who to think of anything to say just now, but it's over in a few minutes...

Right then... this is another Rachael Ray recipe from her book 365: No Repeats, though as always, I've cut back the portion size. She'd have twice the meat. That is the proper amount of vegetables (according to her) though, and after I took my picture, half of it got put away with the extra pork chop I cooked for tomorrow. (So, uh, no update tomorrow.)

Anyway, for creamed corn, it was really good. I've never been a particular fan of the stuff, at least not from a can. I can remember when I was younger that if we had canned corn, my parents would often have to make creamed corn for my sister and plain kernel corn for me because I couldn't stand the creamed stuff. (Or more likely, I decided that I didn't like it, just because my sister did. I didn't like ham when I was a kid for just that reason.) Homemade really is better, at least sometimes, because this I liked. Possibly that's because it's got so much more flavour, with jalapeños, red pepper, onion, parsley and cilantro. (Wish I'd had yellow onions, though, because I only had purple and it looks really nasty when the colour leaches out like it has in this.)

The pork part of the recipe is almost, but not quite, the same as one of my favourite chicken recipes, one I haven't made in far too long. So not surprisingly, I really liked this. Actually, this meal would probably be equally good with chicken in place of the pork. Something for another time, I guess. Definitely worth making again, someday.

Balsamic Lime Chicken with Fruit and Greens

Over two weeks since my last post - shame on me. It's not that I haven't been cooking. Well, no, okay, it's partly that I haven't been cooking. But also that the things I've been cooking haven't been very interesting - stir-fry, chili, stuff from the freezer... There's just nothing interesting about a barbecued burger or sausage. I've taken a few photos of things, but nothing that's stood out, so I haven't put anything up.

This stands out though. For me, anyway. It's just so pretty! (Shame I tossed the salad with the dressing like it said - it'd look nicer if I'd just drizzled some on.) The raspberries look amazing and they tasted amazing.

Actually, the whole thing tasted amazing - a bit of chicken with a bit of pear and lettuce and a raspberry all at once. Just delicious. And definitely a Make Again sort of recipe.

Stewed Lima Beans with Tomatoes on Brown Rice

I'm very in love with Lima beans right now - they're so tasty! The flavour is fantastic and I love the texture and they're just delicious. This looks a bit unappetizing (so says my brother in law), but it was really very good.

The slight bitterness of the Lima beans sits really nicely against the sweet tomatoes and the licorice-hint of fennel seeds. I stirred it up with the brown rice and it was a big ugly mess of great tasting good.

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.

Tagliatelle with Walnut and Sage Browned Butter

Okay, so I'm determined to get myself caught up, and this will do it, until I cook something new for dinner tonight. This was last night's dinner - something quick and easy before going to work. And really delicious.

The recipe for this, which came from Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen, says that it's very rich, and best served with a big salad to balance the richness, but I used Quark rather than Marscapone (for the dollop of white stuff, which I stirred in once the photo was taken), and I think that kept it from being too rich. It was just lovely. (And even with a bit less than one serving, I was too full to eat a salad alongside.)

I think I maybe didn't let the butter brown long enough, because it wasn't a very present taste, but it's possible that the tanginess of the quark covered up some of the flavour. At any rate, tangy Quark notwithstanding, the pasta had a really delicate and light flavour. The sage wasn't too overwhelming, which was the one thing I'd worried about, and the toasted walnuts were fantastic. (I'm not a particular fan of walnuts, as I don't like the texture.)

Spinach-stuffed Steak with Barley Pilaf

I was convinced that I'd posted a photo of this at some point in the past - this is the second time I've made it - but I can't find any entry for it, so I suppose I made it before I started this blog. At any rate, I think this photo is a much better one, since I so badly overcooked the steak the last time that it kind of looked like and had the mouthfeel of shoe leather. I kind of rolled it up the last time, though, and it looked prettier cut than this did.

At any rate, this is just a butterflied piece of some sort of steak, stuffed with sautéed spinach and onion, with a lot of spices, and then put in the oven until cooked through. I don't insist on having well-done steak anymore (I used to; I have a thing about raw and raw-ish meat), but this one was, and it was just perfect, not dry at all.

The barley... I call a pilaf, just because I don't know what else to call it. It's really just cooked barley with some herbs and onion. Barley makes a nice alternative to rice, sometimes. It's got a bit more of a bite to it, like al dente pasta, but the same sort of neutral flavour that makes a good backdrop to pretty much anything.

Caciocavollo-stuffed Burger with Peas and Fries

I'm quite a few days behind in updating because I keep taking pictures and then think they're not worth the bother of posting. I'm not really sure about this one, but here it is anyway.

This is supposed to be an Italian burger, made with ground beef and Italian sausage and served with tomato sauce and melted cheese on top, but I got distracted and stuffed it with cheese instead and forgot about the tomato sauce, which is still in the fridge, and couldn't be bothered to buy fresh sausage, since I only needed a couple ounces rather than a whole package. And yes.

It was still pretty tasty, even without all the extras.

Cavatappi with Lemon Quark and Lima Beans

This probably isn't the best looking dinner I've ever made, but it tasted far too good for me to care. It's the best thing I've had to eat in ages (except for the other best things I've had recently, but).

This is a variation on a recipe from Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen. His version is fava beans with lemon ricotta and rigatoni. But let's face it: no way am I going to shell fava beans (assuming I ever see them anywhere, though if they're the same as broad beans I have seen them at the market) and cavatappi is my favourite pasta shape, really. And I had quark in the fridge and don't particularly care for ricotta. (It's the mouthfeel. It bothers me.)

The quark mixture is just quark with cut up butter, lemon zest, salt and pepper in it. Once the pasta is cooked, you put the hot pasta into a bowl with the quark, and stir it around to coat. Then you add the (cooked) lima beans, check for seasoning, adjust to taste, and eat. So, so good.

The pile of spinach is basically just a pile of spinach, but it's also got a bit of lemon juice, some salt, and a drizzle of olive oil on it. So it's not quite so boring as it looks.

Cinnamon-Lemon Pork with Stuffed Pimento and Spanish Rice

I made Spanish food today, from my Tapas cookbook, though I kind of changed it up a bit so it's not so much tapas as it would have been. (And also, I made rice from a packet. Also not really part of the tapas family, I don't think.)

The pork chop was meant to be the a nicer sounding "Miniature Pork Brochettes" but I couldn't see the sense in cubing it and putting it on skewers when I was only doing it for myself. It worked as well, I imagine, leaving it in one piece, anyway. And tasted as good.

I had to make my own Ras El-hanut, which is the spice blend used on these, as I couldn't find it at any of the local stores (I need to find a Middle Eastern store somewhere, I guess). The ingredients for a proper ras el-hanut are as hard to find as the pre-made blend - it's meant to have rosebuds, lavender, galangal, nigella, cassia, and a whole host of other things I CAN find in a regular grocery store - so I used (again) an easy recipe that I found online some time ago. The flavour of the cinnamon is what stands out most in that variation, and it tasted really nice with the lemon juice that makes up the bulk of the liquid in the marinade.

Apparently the recipe is Arab in origin, and so this would generally be done on lamb, rather than pork (outside of Spain, anyway), and if I weren't scared of cooking lamb, I'd try that some time in the future. (I've got a terror of ruining lamb, since it's so expensive.)

The stuffed pimento was... amazingly good. I used quark for the cheese in the stuffing, since the recipe only asked for a 'curd cheese' and I wasn't really sure what to use. I think a ricotta would probably work as well, but I don't like the texture of ricotta, so I decided to try out quark instead. This particular quark, which is made in Canada, was a lot healthier than ricotta, anyway, and didn't have a grainy texture and was thicker than low-fat ricotta, so I'm glad I decided to try it out. The quark was flavoured with a bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper, garlic, and diced mint and parsley.

At any rate, I liked all of this a lot, so I'm definitely keeping the recipes in mind for the future. (I could take or leave the rice, but that's generally how I feel about rice from a package anyway.) Definitely food I'd cook for someone else, if I were ever cooking for more than just me and my sister/bro-in-law. (Who don't like peppers anyway.)

Turkey-stuffed Tomatoes with Broccolini

I've been sitting here watching the cursor blinking for the last five minutes while I tried to think of what to say, but I've got nothing.

It tasted good. Really, this is just a turkey burger cooked inside a tomato, served alongside some spicy sweet broccolini.

I wish I'd scraped some of the fatty bits off before I took the photos, rather than after. I didn't even really notice them until I went to eat, but they look as gross in a picture as in real life. Ah well, at least it tasted good, even if it doesn't look so great.

Earlier today I made banana muffins. I was going to make banana bread, but I wanted chocolate in it, and my sister doesn't like chocolate, so I ended up splitting the batter more or less in half and doing the muffin thing instead. They're a tiny bit dry, but I think I probably overcooked them a little. (I had to guess at the amount of time they'd need to cook.)

I used to work in a bakery and made many many banana loaves while I was there. It was quite strange to be working with 2 bananas, rather than 20 pounds of bananas. The recipe I usually used was for 12 pounds of nearly everything - sugar, flour, bananas (but it took close to 20 because of the weight of the skins) - and made something like 35 or 36 loaves.

Braised Beef with Tomato Gravy and Vegetables

We cooked family dinner again last Sunday, I've just been lazy about getting the photo up.

My sister had the difficult job of heating the frozen vegetables, my brother in law made the mashed potatoes, and I made the roast, which was not roasted, but braised. The braising liquid is actually the same as I use in my beef and mushroom stew.

Pork with Balsamic-Basil Macerated Strawberries, Parmesan Risotto and Tomato with Caciocavollo

This photo is a few days old now, as I made this dinner on Thursday, but it was a busy weekend, so I haven't really had time to update. I need to now though because I have something new from today to update with, though I haven't edited the photo yet, and I plan to make something new tomorrow, so that'll be another update, if I manage to get it all done.

So this. This is a pork dish that sounded so interesting to me the first time I saw the recipe. It's a Rachael Ray recipe that she calls Columbus's Chops or something along those lines because the recipe is a take on a recipe that goes back to the 1400s.

Like all Rachael Ray's foods, it was quick and easy to make - the sliced strawberries sit in a balsamic vinegar bath with some torn up basil while you cook the pork, and then you mound them on top of the meat and eat. Easy as anything. It tasted really wonderful as well - I wasn't totally sold on the idea of strawberries on pork, but pork does really well with other fruits, so it's not surprising really that strawberries work as well. And then, too, the balsamic vinegar somehow pulls out the most amazing sweetness from the berries. It's like eating a whole different sort of fruit.

The risotto, I'm only minorly ashamed to admit, came from a box. Lundberg has a couple 25 minute risottos and this is my favourite of the two I've tried. It's probably a bit heavy go with something as delicate and lovely as the strawberries and pork, but I didn't have any other white rice, so I made it anyway.

And finally, the tomatoes and cheese. Another very simple side dish - just sliced tomatoes with a little salt on them, layered with sliced smoked Caciocavollo cheese, then topped with fresh grated black pepper and a quick drizzle of olive oil. The cheese is amazing with just a hint of pepper and oil.

Balsamic-glazed Pork Chops with Vegetable Pilaf

Okay, this could have been a really gorgeous dinner, but then I made a kindersuprise-coloured pilaf (instead of the much lovelier sounding "Argula-Basil Pilaf" the pork recipe suggested), over-reduced my glaze to almost a paste, and served it with some... rustic sliced vegetables instead of... I don't know, piling it up 3 inches tall, pork atop rice with spears of asparagus fanned out behind it.

Tasted good, though.

The pilaf is just a lot of cut-up vegetables that I needed to use - red pepper, a single lonely carrot, some red onion I didn't want to toss out, and peas from the freezer - cooked in with the rice. It was impossibly easy and very tasty, if a bit low brow with its bright colours. And of course the cucumber and tomato is my favourite vegetable side.

The pork recipe was remarkably simple, and quick, but I shouldn't be surprised by that since the recipe came from a Rachael Ray cookbook. I did over-reduce my glaze, but it tasted wonderful, even with dried herbs in place of fresh and the cheapest of balsamic vinegars (sorry, I just can't afford any... $80/100ml vinegar). Probably the tastiness was due in large part to the dab of butter you add at the end. It was all shiny and sticky and lovely and worth making again in the future.


This, by the way, is my 175th entry here. Which is a little scary to think of, somehow, that what started as a way to kind of trade photos with a friend has turned into something this big. (Not big in the blogosphere, just in my life, but I enjoy it, anyway.)

I didn't cook this: Spicy Grilled Chicken

My brother in law cooked most of dinner tonight - spicy barbecue chicken (which is grilled, not bbq'd I know) and bbq baked potatoes. I haven't really got much to say about either, except that they were really delicious, even though I peeled all the (flavourful) skin off my chicken.

I did cook some of this: the vegetables were my contribution to dinner, but I think I've shown these before, not too long ago. It's just skewered red pepper, mushrooms, zucchini and tomatoes, with lemon juice, olive oil, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper. Easy, but really good. (I think anyway. I don't know if anyone else liked it so much, other than the mushrooms.)

I can't remember if I've photographed anything on these plates before, but they do make a sort of... busy background for a photo.