Madras Fried Rice

This is kind of... a mishmash of things. I had some spiced rice leftover from a while back and wanted to use it up, so I thought... why not an Indian fried rice. So I bought some veal scallopini (it was cheaper than pre-sliced stirfry beef) and cooked it with Madras curry paste, some carrots, onions and peas. Then I tossed in the rice, cooked it until it was really hot and dug in.

I used too much curry paste, so it was the wrong kind of spicy, but it still tasted good, even if it'll probably give me a gut ache.

So a while ago I'd bought a package thing for making biryani, but I never got around to it and the spice paste for cooking the vegetables/meat expired. But there was a packet of spices in it that you were meant to cook in with the rice, so I did. Altogether I added an inch of cinnamon, 4 or 5 peppercorns, 2 green cardamom pods, 4 cloves and the hugest bay leaf I've ever seen in my life.

The flavour of the rice wasn't really strong - it still mainly tasted like basmati rice - but it smelled amazing, which added something interesting to the experience of eating it. I'll definitely try it again, though I may leave out the cinnamon.

Gingery-Dijon Pork Roast with Roasted Potatoes, Green Beans and Piroshky

I've not given up on this blog, but I have been very much not in the mood for it lately. Not even the blog, just the food, I suppose. Maybe it's the winter doldrums, but I do tend to latch onto comfort foods and easy, lazy junk foods around this time of year, and it's been worse with my grandfather having been sick and then dying because it's made me not want to care about anything else. Make a decent dinner or mope and eat a row oreos for dinner? The oreos would win out.

There have been a few meals that I haven't posted in the meantime. Besides the old standards that aren't worth a photograph (or have already been photographed.) My sister and I made roast chicken last week, with mashed potatoes, stuffing and salad. But I've posted that meal before, so no sense in posting it again.

And a while back I made this really gorgeous rice pilaf-ish thing. Well, not a pilaf, but I don't really know what to call it. It was a flavoured rice that's meant to be served with something else, but... I didn't feel up to making anything else, so I wound up freezing the rice. Tomorrow I'm going to try making a kind of faux-Indian, faux-fried rice with some of the leftovers.

At any rate, we've been making proper Sunday dinners around here the last couple weeks. Last week was the chicken, this week was a pork leg roast we got from my aunt and uncle. (A pig of which we could find out the provenance, even. It's not often I get meat like that, since generally I can't afford the good stuff where you can find out.) The reason for the Sunday dinners is that we're working on emptying the freezer. There's quite a lot of roasts and hams and probably another chicken in there. We could almost eat a roast a day for half a month, I'm sure. (The aforementioned aunt and uncle give us a lot of meat. Every time we see them, they send a small cooler of meat back home with us. Sometimes it's from deer they've hunted, sometimes pork.)

I've never cooked a pork roast before - or a roast of any sort, actually - so I went looking for a website that's slapped on the labels of a lot of pork packages around here - putporkonyourfork.com. I found a recipe for a pork roast that I was able to adapt to the bone-in roast we had. They call it Sensational Pork Roast, but I call it Gingery-Dijon Roast because those were the two predominant flavours. I think I used a fair bit more ginger than it called for, but it tasted amazing.

The roasted potato recipe was one I found from Giada de Laurentiis, but I found it a bit more greasy than I really care for. (I drained off a lot of oil, and then blotted the potatoes with paper towel to get rid of some more.) They did taste very nice, though, once I'd got rid of some of the excess oil and they'd cooled off enough to eat.

The piroshky are leftover from Christmas - my mom made them and left a bunch in the freezer for us. Still tasty, though we pulled out the sauerkraut filled ones, which I don't care for quite as much as the beef/cabbage ones. The green beans were also from the freezer. I'm not so found of them, though, since they just don't cook up as nicely as fresh. They tasted good, but it's a texture thing.

Turkey Sausage with Perogies and Green Beans

This hasn't really been the month for updates, has it? I've either been not cooking or cooking things I've made before or making things that aren't interesting enough to bother with. But mostly I think I've just not been cooking.

I don't really know if this counts as cooking, since mostly it was just heating and reheating, but it did taste very good. The green beans were just barely steamed, then tossed with a bit of butter and lemon juice. The sausage is just reheated, since it's pre-cooked. The perogies were a bit more labour intensive, though.

Usually when I make perogies, I bake them. It's both lazy and wrong, but also much better for me. Perogies are pretty high in calories to begin with, but when you do them the proper way, they're little gift-wrapped heart attacks.

First, you boil them in water until they float. Then you drain them, let them dry a little over a bit of heat, then toss in a metric ton of butter and cook them until they get crispy and a bit golden. I was too lazy and trying to avoid using too much butter to get them to the golden stage today, but if I were being proper about it, that's what I'd do. And then, you have to top them with sour cream, and in ideal circumstances, fried bacon and onions. I don't have any bacon (and don't really eat it any other times, so I didn't want to buy it) so I had to use a few nasty simulated bacon bits to add some colour. Anyway, all of that - perogy, butter, sour cream, bacon, and onions - adds up to the food of the Gods of Clogged Arteries and Happy Taste Buds.

Rotini with Turkey-Tomato Sauce and Roasted Garlic Baguette

At the bakery today they gave me a sample of this new bread they're making, the name of which I can't remember, but it's basically a short baguette that's baked with roasted garlic in the dough. It was so ridiculously tasty, just fresh from the oven. So I had to buy one. (Even though it wasn't fresh from the oven anymore 7 hours later when I bought it.)

And since I was having garlic bread, I had to make pasta to go with it. This was kind of a thrown together thing. I had an uncooked, frozen turkey burger leftover from a couple days ago, so I thawed it out to use for the sauce tonight.

The sauce was made of fried carrots, garlic, onion, and mushrooms - just using up things from the fridge - and oregano and some sort of spice mix from the cupboard, and then added and cooked the turkey. After that, I added tomato sauce (from a can) and then served it on whole wheat rotini.

I sometimes find whole grain pasta kind of heavy or stodgy and not very good, but it really is great with a good tomato sauce with a lot of flavours in it. (Just don't try to serve it with pesto...)

Lemon Chicken with Green and Wax Beans and Baked Paprika Potato Wedges

So I bought this new cookbook the other day called Tapas, which is, of course, a collection of Spanish tapas recipes. There's nothing about any of these three recipes that strikes me as particularly Spanish or particularly tapas-like, but I don't suppose I know a whole lot about either. They were tasty, no matter where they come from.

I couldn't seem to get the chicken to brown tonight, but I didn't want it to dry out, so I gave up on that bit. It was a really simple dish - cooked down onion (though I used shallots) and garlic in oil, then add the chicken, once browned, grate lemon peel over and squeeze in the lemon juice. Add chopped parsley at the end and season. Delicious and easy.

The potatoes were supposed to be fried in a ton of oil, but I baked them in the oven instead, with not a lot of oil. They don't crisp up the same way, but it's a lot more healthy. I probably should have added more cayenne to the spice mix (cayenne, paprika, cumin) but they were very tasty anyway.

Lemon Turkey Soup

This is such a terribly unattractive photo - the broth looks like water and the sugar snap peas are nearly olive green (especially next to the vibrant green parsley) - but it was the second day of this soup, and snap peas don't hold up well for a reheat (in terms of colour, anyway).

I pretty much always use tomatoes or tomato juice or crushed tomatoes in my soups, but I always have a hard time photographing reddish soups. You can't see the other ingredients very well and the colour doesn't seem to translate very well either. So I found a recipe for Lemon Chicken Noodle Soup and decided to give it a try.

It was a pretty basic recipe - broth with carrots and celery, cooked cubed chicken breast, dried oregano, fresh parsley, crushed garlic, a handful of noodles (cooked separately and added at the end), and a squeeze or two of lemon juice. I used some leftover turkey from the freezer in place of the chicken and the snap peas in place of celery (since I didn't have any) and added some shallots.

It really was quite good, though I found the lemon a touch strong for my tastes (I'm finicky about lemon, though), and I found myself missing the tomato. Next time I'll stick to what I do and like best, I suppose.

White Bean and Spinach Ragout

I'm starting to get a small backlog of photos and entries that I need to update, but I haven't been at all happy with my photos lately and so I've resisted updating. This is one of the photos I'm not really happy about.

Actually, there wasn't a lot about this meal that I was happy about. It didn't really taste bad, I don't think, but it somehow turned my stomach and I wound up tossing it all straight into the trash. I couldn't tell what flavour or if it was all of them together put me off so much, but I just couldn't eat it.

So it looks like a dirty ugly mess, my stomach turned into a dirty ugly mess at the thought of eating it, and... I don't know. I'm disappointed that it didn't work out for me. It should have been perfect because I quite like all the component parts.

Maybe I'll try it again someday. We'll see.

Roasted Tomato and White Bean Salad with Hard-boiled Eggs

I should have updated this a couple days ago, but I suppose I've just been a bit lazy. Actually, I've been a lot lazy - it's taken a lot of effort to get out of bed most days the last little while. (But I did shovel the walk and part of the driveway today! That took energy! Energy which is now gone, resulting in me burrowing into bed to watch TV on my laptop.)

Anyway, I broke into one of my vegetarian cookbooks again and dug out this recipe. It's been quite a bit changed, to suit what things I had in my cupboard, but it turned out really lovely. I think it could use a... more constructed vinaigrette (since this just had all the components poured over top - I'd rather whisk it together properly and have all the flavours blending) but this is a bit of a kitchen sink recipe, so I think I could make it a dozen times and have a dozen different outcomes.

A few bits of it were wasted - the artichoke hearts and the olives, in particular. I don't really like olives and never have, but decided to try them out anyway, since there are a lot of things I like now that I never used to. But they're still much too salty, and I find the flavour too pungent. The artichokes, also, tasted too much of salt, though I did rinse them. Maybe another time I should try oil-marinated artichokes, rather than the ones canned with a brine.

Anyway, the roasted plum tomatoes were really delicious, as was the rest of the salad, really. It was definitely good enough to make again.

Asparagus Tartlet

I've been lazy again. I haven't really felt up to cooking the last little while, and so I haven't. I've been eating a lot of crap or else nothing, and it's (once again) got to stop. So.

Tonight I was going to make turkey meatballs and a Caesar(ish) salad, but I didn't feel up to it. I was making a menu for next week, though, and was flipping through a cookbook/gardening book I've got called Shoots, Leaves and Eats trying to find a recipe for something I cooked a while back (Balti Vegetables) and I found this instead.

I'd never made pastry before and was a little scared of the prospect, but it really wasn't that difficult AND I was able to adjust it to just one serving. (Imagine that, a being able to make just one single tart. I would love to create a cookbook of single serving desserts or other baked things that don't involve putting the leftovers in the fridge.)

I didn't realize the pastry would shrink, though, as it was cooking - there was a 1-cm rim on the tart, which shrunk down to about a 1/4-cm rim (it's a bit bigger in some parts) so I guess there was a reason the recipe said to make a 2.5-cm rim. There wasn't a lot left by the time this shrunk down and I was worried the egg would just slide right off before I got it in the oven, but it came out all right anyway.

Anyway, the flavour of this was really nice. The asparagus tasted fantastic - it was frozen asparagus, which I don't usually use - and the cheese was delicious and I overcooked the egg a little but it was so so good anyway, and now I want to cook everything tucked into a little pastry tart.

Five-spice Pork with Citrus-Mango Salsa on Cinnamon-scented Rice

I seem to be craving citrus the last few days. Mostly I don't eat citrus fruit - when I think of oranges, I think of my parents making me eat one every single night ever before I went to bed. It made me never want to eat oranges again. So even though I don't dislike the taste of oranges, I never actually want to eat them. (I make an exception for Mandarin Oranges, but they're almost like candy at Christmas.)

Over the weekend, I saw tangelos at the grocery store and bought them on a whim. And then yesterday my sister was trying to talk herself out of cooking because her recipe seemed too complicated and I made the orange salsa for her so that she couldn't use the excuse. Well, I cut up the tangelos for her salsa (since the oranges we had didn't look as nice) and with the cilantro on it, it was so good! So I had to make my own citrus salsa for dinner today.

The tangelos at my work looked awful, but while I was looking for oranges I found blood oranges! I'd never actually seen one before, so I had to buy a couple. And then one of the produce guys told me he'd get some Cara Cara oranges out of the back for me to buy as well. They're a bit like a pink grapefruit in colour, but are very sweet and so good, even to a non-citrus lover like me.

Anyway, I found a recipe for a 5-spice pork tenderloin with a mango salsa that you're meant to eat wrapped in an egg-coated tortilla (kind of like French toast, I guess...), so I picked and chose bits of the recipe to use. The meat was really fantastic, and it tasted great with the salsa and the cinnamon rice, which had been frozen from something I made a while ago. I think the cinnamon flavour was much more apparent with this recipe than it was in the meal for which it was intended. Definitely a good thing that I had so much of it left-over.

Baked Potato with Green Peppercorn Cheese and Mushroom Cream Sauce

This sort of looks bland and dull - it's so beige - but it was really tasty. I wasn't really feeling up to a big proper supper tonight, but I wanted something warm and filling, so... baked potato. It's kind of a little one, but it was the perfect size for tonight.

The beige stuff up top is a mushroom cream sauce, without the cream. It turns out both cartons of cream in the fridge expired a couple days ago, so I used non-fat milk instead. It was quite good anyway. The mushrooms were cooked in a bit of butter and over it all I grated some weird cheese stuffed full of green peppercorns. (I don't know what sort of cheese it was - I would guess it's about the same hardness as a Cheddar, but it didn't have any of the flavour of a cheddar cheese.) Anyway, it added a nice little spark to the mushroom sauce.

Good stuff all around.

Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies

For somebody who never really bakes, I've posted a lot of baking the last while. It's not that I haven't been cooking, it's just that I haven't been cooking things worth posting about. Tonight I had a mushroom burger (from a box) with roasted potatoes (from a box). Which... boring. I didn't even have a bun to put the burger on. I made eggs a few days back, with leftover ham and fried mashed potatoes... but it was one of those toss together meals where everything's a little bit singed and none of it looks terribly good... so I deleted the photos. I'll probably be eating a lot of things out of the freezer for the next little while because I'm trying to save money for a root canal. It's there, so I might as well use it, anyway.

At any rate, this is the last of the Christmas baking, and only one month too late. (Almost to the day. I baked them on the 26th.) I took them all to work - half for a friend, and half I fed to the night crew - so fortunately they're all gone and I can't just sit around and eat chocolate cookies with mint chocolate chips until my tummy bursts.

These cookies are actually the exact same recipe as these Chocolate Toffee Cookies that I made a while back, but this time I used mint chocolate chips in place of the toffee, and I added a touch more oil and water. They were much nicer this time, a bit chewy instead of crunchy.

Super easy, anyway. Here's how:

Ingredients

1 box chocolate cake mix
1/2 cup oil
1 egg
1/4 cup water
1 cup chocolate chips

Mix together all the ingredients except the chips until just moistened. Stir in chips. Spoon out 1 tbsp of mix onto greased baking sheets, placing cookies about 2 inches apart. Bake at 350F for 10-12 minutes or until the edges are set. Cool, eat, enjoy.

You should get about 48 cookies. I got 42, plus a bit of raw cookie dough in my tummy. Yum.

I still think it might benefit from a bit of strong coffee, just to bring out the taste of the chocolate, but that'd probably be better if I weren't using mint chips.

Anyway, I kind of used a generous 1/2 cup of oil and a very generous 1/4 cup water. It wasn't runny, at all, but it wasn't such a dry mix as it was the first time I tried it.

Recipe: Mixed Bean Soup with Ham (and Swiss)

This is my second time posting this particular soup, but I've changed it a little and this is probably the better picture. (Still get the slightly weird colour though off tomato based soups. Such a strange orange. I suppose I should learn to adjust things like that in photoshop, but that seems like so much effort.)

At any rate, I wanted to post the recipe so that I don't lose it. I kind of cobbled it together myself from a few different places and have been adjusting bits of it and I'm pretty happy with it, so I'd hate to lose it now.


Mixed Bean Soup with Ham
Makes about 10 cups.

1-2 tbsp olive or canola oil
1 lg onion, diced
3 carrots, diced, sliced or chopped
3 celery stalks, diced
6 garlic cloves, minced

3 dried bay leaves
1 tbsp + 1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground sage
2 tsp oregano
2 tsp marjoram
1 tsp cilantro
1/8-1/4 tsp chipotle chili powder

1 19oz/540ml can mixed beans, drained and rinsed
4 cups vegetable or chicken stock (reduced sodium!)
1 19oz/540ml can crushed or diced tomatoes
4oz/110g cooked ham, cubed
2oz/60g Swiss cheese, cubed (optional)

freshly ground black pepper to taste
fresh cilantro for garnish, chopped (optional)

1. Cook the onions, carrots, and celery in oil until softened. I tend to leave the vegetables with a little bit of a bite to them, but they probably cooked (today) over medium heat for about 15-20 minutes. If you do it for that long, you can just add things as you chop, you don't need to have it all prepped before starting. Keep the heat low enough that the onions don't burn. Once the onions, at least, are softened, add the garlic and cook for a minute or two. I gave a range for the oil because I'm not really sure what I used. I started with probably a little less than 1 tbsp, but I added more when I added the celery (that was the last thing I chopped) because it seemed a little dry. Also, I have a tendency to be chintzy with oil, so you might want to use more.

2. Add all the herbs, stirring to coat the vegetables. I didn't have any oregano today, so I used basil and parsley in place of it, and that tasted quite good. Before the mixture dries out too much, add in the rinsed beans. Stir to coat them with the spice mixture as well, and let cook for a couple minutes - it'll add a nicer flavour to the beans than if you just pour the stock in straight away.

3. Add stock, crushed tomatoes, and diced ham to the vegetable base. Bring up to a boil, then let simmer for as long as you want to wait for supper. I probably leave it about 30 minutes before eating. Taste before serving, adjust seasonings and add black pepper. Garnish with a little grated Swiss cheese or chopped cilantro or both or neither.


It won't be spicy at all with the amount of chipotle chili powder I've suggested, but it should have a smoky flavour. If you want a spicy soup, add more chili powder (though maybe just a regular one, rather than chipotle, since I find the smokiness can be overwhelming if you use too much) or some cayenne pepper or add a pinch of red pepper flakes to the mirepoix.

If you happen to have old dried out Swiss cheese, this is a really nice way to use it up. Chop it up and toss it into the soup along with the ham and it'll kind of get stringy and lovely in the soup, but doesn't completely dissolve or melt into the soup. (That's what I did today.) If you have fresher Swiss, use it as a garnish or stir in just before serving. If you have no Swiss (or don't like it), just skip that bit.

Also, this works really well as a vegetarian or vegan soup - just leave out the ham/cheese and be sure to use a vegetarian vegetable stock. You'll probably need to add salt, though, since the ham does the job of adding salt to the non-veg. version.

Thai Chicken Salad

This is yet another of the Sandi Richard recipes. (I'm nearly done the book, actually. I mean, not the entire thing, but every single recipe in it that I'm willing to cook.) She seems to have a bit of a thing about making healthier versions of often unhealthy meals, which is common with diet books (see, for example, any of the books by the Eat, Shrink and Be Merry authors).

In some of the cases, her results look a bit disastrous -- her butter chicken looks completely disgusting and the ingredients list doesn't really resemble ANY recipe I've ever seen for butter chicken -- but this one is really very good. I wanted to eat it all, even though it was way more food than I really wanted or needed to eat.

Curried Red Lentils with Caramelized Onions and Cinnamon-scented Rice

This looks, as my grandma would say, like a dog's breakfast. But did it ever taste good.

I find it sort of... odd and distracting that the lentils, which start out red, cook up yellow. But they're a fantastic shade of it, at least. I wasn't really sure what to expect when I decided to try out this recipe, but I think I imagined something a little more thick than it turned out. It's a bit like a very thick soup or a very thin stew. It could have used a bit more salt, and I think I'd like it a touch spicier, but it was really good.

There's such a big pile of caramelized onions on there (half an onion, actually) but they're so lovely, I don't think there could be enough. The rice was cooked with a stick of cinnamon in it. I thought maybe it'd colour the rice a little, but it didn't at all. It makes only a subtle change in the taste of the rice, but it was nice.

Baked Ham with Colcannon and Mixed Vegetables

I've been a very lazy cook this month, and as I've a dentist appointment today, it might continue on for another day or two. I don't really know what, if anything, they're going to do with my teeth today, but if I end up having anything done that requires freezing my mouth... I'll probably not be cooking tonight (or possibly tomorrow night, we'll see...).

At any rate, in light of my laziness, I decided I should do something a little more put together than toasted cheese sandwiches with ketchup. So on Sunday, I made this.

The ham is just one of those pre-cooked ones you can buy for $12 anywhere, but my work had them for $5 for a couple days last week. So, honey ham. I didn't do anything to it besides re-heat it in a bath of pineapple juice.

I'd found a colcannon recipe a while back, in a cookbook of mine, and decided that I needed to try it sometime when cooking for my sister and her husband. They're both mashed potato fiends, and they're both cabbage fiends. Seemed a recipe made in their version of heaven. I wound up using a different recipe (found here). I didn't quite follow the directions - I only crisped up one side, gave it the flip and crisped the other, rather than doing it in two layers with a crunchy layer on the top, bottom, and middle - but did use his basic proportions for things.

I always wonder when I make things like this, that are so culturally specific, if I'm making them the way they're "supposed" to be made. But I suppose that's a bit of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, since probably every Irish cook out there makes a slightly different variation on the theme. Like trying to find the definitive apple pie recipe. Anyway, it was quite good, so authentic or not, I'll probably make it again.

Fruit and Barley-stuffed Pork with Roasted Potatoes and Veggies

I eat a lot of cucumber and tomatoes, don't I? I've had to resort to buying the horribly expensive grape and cherry tomatoes because they're the only ones through the winter that seem to taste like a tomato is meant to taste. I suppose I should aim more for eating in tune with the seasons, but I love tomatoes too much not to have them.

At any rate, this isn't the nicest looking dinner. I was too lazy to trim the fat off the pork and so it left that nasty looking scum in the barley stuffing and I think that it should be seared before being baked so that the top of the meat would brown up a bit. The stuffing had a lot of fruit and nice flavours in it that worked well with the meat, though, and it had a really nice flavour.

The potatoes came from a bag. I was feeling lazy last night. It'd be cheaper and just as tasty to peel my own potatoes and roast them, though.

Vegan Chocolate Cake (with non-vegan chocolate icing)

When I came home from work yesterday, the very last thing I wanted to do was... well, anything. I didn't want to cook. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to watch tv. I didn't want to do anything. But I went to check my email, and then I started looking for a file with some addresses I needed, and then... I found a recipe for vegan chocolate cake.

I don't like baking. I'm not vegan. I didn't want to eat cake.

Somehow it seemed like the best thing to do at that moment. So I baked a cake. And it turned out beautifully. And deliciously.

However, a plain chocolate cake does not a pretty picture make, so it turned into a whole saga of how to decorate a chocolate cake when you have no icing sugar. Well, I had a half bag of frozen mixed fruits, so I made myself a very simple (and tasty) fruit glaze.

But the pictures were awful. They came out terribly dark and the sauce was the same colour as the cake. (Alas, that's what happens when your mixed fruit is really just a bag of frozen blueberries with a few strawberries and some peach slices thrown in as an afterthought.) So I threw out almost a quarter of the cake (from wasted photo attempts) and put the rest away and bought myself some chocolate icing today. (The icing is probably not vegan. I didn't look, but I don't really care because I'm not vegan anyway.)

I didn't really want to ice the cake because I didn't want the sweetness that icing invariably adds, but it does make for a better picture - there's some contrast in the colour, at least - and it was cheaper than a bag of icing sugar.

Anyway, now that it's all iced, it's sitting in the fridge waiting for someone to eat it, but since I'm the only chocolate eater in the house, it'll probably get tossed before it's done. Still... that's the easiest scratch cake I've ever made in my life, and it came out better than pretty much any cake I've tried to make. So I'm pretty impressed with my single bout with vegan baking. Who knew it'd be so easy to make a good cake without using any eggs?

Spinach-stuffed Sweet Potato with Gingered Snow Peas

Another very good dinner, though I don't particularly care for the wait time when baking potatoes. (I can't talk myself into trying the microwave for that.) The sweet potato is stuffed with spinach sautéed in Thai red curry paste and lots of ginger. And there's just a hint of coconut milk, though the flavour doesn't come through as strongly as I'd have liked. The sugar snap peas have also been sautéed in ginger. Yum.

Spicy Cabbage on Chinese Noodles

Any idea just how hard it is to photograph food when it's all the same shade of bland? Slightly golden cabbage, onion, garlic, noodles, and to top it all off... chopped peanuts.

I'm glad I had cucumber and tomato in the fridge to add a little colour to the plate though. If I'd had a red chili, I'd have sliced that up to sprinkle on top to help things out as well. I'm not sure that using a black bowl was the brightest idea - I never quite like how the food looks against it and can never decide where to take the picture, on my usual black coffee table (where you can't distinguish between plate and table) or on the red tablecloth covered table (which throws off the colour of the food on the plate) - but it's probably a much better idea than my favourite white plate. The gold on white would have probably been worse.

Don't get me wrong though, this is delicious. Coming from a position of someone who loves cooked cabbage, of course, but there isn't a real taste of cabbage so much as the chili-garlic sauce that gives it its kick. And the salty crunch of peanuts. I'm glad there are leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Pan-fried Noodle Cake with Stir-fried Baby Bok Choy

Yum.

This was good, and ridiculously easy. It's basically just steamed Chinese noodles that've been fried in a bit of oil until it holds its shape, with boy choy that's been stir-fried with garlic, ginger, and a sauce made of hoisin sauce, rice vinegar, water and black pepper.

I'm going to be cooking mostly vegetarian foods most of the week, for no real reason except that I started flipping through a vegetarian cookbook and marked a ton of things to make. The book, which I've recently posted a recipe out of - A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen - is one of those loosely vegetarian books. He cooks with butter and tons of eggs and all kinds of dairy. So really he's not vegetarian so much as he doesn't seem to eat the flesh of animals.

Anyway, this particular recipe is delicious. I don't think I've ever used Hoisin Sauce before, so I wasn't sure what sort of flavour to expect. A little sweeter than I imagined, but good.

Blackened Chicken on Harissa Quinoa Pilaf with Steamed Broccoli

A lot of spicy things tonight - I kept sneezing while it was cooking, and it wasn't even because I've not been well. I couldn't get the chili/ cumin/harissa/pepper or whatever it was out of my nose.

I've made this chicken before, though this time I had to use chipotle chili powder (as we tossed the plain chili powder), which changed the flavour in a subtle, but very nice way. It was quite smoky this time, and though I was worried it wouldn't be as good, I think it came out pretty well.

For Christmas this year my mom picked up some strange Victorian Epicure spices for my sister and I. One of the ones she got for me was a Harissa blend (it comes with instructions on making the paste that most recipes seem to use). I don't really have too many ideas about how to use such a thing, but fortunately my mom asked for some recipes. The quinoa recipe is one that she got by way of a VE salesperson up in Yukon or NWT. I didn't really follow the recipe, but it gave me the bones of what ended up on the plate. It was quite tasty, really.

The leftovers of the chicken are going to be diced up and mixed into part of the leftover quinoa for lunch tomorrow. Yum.

Ham and Bean Soup

In another "use up what's in the freezer" kick, I decided to make a ham and mixed bean soup. I had half a can of frozen mixed beans, a lot of ham steak, and plenty of base vegetables in the fridge, so that's how this soup came about.

Most of the recipes I looked at wanted me to blend everything, but I don't have an immersion blender, and pouring it all into a blender was too much hassle for me. So I didn't follow a recipe and came up with this on the fly. I sautéed carrots, onion and celery, then added garlic, a whole lot of herbs, the beans, diced ham, chicken stock, and the tomatoes. Usually I like recipes because then if it tastes funny, I have someone to blame other than myself, but this came out really well, so it's all good. (I wish I'd had a can of crushed tomatoes to use rather than diced, though.)

I really wish I could figure out the trick to plating and photographing soup. I suppose I could help myself out a fair bit by not traipsing around the house sloshing the soup around the bowl (so I wouldn't get the gross looking rim of soup scum). And I shouldn't have shot something with so much red in it against the red tablecloth.

Recipe: Quinoa Pilaf with Caramelized Onions and Toasted Pecans

I had a request for this recipe, recently, so here it is, reproduced from Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen. I don't remember anymore what, if anything, I changed from that original recipe, so I'm going to assume that I followed it directly (though I definitely cooked only half).

1/4 cup chopped pecans
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, diced
1medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and diced
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1 1/2 cups quinoa, rinsed in a fine strainer under cold running water
3 cups water
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley leaves
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Place the pecans in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Toast, shaking the pan occasionally to turn the nuts, until fragrant, about 4 minutes. Set aside on a plate.

2. Add the oil to the empty pan, raise the heat to medium-high, and heat briefly. Add the onions and bell pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Stir in the cinnamon and ginger and stir-cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the quinoa and stir-cook until toasted, about 1 minute.

3. Carefully add the water to the pan - it will sputter - and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer gently until the quinoa is tender and the liquid has been absorbed, 15 to 20 minutes. Stir in the parsley and toasted pecans and adjust the seasonings, adding salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

This makes 3-4 main course servings. I didn't find that the onions caramelize particularly well in this cooking time, so you might need to add a bit more time for that to happen.


The cookbook this recipe is from is one of my favourites - there's such a wealth of information in it, aside from the recipes themselves, which have all (that I've tried...) been delicious. It's a massive book, making it a bit unwieldy for actually using, but every time I flip through it, I find something else I want to make.

Recipe: Apricot-topped Curry Burger

I've been sick, which is why I haven't really been making anything to post. Last Wednesday I'd taken out a pork loin chop to make ginger pork, and beef to thaw for making into a meatloaf on Thursday, but I wound up so sick I spent all of Wednesday in bed and I skipped work on Thursday. I ate crackers and chicken soup.

On Thursday I made the ginger pork, just because I didn't want the meat to go to waste, but I couldn't taste anything and it hurt to swallow, so I wound up throwing it out. Friday, fortunately, I felt a fair bit better, so I decided to make the meatloaf. We always go out for dinner on Fridays, though, and I decided to make burgers instead as they'd cook faster and I didn't want to be stuck with food in the oven when my sister and brother-in-law wanted to leave.

I had to cut one apart to be sure they were cooked since our meat thermometre seems determined not to read anything above 100F, so I took a bite of that cut one that day. And oh my god, so good. Both pictures since have been microwave reheated, which is not my favourite thing to do to meat, but these burgers were so moist and juicy that even the microwave couldn't sap the goodness out of them.

So this recipe is kind of a hack job, taking parts of a meatloaf recipe from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix and adapting parts of a chicken recipe from YOU: On a Diet. Richard likes to cook with jams and chutneys and things like that, but I can't and won't buy one of every flavour of jam out there just so that when her recipe asks for plum sauce mixed with peach jam I'll be set. So I decided to use the topping from this chicken recipe. It was a smart move, I think.

Apricot topping
8 dried apricots
2 shallots
1 tbsp + 1tsp olive oil
2 tbsp white wine
1/4 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp cinnamon

Chop up the apricots and shallots, making them fairly fine. Add ingredients to a hot frying pan and cook, stirring, until most of the liquid has cooked away. Set aside. If you want, you can process or blend the mixture until smooth, or just leave it chunky as in the picture. (I processed it when I used it as a chicken topper.)

I didn't have white wine, so I used a tiny little splash of white wine vinegar and 2 tbsp of water. I don't know what difference that makes for the recipe, but it would probably be better with the wine. It uses a lot of oil, which comes directly from YOU, and I considered using less, but I used it all anyway because I thought it maybe helps keep the burger moist. A fair bit of the oil cooked off in the oven, and it doesn't taste or feel oily, so I don't think it hurts to use it all.

Burgers or Meatloaf
1 lb extra lean ground beef
salt, fresh ground black pepper
1 egg
1/4 c fine breadcrumbs
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tsp garam masala
1 tbsp Madras curry paste (I used Patak's brand, which is quite spicy, but I imagine you could use whatever type and brand of curry paste you like or already have; the recipe asks for Tandoori curry paste, but I had Madras, so that's what I used.)

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Shape into a long flat meatloaf or into four burgers. Place on a baking sheet. Top with apricot topping. Bake in a 350F oven until cooked through. It's done when a thermometre reads 180F. (My burgers took about 25 minutes, but we've an oven liner in the oven at the moment that seems to add to the cooking time. Though it does keep the oven clean. The recipe, which is for a 2-lb meatloaf, says it requires a 50 minute cooking time.)

My burgers were moist and juicy and delicious. A little bit spicy and a little bit sweet and just really good.

Apricot-topped Curry Burger with Roasted Potatoes and Green Peas

I cannot rave about the burger (which was meant to be a meatloaf and actually sort of has the texture of one) enough. But I have to go to work, so I can't actually rave about it right now. But so so so good.

I'll post a bit more about it, and a recipe, tomorrow. Because it's that good and if anyone ever tries anything I've put up here, I hope they'd try that.

Orzo with Chicken and Peas

Today I transfered the photos from my "Food" folder to a sub-folder "2007." There were 170 photos. I was a bit shocked by that, really, since the whole picture taking thing only started when, after bugging a friend to post more pictures more often (of anything, he doesn't do food photography), he told me that I should reciprocate. I couldn't think what to take pictures of (I don't have a photographer's eye at all), so... food.

It pushed me to try harder. In the kitchen, I mean. I love cooking, but a lot of the time I found cooking for one a little bit overwhelming. I don't like or want to eat leftovers for three days after making anything... but so many cookbooks are designed for 4-6 serving recipes.

What I've discovered is that it is a lot easier to cut recipes down for one than you'd expect. I've maybe just gotten good at it, but I can tell now when and where I need to adjust amounts. I've figured out what things don't adjust well. I've learned a lot about what can be frozen. I've discovered that I eat more healthy more often when I change things up a lot.

I have a tendency to fall into ruts when I get tired of cooking - I used to eat toast for dinner for a week straight, sometimes - but one of the rules I had for myself is that I'd not post duplicate pictures. (I've broken that rule a couple times when I've changed things or much preferred the later photo.) Not posting duplicates meant that if I wanted to keep up a fairly steady posting schedule, then I had to keep trying new things. And trying new things makes it much harder to fall into a rut because there's always some new plan coming up.

Anyway, I didn't really want to post some long year in review type thing and now I've gone and done it.

So, the food.

This recipe is one that I found on another food blog, Culinography. (Her picture is much prettier than mine - see here.) I've been craving carbs a lot lately - my last four picture-worthy meals have been pasta dishes, and for lunch today I had a sandwich - and today I'm not feeling especially great, so this recipe was perfect for me. Quick, easy, and a little bit carby.

I think my carb craving is maybe something to do with winter (or something to do with having eaten so many of them over the Christmas holidays and now I just don't want to go back to my usual light-on-the-carbs diet) and this was a bit too light to be a good solid winter dish. But that's probably a good thing, since I need/want to put the kibosh on eating heavy foods for a while anyway. (I shall promptly follow up that statement with a dinner of meat and potatoes later on this week. But never mind that.)

Baked Mac and Cheese

I had a sudden craving for homemade mac and cheese today. I'm not really sure why, since I don't really remember eating homemade mac and cheese - my grandma sometimes made it, but she always put tomatoes in it, and I hated that. I only really remember my mom making the stuff from a box. The closest thing I've ever made was a chili-cheese spaghetti, but it was made with cheez whiz and baked with extra cheese on top. I don't own or cook with cheese product any more, so... that wasn't really a usable recipe this go around.

Since I didn't have a recipe to follow, I looked at a couple online first. The basic gist of it seemed to be "Make a roux, whisk in milk, melt in cheese, pour over pasta and bake until bubbly." So that's what I did. (Without following any particular recipe. It didn't seem complicated and it wasn't.)

The only problem I have with this lunch is that who really wants a nice green salad with the tastiest tomatoes I've had since early September when there's still half a dish of the mac and cheese waiting for someone's hungry tummy?

Spicy Peanut Chicken and Vegetables

This might be the last new thing I make in 2007. (I haven't decided yet if I'm going to cook tomorrow or just eat something from the freezer.) If it does turn out to be the last new thing... it was a tasty last new thing.

I used the sauce from a cold chicken salad recipe and turned it into a hot chicken... not salad. Here's the recipe (for one):

Whisk together, taste, adjust as necessary to taste, and set aside:
- juice of half a lime and an equal amount of soy sauce
- a few drops of sesame oil
- a few drops of hot sauce
- 1 tbsp peanut butter (if you have the unsweetened stuff, you'll need to add a tsp or so of honey or something else sweet)

Next, cook about 30 grams of rice vermicelli and fry up half a chicken breast (use oil or spray if necessary). Set aside. Sauté a big handful of green/wax beans and baby carrots until tender-crisp. (Or use a frozen mix and cook until just heated through.) Add chicken back to the pan; stir together. Remove from the heat. Pour dressing over all and toss to coat. Serve over noodles or stir noodles into the veg/chicken mix. Top with about a tbsp of chopped peanuts and serve.

I think this would be really nice with cilantro in it as well, though I didn't try that. I think the freshness of the cilantro would perk it up a little, though I did think it was pretty good as is.

Turkey Tomato Soup with Piroshki

I didn't feel like a sandwich tonight, but wanted to use some of the leftover turkey, so I made a tomato soup. It's a variation on my favourite Pasta Fagiole recipe, with different herbs and turkey instead of beans. Very tasty. It's quite thick though and I think tomorrow's leftover soup is going to be like eating a stew instead of a soup. I'll thin it with a little water though, if it's too thick.

My mom made the piroshki and brought up quite a few of them for Christmas dinner (there isn't one in my picture, though, I don't think). These were stuffed with ground beef and sauerkraut, though I think some had bacon and sauerkraut instead. Tasty goodness.

Christmas Dinner

I could say a million things about this, but I don't really feel up to it - I'm tired and it's two days too late already and somehow that makes it seem an impossible task.

Another fairly typical family dinner at my house. Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing (from a box), Russian potato salad, Cucumber and Tomato Salad. The only change is this time I also made roasted asparagus and red peppers to go along with it. Delicious all around.

The big difference this time is the dessert that our guest brought - Sticky Date Pudding. (Did I get the name right?)It was delicious anyway, and a nice end to Christmas dinner. Sweet and tasty and good.

Sweet Chicken Chickpea Curry

This is a sort of strange curry, or at least strange compared to most of the ones I've had before. It's quite sweet - it has mincemeat in it - but also quite spicy.

It's another of the recipes from the Sandi Richard book, but I used half chicken and half chickpeas, rather than just chicken (or tofu, which was her vegetarian suggestion). The flavour of the curry was really well suited to the chickpeas and I think I could make it (and enjoy it) with chickpeas only, rather than both the beans and meat.

Honey-Soy Chicken on Rice with Sautéed Vegetables

I've had a few too many bouts of laziness this week. So this was a good way to get back into the cooking thing, although Christmas and guests are going to mess that up before I can restart the habit. (My parents are coming up for a few days, so mostly we'll be eating out a fair bit, I think.)

The chicken was... probably not all that much like it was meant to be, but I didn't have enough of two or three of the ingredients, so I just kind of did what I could and added things until the marinade tasted good. And it was good. A bit like a teriyaki sauce, but more subtle. I don't really know how to explain the taste, but it was really nice.

The vegetables were just very basic - cut up, sautéed with a little oil and Mrs Dash seasoning, eaten. And very good. The zucchini was perfect and I could eat sautéed mushrooms every day.

Chipotle Steak with Balsamic Reduction, Mashed Potatoes, and Marinated

Oh, hello, overcooked meat. This is what happens when you take a bathroom break in the middle of things. And read a short chapter in a book. And then go back to dinner and think, huh, maybe I should flip this.

The inside, actually, was very nicely cooked. Just rare enough for me, but the one side was so, um, well-seared that it was a bit like a nice steak topped with shoe leather. The overcooking, at any rate, was kind of irrelevant, since I didn't like the taste of the seasoning on the steak in combination with the reduction. (The balsamic reduction tasted fantastic on mashed potatoes, however.)

I think this photo does a nice job of illustrating for me why food photographers sometimes let a part of the meal blur out of focus. In the cookbook, you don't see the vegetables. In my photo, you see balsamic vinegar stained cucumber. Still the vegetables tasted fantastic, however awful they look.

Hazelnut Cookies

It seems like the only time of year that I bake is just before Christmas. I don't really like baking, and I'm not really very good at it, but I guess it's the one time of year that baking feels like it'll be worth the effort. Last year I made a ton of different cookies and gave them away as gifts to some of my family. This year I'm not seeing most of them, so I'm not going to quite so much effort.

The last batch of cookies (Chocolate Toffee Cookies) are already gone - I gave most of them away to a few friends at work. So today I started a second batch of cookies, which will also mostly be given away. I think I'll freeze a few to have around at Christmas, but otherwise I don't need so much tasty goodness sitting in the kitchen, waiting to be eaten.

These cookies came out quite good. They're really soft with bits of toasted hazelnut throughout. My favourite cookies are always soft ones, so this was a great recipe for that. I need to fiddle around with the cooking temperature though, because the bottoms darkened up a little too much. They're not burned, at all, but I'd like it if they were a little lighter on the bottom, and didn't form such a thick crust on the base.

If I can talk myself into it, I may buy some white chocolate to melt and drizzle over top. But probably not, they're pretty good without.

Salmon with Cranberry Lime Sauce, Rice, and Broccoli

I think it's pretty clear that my sauce didn't quite enter sauce territory. It's really more cranberry-lime juice, but I did reduce the heck out of that stuff until there was nearly none left and I finally gave up on the whole thickening portion of the recipe. Kind of pretty though, even pooled under my broccoli. It's no wonder the recipe photo has it shown on a red plate - you can't see the sauce in the picture, so you don't know that it's not really a sauce at all.

Anyway, this was really tasty, though the flavour of the salmon was quite evident. (I usually prefer fish that doesn't really taste like anything, though I make an exception, rarely, for salmon not from a can.) The cranberry-lime was a little too sweet, but it really suited the fish. (The sweetness was only really evident when I was eating the last bits of rice that had become saturated in the juice.)

The broccoli I steamed in one of those new microwave steam bags you can get from Glad or Ziploc. (I forget which brand I've got.) It worked quite nicely, and no clean-up after, but I don't think I'll waste the money on them again, once I run out. It's not that much more complicated to steam vegetables in a pot on the stove, and that at least doesn't leave you with extra garbage.

Chocolate Toffee Cookies

I didn't feel like making dinner today, so I made cookies instead.

These are maybe the world's most simple cookies ever, but I can't really decide if I like them. The chocolate taste isn't strong enough - maybe I should have added a tablespoon of coffee? Coffee is supposed to bring out the chocolate, isn't it? And they came out a little drier than I expected. They're made out of a boxed cake mix (and a few other ingredients), and because of that I think I expected them to be more cakey in texture than they are. They had more of a crunch than I'd hoped for.

Tortellini with Tomato Tapenade and Glazed Green Beans

I always thought that a tapenade was made of olives (and some other things), but this doesn't have an olive in it. (Thank god, as I don't like olives.) Maybe they called it a tapenade because it sounds good with the alliteration.

Anyway, this dinner had a couple weird flavour combinations that somehow came together anyway. The first is the tomato tapenade, which is made of fresh salsa, maple syrup and basil pesto. Strange. But strangely compelling. Incredibly lazy though. I feel like I should at least have chopped up my own tomatoes instead of buying fresh salsa from a deli. Or maybe made my own pesto instead of using the jarred stuff.

The second weird thing was the beans, which are flavoured with soy sauce and lemon pepper seasoning. I think I prefer a non-soy doused green bean - I love green beans, but maybe I'm a bit of a purist in the sense that I want my green beans to taste like green beans instead of like any sort of sauce - but they were actually pretty good, even with lemon pepper and soy on them.

Soft Taco, Unrolled

These things just don't photograph that well when they're rolled, or maybe I just don't know how to photograph them. So instead, I left it open.

Pretty standard, pretty boring to look at and to cook, but very tasty. And it took about... 10 minutes to make.

I made the beef filling out of the spare burger I made a few days ago. I hadn't cooked it before freezing it, and it didn't have egg in it or anything, so I just crumbled it up and cooked it with a few extra spices and some onion. A good use of leftovers, that.

Red Snapper with Pineapple Salsa, Pecan Wild Rice, and Sautéed

Cooking fish makes me nervous. Actually, just eating fish sort of makes me nervous. It somehow seems impossibly hard to cook, and I always always assume that I won't like it, even though I haven't run into that many fish dishes that I've not liked.

It's probably partly that I'm scared of fish - I can barely look at them, from larger dead ones in the store to goldfishes in a fishbowl - and partly that my main experiences with fish when I was younger weren't too great. And, too, I come from the prairies. The ocean was a two day drive away. Fish wasn't (and still isn't) a terribly common protein choice. Of the four large grocery stores in my hometown, none have a fresh fish counter. When my mom cooked fish, it came out of a box that said "Highliner" or "Bluewater" on the side.

And then my other experience was going to an uncle's place in BC and my mom canning salmon there. They took this giant, freezer length salmon out of the freezer, and did whatever they did and we can home with jars upon jars of the stuff. I hated it. (My sister still refuses to eat salmon.)

Since then I've had it a few times. Once at a nice restaurant here in Calgary (Chicago Chophouse, what I had is no longer on the menu, though), and I've made it a couple times. This is probably the best fish I've ever made.

I really liked the texture of this fish, and the taste, with or without the salsa. I found the salsa a bit too sweet, but it was just spicy enough. I was a little worried about the salsa because it asked for "hot curry paste" and I never quite know what to use. I had Thai red curry paste, Tikka curry paste, and Butter Chicken curry paste in the fridge, but I always wonder what sort of curry paste they're actually asking for. (I used the Thai one.)

I found the rice a little boring. The pecans were an essentially useless addition, since I neither tasted them nor felt them when I was eating. I can't actually remember biting into a piece of it. I was supposed to use a white and wild rice blend, but I already had a brown and wild rice blend, so I used that. I don't know if that affected the outcome, but it might have, since the brown blend has a stronger flavour of its own than a white blend might have had.

I was going to serve green beans with this, which I think would have looked nicer (too much chopped stuff all over the place in this picture), but I had half a green pepper and an ageing tomato hanging out in the crisper, so I thought I'd better use it up before it went bad. I just very quickly sautéed them with some onion, thyme and basil.

Anyway, this is another of the Sandi Richard recipes, and I think it's a keeper.

Couscous with Mushrooms and Mixed Beans

This is another of the Sandi Richard recipes, but one of her vegetarian options. She tries to give a vegetarian version of all her recipes so that if a family is mixed vegetarian/omnivore the same meal can be served to everyone with a few simple changes.

The original recipe was a big nasty looking hunk of ribs with a side of couscous and steamed broccoli. I'm not a particular fan of ribs - too much effort for not enough reward. (I know not everyone shares that opinion, but.) So I decided to try her vegetarian version instead.

The original couscous recipe was a fairly basic thing with mushrooms, tomato, onion and garlic added, but with the changes, it got mixed beans (the can I bought had garbanzo, red kidney, romano, and black-eyed peas), raisins, and salsa as well. It tasted really good, though next time I'll add a bit more salsa. I'm always a bit sceptical about couscous - my first experience with the stuff was a fairly awful (I thought) dish with slices of oranges and green onions that my mom sort of fell in love with and that I couldn't stomach, much as I tried - so it's good to find recipes that I actually like. (And also, one serving of this? 10 grams of fibre. Which is insane. In a good way. But you have to use whole wheat couscous to manage that.)

The side that I made was a slight variation on Richard's recipe, which was not so much a recipe as just instructions on how to microwave steam broccoli. I briefly sautéed garlic and red pepper flakes with the broccoli before steaming it. Ridiculously tasty.


ETA (10/12/07): The couscous is very good as a cold lunch. I might like it better cold than hot, even, but I do tend to like things better cold so anyone else's mileage might vary.

Tuna Tetrazzini with Peas and Corn

This is one of those dinners that is really, really unattractive but tastes good enough that you really can't bring yourself to care.

This was kind of a tastier, healthier version of my mom's tuna casserole. (Her version was made of leftover macaroni and cheese, a can of tuna, a bunch of green peas. Baked together until heated through. Eaten as a condiment with ketchup.) (The ketchup was the most important part of mom's tuna casserole. Yum.)

Anyway, this was a dinner that didn't really fill the plate (though it did fill me up), so I kind of mushed it across to fill as much space as I could and then all the baked cheese got kind of buried and and and... yeah. (I'm too tired to sound more interesting or more interested tonight.)

Asian Meatball Soup

This is my first real miss from the new cookbook. It tastes like a mild soy sauce soup. Who wants to eat soy sauce soup? Not me. Probably not you.

I don't know if I ruined it by not slow-cooking the soup for eight hours, but I did simmer it for a couple hours after work, and I can't see how it could make so much of a difference one way or another.

Chicken Rollatini with Roasted Sweet Potato and Greek Salad

This is another of the Sandi Richard recipes. Sort of. But not really. The recipe was an asparagus stuffed chicken breast with Hollandaise, but I'm not a big fan of Hollandaise, so since I've made a different asparagus-stuffed chicken dish before, I decided to make it again. (It looked and tasted pretty fantastic, too.) I used green beans this time, though, since the asparagus at the store looked alternately woody or limp and desiccated.

This Greek salad is from SR though. It's a more fussy variation on the one I usually make myself - more herbs and dressings. It tasted quite good, but I'm happy with my plain-jane version.

The sweet potato... well. I don't know. It wasn't meant to be part of the dinner, but I bought one for something last week, but didn't get around to using it, so I decided to roast it tonight. I've never had roasted sweet potatoes before, but they tasted pretty good. I'd just as soon have a regular potato though. (I stole the stacked display from Anthony Sedlak whose show The Main was on tv today while I did some sewing.)

I decided to take a picture of the inside too, since the vegetables didn't peek out the end of the chicken very well. (I should have properly butterflied the chicken breast instead of just using the little flap at the back. It was much too small to really wrap around.) So there you can see the roasted red pepper and the green beans, which were steamed before being stuffed inside and still had a nice bit of crunch.

This was a really filling dinner. And very easy.

Mexican Burger with Potato Wedges

My burger shrunk in the cooking! If it hadn't, it would have fit that bun perfectly. Alas.

Oh well. I scooped all the innards out of the bun anyway after I took the photo and threw them away. (I like a bun shell much more than I like the bun itself. It's convenient for holding, but not so bready.) And once the insides of the bun were gone, the burger and vegetables all fit nicely inside the shell.

This was really good, anyway. It came from a cookbook that I picked up a few days ago, The Dinner Fix by Sandi Richard. Richard has a tv show on the Canadian food network called Fixing Dinner, which is basically about helping harried families get into a week-night routine of cooking quick, tasty, healthy meals. I don't generally have a problem with my cooking, since I only have to work around my schedule, but I love cookbooks and I was interested in seeing some of her recipes.

I'm actually intending to do a straight week of Dinner Fix recipes (that is five days, since she doesn't worry about the weekend), and this was a pretty good start, I think.

The burger is flavoured with chipotle seasoning, chili powder, cumin, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and ketchup. Which made for a very tasty, slightly spicy, moist burger. (It could maybe use an egg, though. It didn't quite want to hold together.) The red onion really complimented the flavour as well. I made two (froze the second for another day) and also made meatballs for dinner on Tuesday. (Her thing: if you've already got ground beef out for one recipe, you might as well prep for another.)

It really was very fast - the prep took just a few minutes - and it cooked in about 12 minutes. All told, probably a 17 minute meal. Which even Rachael Ray could be proud of. (Though she'd have eaten two burgers and twice as many potato wedges. Which she'd have made herself instead of getting them from a bag in the freezer aisle.)

Tortellini Soup with Mushrooms, Spinach and Artichoke Hearts

I haven't felt so much like cooking the last little while again. (On Friday I had... rice crackers for dinner. And chocolate.) But I can't let it turn into a habit, so I made soup for dinner tonight. (Where tonight=Saturday - I'm still awake from working over the night shift, and since I haven't slept yet, it doesn't quite feel like Sunday yet.)

This soup is another recipe from Rachael Ray - About 15 Minute Soup with Spinach, Artichokes and Tortellini - from the same book as the last recipe I made of hers. I had tortellini in the freezer and canned artichoke hearts in the cupboard, so it was convenient that I found a recipe asking for those two things. (Had to buy spinach though...) And it was a soup recipe, which is always fantastic, and even more so now that it's cold as the North Pole around here.

Anyway, it was my first time trying artichoke. It's sort of a strange vegetable and I can't quite decide what to make of it. It didn't taste bad at all, but I don't know that it really tasted of anything. I think I imagined it would be woody, but it wasn't at all.

The soup itself was very good. The spinach stayed really bright and fresh looking and still tasted nice. (Sometimes I find it gets kind of like a little lump of sodden, muddy tasting leaves, which makes me wind up scooping all the spinach out. Generally that's day two of any soup with spinach in it, I find, but still.) The flavour of the tortelloni seemed to suit the soup (although RR does say that you can use any flavour you like so maybe anything would suit the soup). And it was really, really filling.

As usual, RR's portion sizes are insanely huge. The bun lurking in the background of the photo was just for show in the end. What you see in the bowl there is actually only half a serving, and I was pretty close to full by the time I finished that much of it. And I even used 3 oz LESS spinach per person and 1.5 oz LESS pasta per person than the recipe suggested.