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.

Rotini with Broccoli and Caciocavollo

I don't really know why I've been eating so much pasta lately, but I found that recipe that needed Caciocavollo cheese (for the last pasta photo - Fettuccine alle Noci) and bought it and now I've got a whole lump of that cheese to use up. It's a smoked cheese, so it's got a nice smoky tasty, and it's quite stringy and lovely when it gets all melty, like the perfect pizza cheese. (Hm, maybe pizza next?) I should have lifted up a fork-full of the pasta for the photo, so it wouldn't look just like pasta in white sauce instead of pasta with tons of stringy delicious cheese.

(The recipe came from here, though I used a fair bit less cheese than it asked for.)

I'm going to update this little blurb on Sunday when I'm home from work - just wanted to get this up before I leave. And I don't know that eating pasta twice in a week is "eating so much pasta lately" but I don't generally eat a lot of it, I don't think.

Fettucine alle Noci

This is a Mario Batali recipe, which I found here. I didn't really change the recipe much, though I used less pasta, less oil, less red pepper flakes (1 tablespoon? really?) and probably less cheese. (Unintentionally on the cheese, I just couldn't find a big grater and got tired of using the palm sized one with tiny holes.)

I wish that I'd had fresh parsley to use in this because it's regrettably beige looking and some fresher looking green bits would have been welcome. I did use dried, but the bits of it are so small they almost disappear in the picture.

Actually, I find this a sort of messy picture, in the sense that you can't really distinguish one thing from another. I mean, the pasta looks like pasta and the green bits are obviously parsley, but it doesn't really look like walnuts and you can't really see the stringy melted cheese. The powdery white stuff is the bread crumbs you're instructed to sprinkle over at the end, but I think I could do without that taste-wise and appearance-wise.

I thought it tasted nice, but not so spectacular that I'd be likely to serve it to anyone else or even maybe to make it again.

Spicy Peach Glazed Chicken with Roasted Rosemary Potatoes and Sautéed

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

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

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

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

Cauliflower Leek and Chicken Soup with Rosemary-Parmesan Crackers

I made my own crackers today. And my own soup.

The soup - cauliflower, leek and chicken - was quite nice. Pleasantly oniony, with lots of cauliflower and chicken and a tiny hint of lemon. (I don't generally like lemon in chicken soup, but I cut down the amount the recipe asked for and liked it here.) This was the first time I'd used leeks, and I quite liked them, but I was annoyed to throw so much of them away. What's the sense in so much (inedible?) greenery?

The crackers were nice too, but the the texture was a little bit off. I think they had too much cheese and not enough flour, so they didn't get that sort of flaky texture. Or maybe I over-worked it. I don't know. (I don't think I did, since I barely did anything with it at all - just stirred it until it made a ball and then rolled it into logs, chilled it, sliced it and baked it.) Maybe I used the wrong sort of cheese. They were meant to have Asiago, but I had a nice Parmesan (can't spell it the proper way off-hand...) so I used that instead and maybe it was the wrong hardness or something. Anyway, they do still taste pretty good, even if they've got the wrong mouthfeel for a cracker.

I really hate that black bowl. It's actually my sister's but it's the only bowl we've got that's shallow enough for photographing soups when you want all the chunky bits to show up. (The rest of the bowls you mostly get to see broth and little hints of what's inside.) It always looks dirty in pictures, though, even when it's clean and it catches the light in all the worst ways and broth looks dirty with that black underneath it, rather than just like pale broth.

Spicy Meatball Sandwich

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

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

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

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

Fettucine Carbonara

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lemon-Thyme Chicken with Lemony Grilled Vegetables

I'm over in Saskatchewan for a week visiting with friends and family, so I don't know how much cooking I'll be doing this week, but tonight I cooked for everyone. I was going to make a stew recipe I found online, but it was so nice outside today that I decided to barbecue instead. (Or grill, really.)

I didn't really have a recipe for either part of this meal, but it was easily enough to make something up. The chicken... I made a lemon-thyme butter, which I smeared under the skin and used to baste as I was cooking. (It was just lemon zest, thyme leaves, garlic, salt and pepper in the butter.) It didn't have quite a strong enough thyme taste, but it was really moist, tasty chicken. I think I'd definitely make that again.

And the vegetables... it was basically the same flavours, but the lemon was really the strongest taste. I had the vegetables on skewers, and drizzled over a dressing made of lemon juice, olive oil, crushed garlic, thyme leaves, salt and pepper. After they were grilled, I gave them another shot of lemon juice just to perk the flavour up a bit.

So good.

Fennel Chicken Pilaf

This is my take on this recipe. I didn't change anything ingredient-wise (except to use chicken breasts), but I cooked it entirely on the stove top (because there was cleaner in the oven), shortened the cooking time and only made half. Half was still enough to serve probably 3-4 people. (And I used chives as a garnish because I have them and might as well use them.)

This was pleasant tasting - there is a tiny hint of that fennel licorice taste, but mostly only when you bite through one of the seeds - but not quite interesting enough to move beyond pleasant. I think it could stand to have something else added to perk it up a bit, though I'm not quite sure what. I don't know what tastes go well with fennel seed, but I felt like it could have used something a little bit spicy.

Drop a note if you've got any suggestions. I don't know if I'd make this again, but I like the idea of it enough (and the execution - it was quite easy) that if I could make it into something a little more to my taste, then I'd probably keep picking at the recipe until I could be happier with it.

Topless Steak Sandwich with Mushrooms and Caramelized Onions

Okay, it's just that I burned the top because I wasn't paying attention. (I ate it with the top anyway, but it looked bad in the picture. It was over-toasted not charcoal.)

A take on a Rachel Ray recipe. But with less of everything but the mushrooms (which I added) and some improvisation. (She really, really has the hugest meals ever. It must take a lot of calories to run that personality, but seriously. This sandwich twice over would be one of hers.)

The long version of tonight's dinner is that originally I was going to make beef barley soup with mushrooms. And then I didn't feel like soup, so I was going to make a stir-fry because the ingredients are pretty much the same, just with rice instead of barley, and less cooking liquid. (And more soy sauce. And different spices. And al dente vegetables.) But then I didn't feel like making a stir-fry, so I had to find something different, and I found a recipe for a steak sandwich in the one RR cookbook I own, 365: No Repeats.

It's a little bit spicy, with lots of hot sauce and peppercorn grill spice on the meat, and the onions are a little bit sweet and the mushrooms I just added because they would go bad if I left them in the fridge much longer and I don't think you can really go wrong with mushrooms and steak. And then crunchy toasted bread and melty cheese, which is always good, though I wish I'd had something with a bit stronger of a flavour. (A cheese with peppercorns would have been really good. Or Guinness cheddar.) I think strips of roasted red pepper would be really good, too, if I make this again. Oh, and maybe a spicy mustard. Hm.

Delicious.

Baked Pork with Piquant Sauce

The pork and sauce is a recipe I found Gordon Ramsay's new cookbook Fast Food, which contains a number of recipes from his show The F Word (which is one of my favourite cooking shows, and is probably the only one of Ramsay's NOT shown on the Food Network in Canada). So I have two recommendations here before I even get to the food.

The first is the tv show. (I downloaded it. Sorry Channel4 - sell the show to the Food Network Canada and I wouldn't have to go about watching it that way.) There are three seasons so far, and each has followed the same basic pattern. The restaurant, The F Word, serves one three course meal per week that anyone could cook at home, usually cooked by an amateur brigade of cooks. Most of the episodes have either a little blurb from someone else about unusual food items (horse milk, for instance) or about outrageous food related things (an example: the amount of meat in sausages, and what counts as meat). I'm not quite sure why it's so compelling to me, but it really is. (Even without his usual vitriol, though that's present as well.) I hope another season is out soon, because I do enjoy it a lot.

The cookbook is both a hit and a miss. It's quite beautiful, full of a lot of pictures and meals that look and sound amazing. Everything looks quite easy to make, which is part of the point, and is probably the only thing that got me to buy the book instead of just flipping through it. (Nothing worse than buying a cookbook and discovering you'll never use it because you just know you'll never be deep-frying poached eggs or whatever.)

The miss... I live in Canada, not Britain, and it's remarkable how different the common foods are. There are so many things I either won't be able to make or would have to start substituting ingredients for. Another miss (for me) is that there are so many fish/seafood recipes. I'm willing to try the fish recipes, if I can find the types of fish he requests, but there is a lot I've never heard of or seen here. (Porgy, hake,...) And finally... a few of the recipes are a little bit... lame. Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, for example, which seems a bit too standard to be worth including.

At any rate, this pork dish was really delicious. The sauce - made of mushrooms, red pepper, onion, hot pepper, and canned diced tomato - was really fantastic and went well with the pork, which was fairly plain. (Salt, pepper, garlic and rosemary on top, with a bit of olive oil.)

The broccoli is just steamed, so a bit boring but I wish I'd bought more because it was so good that I want to eat it again tomorrow. (But sautéed, maybe, with some red pepper flakes.) The rice came from a local curry restaurant and it tastes amazing and I wish I could figure out exactly how to make it for myself. (It's got fennel seeds in it, I can tell that much, but otherwise, I don't know.) Indian rice probably wasn't the best match for this, but the fennel, at least, was quite nice with the sauce, so it wasn't as bad a combination as it might have been. (Mostly I just didn't want to cook my own, and my brother in law happened to be ordering butter chicken, so I had him pick up rice as well.)

Anyway, I'm fairly certain I'll make this again. It made far too much food, but there are leftovers for tomorrow, so I'm happy about that.

Chicken in Cream Sauce with Whole Wheat Spaghetti and a Salad

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

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

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

Fried Fish with Roasted Potatoes and Green Peas

This is a couple days old now, but I think I didn't post it in favour of going to bed and then I just never got around to it the next day. I also didn't really get around to eating it.

Well, that's not quite true. I did try eating it, but I didn't like the fish very much. It was somehow watery tasting, and the texture was sort of watery as well. Damp, almost, like eating flaky jello. So maybe I prefer firmer fish, or something. I don't know. Anyway, I wound up throwing away the fish after a few bites.

The potatoes were nice, if very basic - just parboiled, then roasted with fresh rosemary and garlic. And the peas, which were meant to be mashed, were heated with a little white wine vinegar, and salt and pepper.

The three recipes came from a cookbook I picked up a little while ago, Fast Food by Gordon Ramsay. When I was at the grocery store, I couldn't remember what sort of fish I needed for the recipe, so I picked up sole because it looked nice and it was cheap, but the recipe does suggest something else... cod or haddock, I think, so I do think I'll try it again someday with a different type of fish. With any luck, I'll like it better.

Beef and Mushroom Stew with Fingerling Potatoes and Russian Salad

This isn't the best photo of this (though it's better than the last one I took almost a year ago) but beef and mushroom stew is one of the best things I cook. Yum. I wish I could remember where I found the recipe, because I've been working off a much reduced version of it and I know I don't do all the steps or use all the ingredients and someday I'd like to try it as it's meant to be. At any rate, it's very good.

These were the first fingerling potatoes I've ever bought, but I'm not much impressed. I had to peel most of them because they were a bit green skinned. But that's not the potatoes' fault. I blame President's Choice. (And why, anyway, is there a brand name on my potatoes?)

Spinach and Feta Turkey Sausage with Potatoes and Corn

So... first dinner in the new house. Or first dinner cooked by me in the new house. My brother in law made a couple things I'd have liked to photograph but didn't because the camera was packed. It's a bit too bad this wasn't something nicer looking or more interesting than a sausage and potatoes, but it's a Saturday night and I'm gearing up for a long night at work, so more effort than that is not something I wanted to expend.

So, the sausage is maybe the last stop on my previously never ending quest to find a healthy sausage. I think, by definition, sausages are nasty. Mostly made of the fatty, leftover bits of "meat" and then spiced so you don't realize you're eating the second most garbagey of the garbagey bits (hot dogs being last stop, I'm convinced).

This sausage, and I've thrown out the packaging a couple days ago so I can't check the brand name, clocks in a low 110 calories with... I think it was 4 or 5 grams of fat. Which tells me that either they're lying - and Canadian law allows for something like a 20% margin of error in nutritional tables, so who knows - or that they're actually made of the good bits. (Which would explain the price. Which wasn't exorbitant, but higher than average, I think.) A point in favour of my guess that they're made of the good bits is that even when I pierced it, very little fatty liquid came out. They weren't dry, but not nearly so oily as you'd normally expect.

It was a different sort of taste, good, but not quite what I imagined. I'm not sure what I imagined, but I didn't get any flavour of feta at all and the spinach was only a mild presence. It'll be a while before these are gone (since it was quite a large package and I really don't eat sausage all that often) but I think I'll definitely buy these again in the future.

The rest is pretty standard. I microwaved the corn, because I didn't want to dirty another pot, and the potatoes are just boiled and then dressed with a little butter and herbes de provence, which was probably not the best way to use the herb mix, but I only recently bought it and wanted to see what it would taste like against something without much flavour. It was nice.

Montreal Smoked Meat with Mustard Cream Cheese on Foccacia

Okay, one last picture before I move. This is my new favourite sandwich that I've been making and taking to work all week for lunch.

Basically, you mash a bit of whole grain mustard and ground pepper into (low fat!) cream cheese for the base. Then Montreal Smoked meat or pastrami. Then pickles. It would have something green and leafy, but I didn't want to buy any more food before moving, so I've been doing (happily) without.

Delicious.

The idea for this came from a new cookbook I picked up recently, Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food. (I forget what parts of his recipe I didn't use. He definitely uses pastrami and I think he uses arugula or something similar as the greens. At any rate, if I get nothing else from the cookbook, this sandwich is worth it. (Well, maybe not worth twenty-odd dollars, but pretty close.)

This isn't a terribly nice looking picture - I didn't even pick the sandwich up off the cutting board and it's all messy looking and I just kind of folded the meat to show the cream cheese and folded the meat to make it look more... meaty (since I'm pretty chintzy with meat on sandwiches; I don't like a big layer of the stuff) and yes. It's not pretty, but it is tasty.

Cucumber-Cream Cheese Foccacia Sandwich

This is probably the last thing I'll post for the next week or so, until we're moved and settled into the new house. It feels a bit boring for a last post before a big change, but I had exactly that much energy in me for cooking tonight. (In other words, no energy at all, but couldn't quite justify take out or fast food.)

I used to make cucumber and cream cheese wraps all the time, sometimes with tomato and sometimes without, but I never really tried it on a sandwich like this. I made it a bit more like a Greek salad this time, with the red onion, and probably that would be pretty fantastic with Feta in place of the cream cheese, though I'd need to drizzle it with a little oil and vinegar so that it wouldn't be too dry. (But not too soggy, either.)

Anyway, it was really good, if a bit light for a dinner.

Chili with Cheese

Chili with Cheese (on new dishes!)
Originally uploaded by hold your spin

This is a very pointless post because I'm only updating to point out my pretty new dishes. I haven't been letting myself look too closely at anything anywhere in a while because I always want to buy the plates and bowls that catch my eye, but I don't really need them. I fell in love with the colour of these, though, so I had to have them.

The chili itself was only so-so. I don't understand what went wrong with it, but you couldn't even taste the chili powder or cayenne or hot sauce or cumin or anything else that I put into it. You could feel a tiny hit of heat on your tongue, but it just was like bland tomato sauce on beef. I really hope the leftovers tomorrow will have some flavour, but I'm not holding out hope just now.

Pork and Sweet Potato with Spicy Orange-Thyme Sauce

I've been sitting here for a couple minutes trying to decide what to say about this one, but I haven't really got any ideas in particular. It's a recipe that I tore out of some magazine or other - I don't remember which, but I found it in a stack of papers when I was doing some packing today. How convenient that I had pork and a lonely, aging (but still usable and tasty) organic garnet yam in the cupboard.

The sauce, which wasn't so much a sauce as just... something to cook the potatoes in and that I reduced until it was just a sticky mess on the bottom of the pan, was a bit too sweet for my tastes, so I think if I try this again, which I think I will, I'll have to try it with something else in place of the orange juice. I don't know if it needs that sweetness at all, so maybe I could do it with just chicken stock, but then the orange flavour wouldn't be there. Or maybe I can just reduce the amount of orange juice as compared to water in the recipe. (It uses equal parts of both.)

Anyway, it wasn't as spicy as I'd hoped, so I think I could add a bit more zing to the recipe as well, and maybe that might help to cut a bit of the sweetness. My brother in law thought maybe serving it with something like asparagus would help, so that the slight bitterness of the vegetable would help pull it back.

Tasty, though, so I think I'll try to make this again and see how it goes.

Spicy Chicken on Rice Pilaf with Edamame and Tomato

A week or so ago I picked up a new magazine (well, the second edition of) called Clean Eating. It's mainly full of recipes, with a handful of articles about health and healthy living. And the rice and chicken recipes came from it. Both were good but not spectacular. I could eat both again, but wouldn't likely go out of my way to make them.

I do like the idea of the chicken - it's sort of marinated in a dressing made of low fat plain yogurt with spices, but since it didn't get time to sit in the mixture, the flavour didn't travel beyond the surface of the chicken. And too, it only had chili powder and garlic in it (and lime juice). The lime juice was nice, but it was a bit... boring. I think most people could come up with a more interesting flavour mix with a well-stocked spice rack and a blindfold on than that.

The rice.. it didn't really taste of anything. It had cumin and oregano in it, but it just sort of tasted like damp brown rice. I wouldn't mind to try it again, but... differently. I think I'd use a different method to cook the rice, and then separately sauté the onions with the spices and stir them in after. Not quite the same, but it might work better (for me)

Roasted Tomato Pizza with Garlicky White Bean Puree

Another pizza experiment, and my final one at least until I've moved. (Not buying anything that'll have to get chucked in the freezer; we're trying to use things up, rather than add to them.) This isn't at all the pizza I'd planned to make with my last pizza shell - it was going to have roasted zucchini and eggplant and bell peppers and mushroom and onion and feta cheese on it. But I used up all my feta cheese yesterday with that Greek salad, so I had to change plans.

I decided to do a version of this salad instead, just without the artichokes and olives. I had already packed the cookbook, though, so I had to figure out a way to translate the concept without even the recipe as a reference.

So I came up with the idea of a bean puree as the base. I didn't want it to be too blandly beany, so I heated the beans in a bit of oil with a lot of garlic, (dried) basil, salt and pepper, then mashed them up with a potato masher and used them in place of a sauce. The tomatoes were roasted with oil, basil, garlic, salt and pepper. I peeled off the skins when I put them on the pizza, so they wouldn't hold their form so strongly (those little tomatoes had strong, thick skins).

I was going to do it as a cheese-free pizza, with an egg cracked over the centre and baked on (to reference the hard-boiled eggs from the salad), but I chickened out and just used a bit of mozzarella cheese instead.

It was really tasty. The taste of the garlic was quite strong in the puree, and I really liked the texture of the soft mashed beans. The tomatoes were exquisite. But I should have learned from my last go around with bean puree on pizza that it doesn't look nice once it cooks. The edges dry out so much.

Maybe if I try it again, I should pre-cook the pizza shell with a bit of olive oil or something, or a sauce (though I really wanted to use the beans in place of a sauce), then pile the hot bean puree on top, add the rest of the ingredients and only just give it a quick few minutes under the broiler to melt and brown the cheese.

Roast Beast with Mashed Potatoes, Steamed Carrots and Two-Dollar Tomatoes

Yum. We've been doing a lot of family dinners lately - every Sunday, as part of the Empty-the-Freezer quest - and it's been quite nice having a big proper dinner together. (We're running low on roasts, finally, as we've now only got two left, one pork roast and another beef roast.)

This was a pretty simple roast. The recipe book called it 5 Minute Roast, by which they mean the prep part takes less than five minutes. My sister did most of that, but I'd guess that was about all the time we put into it before putting it into the oven. It maybe came out a touch dry - the thermometer wasn't registering properly. (It was reading 85 degrees, but you can see plainly that it's well done, and so should have read nearer to 160.) But it tasted very good and with a little of the juices spooned over top, it didn't seem dry at all.

That's some more of my delicious tomato. I was going to eat it with some mozzarella slices, but the cheese smelled like it had gone off, so I chucked it. Alas. Anyway, that tomato is so good that it was maybe nearly a crime to have doctored it with salt and pepper.

Question, though: what turns mashed potatoes into a gluey paste? The last two times my brother-in-law has made them, they've come out with the most bizarre texture.

Greek Salad

This is a pretty standard thing, just tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, goat feta and a homemade dressing. But it looked and tasted phenomenal. I could eat that every day. But only with tomatoes that good.

This is the dressing I made:

1.5 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
a splash of white wine vinegar
1 garlic clove, crushed
salt and black pepper, to taste (go easy on the salt if you are using it with feta, since it's so salty on its own)
1/4-1/2 tsp dried oregano (it's nicer fresh, but I always wind up throwing out most of the package, so I don't buy it often)
1/4 tsp dried thyme

Whisk all the ingredients together until it emulsifies. It should look almost creamy, with the flavouring bits suspended in the dressing. If you let it sit - which really improves the flavour by making the garlic punch through, but isn't necessary - you'll need to whisk it again before you put it over the salad. Taste to check the proportions before using it - you might like more olive oil than I've used. (I think most recipes use something closer to a 2:1 or 2.5:1 proportion of oil to vinegar, but I prefer a really lemony taste.)

This makes, I guess, about 3 tbsp dressing, which is more than enough for one huge dinner sized salad (like the one in my picture). That huge salad is comprised of about 1 large tomato (it's a 1/4 of a big tomato plus 3 or 4 cocktail size tomatoes), 1/2 an English cucumber, 1/4 red onion, 1.5 oz (~45g) goat feta. There was about 1 tbsp of dressing leftover on the plate.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised to find these tomatoes at the grocery store yesterday. They always get hothouse tomatoes (which these are, but they're also local to Alberta) but usually only the standard varieties - grape and cherry, cocktail, mid-sized on the vine, and the regular large round tomatoes. These ones were interesting enough (and smelled good enough) that I had to buy them. (Even though that one single big tomato cost me $2 on its own. The tub of Sweet Zebrinos only cost 90c though.)

They still smelled like they were just plucked off the plants today. So. Good.

Mediterranean Pasta Salad

As a part of my Empty-the-Freezer quest, I finally decided to use up some of a Mediterranean vegetable mix that I've had sitting around for quite a long time. I didn't really have any specific ideas about how to use the vegetables, but came up with an idea over the last few days for a pasta salad with tuna in it and lemon. It tasted quite good, but it was a little dry, so I think I need to work on it a bit more to get it to work out a little better.

I was really impressed with the taste of the goat's milk feta. I'd never tried it before and I was worried about how pungent and goaty it would be, but it really is quite mild compared to Chèvre, which I'm not always a huge fan of. I'm so used to cow's milk feta, but this had a much more delicate and light flavour, and it wasn't over-powered by the salty brine.

At any rate, this was (for me) a really interesting take on pasta salad, since the one I grew up on was more... pasta with ham and celery and mayo and surely other things I've forgotten. There was a lightness and freshness to the flavour that I really enjoyed, though I do need to tweak the sauce to be... more saucy.

Souffléd Cheese Omelette

Another recipe from my favourite vegetarian cookbook, Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen. According to the book, it's a sort of combination frittata and soufflé, which seems to be a pretty good description except that it can't support the weight of the things that are normally packed into a frittata - this just contains cheese and some ground black and red pepper. It was meant to have blue cheese in it, but I don't really like that, so I used a shredded blend I already had in the fridge - cheddar and Monterey jack with jalapeño and tomato.

It was delicious and fluffy and light and cheesy and wonderful.

If I'd been a touch less lazy, I'd have made a salad to go along with it, which would have been nice for the picture. But I was that lazy.

Ravioli Aglio e Olio with a Tomato-Cucumber Salad

I live in a neighbourhood that was (at one time, anyway) very Italian. I don't really know if the population of the area is so much Italian anymore, but there are Italian restaurants and specialty stores everywhere around here. I've never been into any of them, but if I ever went into one of the stores, I'd be willing to bet if I had the money, I'd come walking out with a pasta machine. Then I'd use it once, decide it was too much bother, and put it away for when I have more time. Anyway, why make my own pasta when I can buy it fresh and made by some company far more capable than me?

So this is spinach and cheese ravioli with olive oil and garlic and parsley and Parmesan cheese. And tomato and cucumber slices with mozzarella.

Really lazy (maybe, maybe a 10 minute meal), but really tasty.

Pork Sauerbraten with Lazy Cabbage Rolls and a Green Salad

So... this turned into a kind of meat heavy meal. Which I blame entirely on my sister. Even though it's not her fault.

Basically, I found a recipe for pork Sauerbraten that I wanted to try out. And then I was trying to decide what to serve with it, since I don't like spaetzle, which was what the recipe suggested. In the freezer was a bag of cabbage roll mix, which my sister had made and which I thought was comprised mainly of rice with a little meat. Turns out it was comprised mainly of meat with just a little bit of rice.

Anyway, the sauerbraten recipe is another Pork! Fork! recipe from Put Pork on Your Fork. I used a smaller bone-in roast, and made it in the slow cooker, rather than properly roasting it. It was really delicious, though I did find the vinegar a touch strong. (Probably I didn't need to marinate the meat for so long, since it was a significantly smaller roast.) The gravy, which is so white because it's got a huge lot of sour cream in it, was really tasty too, though nobody else in my house would try it.

The cabbage roll mix... well, I made it the lazy way. Cook the meat mixture in a frying pan, then transfer to a baking dish. In the same frying pan, cook off a bunch of sliced cabbage until it wilts, then dump it and a cup or so of tomato juice over the meat. Bake for about 30 minutes or until it's bubbling. Delicious.

My sister's husband made the salad for us, and just off on the edge of the plate you can sort of see some asparagus that my sister made, but it was a bit overcooked, so nobody ate it.

Caramelized Onion Pizza with Gorgonzola and Toasted Walnuts

This picture has been sitting around for almost a week, waiting for me to get around to deciding whether or not to post it. Thing is... I never ate it. But I decided to put it up anyway, since it was an interesting experiment, if not one I'd like to repeat. Or rather, one I might repeat if I use a slightly different ingredient or two next time.

This was part three of my (soon to be) four part March pizza odyssey. (The pizza shells come in a pack of four.) The recipe came from a vegetarian cookbook of mine A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop. His recipes have always been really delicious when I've made them, and I think this one probably is too, but I just have not developed a taste for blue cheese.

This is a pizza without a sauce. The base is just a huge mound of caramelized onions, which have been finished with a bit of balsamic vinegar. (I was too lazy to cook it off properly, so the onions were a bit more pungent than sweet, but I still think they tasted delicious. My sister thought it smelled foul.) It was baked with some crumbled gorgonzola over top (I read somewhere that gorgonzola is a bit more mild of a blue cheese, but I don't know if that's true, and if that was mild... I'd hate to taste the properly pungent stuff) and then in the last couple minutes of the baking time, I added crumbed walnuts.

When I went to eat the pizza... everything was fine up until I got my first bit of gorgonzola, and then I immediately pitched the lot of it into the bin and went out for McDonalds. (Or not McDonalds, but... something that wasn't covered with blue cheese at any rate.)

Mexican Taco Salad Pizza with Refried Beans

It's.... a taco salad pizza. I guess. With refried beans in place of the ground beef.

I don't think it's possible to do anything new with pizza anymore, but this weird idea came to me today (I'm sure someone else somewhere else sometime else came up with it first) and I absolutely had to make it.

So, from the bottom up: a pizza shell, half a can of refried beans cooked with half a packet of taco seasoning (I should have made my own, but I was too lazy) and a bit of water, cheese (cheddar and an Italian blend), slices of tomato. So I baked that until it was heated through, the cheese was melted and the crust was darkened. (Obviously I darkened it a bit too much, but that's what I get for wiping up the counter when I should have been taking it out of the oven.) Once it was out of the oven, I topped it with lettuce and more tomatoes. If I'd had salsa, I'd have spooned some of that on top. And if I'd had green onions, I'd have used some of those. And if I'd thought of putting sour cream on it, I might have done that too.

It was really good. Even my sister and her husband liked it, though they think I should use beef rather than beans next time.

Pizza Margherita

One of the things I do for my job is make price labels to go on the shelves at the grocery store, and today the dairy guy asked me to make some new labels for the mozzarella cheeses because the old ones had almost all fallen off. (They're in a shoddy channel and rarely last out the week before I'm replacing some of them.) And I suddenly got a craving, standing in my work room with an armload of mozzarella cheeses, for tomato and mozzarella cheese pizza.

How fortunate I work in a grocery store. Of course, I still managed to forget fresh basil (I had to dollop on pesto to get that basil flavour) and the tomatoes weren't quite ripe enough, but I think it still came together well enough in the end.

Pizza Margherita is one of my absolute favourite pizzas. It's so simple, but completely delicious. And even if this isn't quite a proper one, it was the best thing I've had to eat in ages.