Sick Man Soup

No, it's not a soup made out of sick people. Feeling a little under the weather? Grandma Charles will fix you up in no time.

Ingredients:

3 cups	broth (I used vegetable but I think chicken would be best)
1 cup	dry rice
2	large carrots, chopped

Procedure:
Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and boil for about 20 minutes. The rice should be done and the carrots should be soft but it will still be pretty goopy. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

Obviously this isn't a polished recipe... but it's very easy to make when you're feeling lousy and you're out of instant chicken noodle soup. For particularly sensitive stomachs, I recommend using half broth and half water. For slightly more robust digestive tracts, peas or small pieces of chicken could be added.

Enjoy with water with a hint of lemon juice.

Chicken Tangine

This is another recipe from Mom (she found it in Healthy Cook by Kate Sherwood in Nutrition Action Healthletter, Sept 2010). I was in a rush so I didn't change it all (well, I used 3 carrots instead of 2, but mine were kinda shrimpy). There were some things I did think about changing, but I'm glad I tried it out as written first.

Ingreduents:

2 lbs	chicken breast, cut into large cubes
3	carrots, chopped
2	zucchini, chopped
1	small onion, chopped
1 tsp	turmeric
1 tsp	ground cumin
1 tsp	paprika
0.25 tsp	ground cayenne pepper
0.25 tsp	cinnamon
6 cups	broth (I used vegetable bullion)
1 can	diced tomatoes
	olive oil

Procedure:
Cook the chicken in some olive oil until it's done on the outside. Add spices and stir for a minute or two. Add all other ingredients. Simmer for about half an hour. Serve with a lot of bread, the crustier the better. Serves 6-8, depending on how much you like bread.

This recipe is great. It's very easy and has a lot of flavor to it. There's a good amount of kick in the broth which does not diminish when reheated days later. The one thing I didn't like is that it's too... soupy. The vegetables seem lonely since there's just so much broth.

I think next time I'll try adding some chickpeas. Alternatively, some brown rice could go in. I would add it dry and then let it soak up the broth instead of making it with water. I thought about potatoes but I think they would gum up the broth. Pasta was another option as well -- probably little spirals -- but that seems weird.


Yeah, I'm not sure. I kinda forgot to take a picture until after we packed up the leftovers.

Pumpkin Spice Cookies

This was the recipe I chose for the Cookie Swap that Sarah and I hosted this weekend. It's based somewhat on a bread recipe from my Mom. I fudged some numbers to make them more cookie-ish from online recipes and threw in a few extra things myself. They were great. We got full fast so I didn't try, but I would anticipate them being excellent with vanilla ice cream or cream cheese frosting.

Ingredients:

1 cup	dark brown sugar
1 cup	white sugar
2 sticks	softened butter
3 cups	whole wheat all purpose flour
2 tsp	baking soda
1/2 tsp	salt
1 can	pumpkin puree
2	eggs
5 tsp	orange marmalade
1 tsp	vanilla extract
1 tsp	cinnamon
1/2 tsp	ginger
1/4 tsp	nutmeg
1/4 tsp	ground cloves
1/4 tsp	allspice
1 cup	mini dark chocolate chips (regular works too, I guess)
1 cup	dried cranberries

Procedure:
Mix all ingredients. Cook in a hot oven until done.





Really there's not much more to it than that. I guess there's an order in which you're supposed to combine things; I'll tell you what I did, which worked out, but I suspect the exact order isn't that important. However, if you're doing all your stirring by hand like I am, this will make your life easier.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Soften the butter and mix it into a paste with the sugars. If you put them all in the same bowl before realizing that the butter is hard, leave it on top of the oven to melt. If you put sugar in the microwave for too long, bad things will happen to it.

Mix the flour, salt, and baking soda.

Mix the pumpkin, eggs, vanilla, marmalade, and spices.

Combine the butter mixture with the pumpkin mixture. Mix well to make sure you don't end up with lumps of spice. Gradually add the flour mixture. It will be a pretty wet batter but not soupy enough to settle after you mix it -- it will hold peaks. Mix in the chips and cranberries.

Put heaping tablespoons onto a buttered pan and bake until they bounce back when poked, about 20 minutes.

This recipe is huge. My cookies got incrementally larger as I went on making them since I realized I didn't want to do three rounds in the oven. They ended up about biscuit sized by the end. If you prefer smaller cookies, go for it, but don't cook them for as long.

They are very bready, no surprise, but really tasty. They are soft and moist without being overwhelmingly sweet. I think I liked them more than most. They weren't as popular as the chocolate overload cookies. That was predictable, though. A lot of people are bonkers for chocolate. I prefer these.

Moroccan Chicken

Hello again, readers. Things have been very busy lately. I'm back now, though, and hope to resume updating semi-regularly.

This recipe is based on the internet. Just punch "chickpeas turmeric chicken" into Google and loads of hits come up. They're all pretty consistent and I stayed pretty faithful to them, with slight changes as always. The inspiration for this dish came from Anna's Halloween concoction. I don't remember precisely what was in it other than chicken, chickpeas, and turmeric so that's what I went from.

Ingredients:

1 lb	chicken, diced
1 can	chickpeas, drained
2	large carrots, sliced
3 stalks	celery, sliced
2	small onions, chopped
1 can	tomatoes
1.5 cups	broth
4 cloves	garlic, minced
1	green pepper, chopped
0.5	turmeric
0.5	paprika
0.75 tsp	cumin
0.25 tsp	cinnamon
0.5 tsp	oregano
2 tsp	salt
0.5 tsp	ginger

Procedure:

This is a very easy recipe. Fry the chicken, onion, garlic, and carrots until the vegetables begin to soften. Add the rest of the ingredients. Cook until it's a stewy consistency. Serve over couscous or brown rice; serves five.

One thing I did omit was spiciness. This recipe would have appreciated come cayenne pepper (which most recipes used). I made the substitution of a green bell pepper for zucchini. I really think this was a good call; not only are zucchini creepy, but I don't think it would have blended well with the rest of the goop.

I only used one can of chickpeas; some recipes used even less. However, they're really what makes the dish exciting. I would recommend using a can and a half, and cutting the carrots smaller, to really emphasize their place in the dish. The celery was fine, but I guess celery is always just fine. I wasn't excited to have it in there, but it didn't detract from the dish. It played a very inconspicuous part.

Wild Rice and Fruit Salad

This is a cold salad that they had at St Olaf, and which I always enjoyed. Between my memory and some online references this is what I pieced together.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups	uncooked wild rice
1 cup	sweetened dried cranberries
1/2 cup	slivered almonds
2	small apples, diced
1/2 cup	basalmic vinaigrette dressing
1/4 cup	olive oil
2 tbs	orange marmalade
1 tbs	honey

Procedure:
Prepare the rice as directed. Throw the almonds in a frying pan for a few minutes to toast them. Throw a cit of lemon juice on the apples if you like, as they may otherwise get brown from sitting around as you wait for the rice.

Mix the vinaigrette, olive oil, honey, and marmalade. The best way I found to do this was to start with the marmalade then slowly add the liquids. If you throw a lump of marmalade into a cup of liquid you'll have a hard time breaking it up.

Add the cranberries to the rice as it cools, then stir in the almonds, dressing, and apples. Serve cold.

This was a bit too much fluid; maybe decrease by a few tablespoons the amount of salad dressing.

The apples should probably have been granny smith, but all I had around were some small, soft, sweet ones. The softness was more a problem than anything, causing them to sustain damage during the mixing. Otherwise this was very tasty. It's probably really healthy too.

I took a picture of this, but I don't think I'll share it. As you may imagine, it doesn't look like anything. But I promise, it's worthwhile.

The Most Terrifying Thing

Take about half of a jelly jar and fill it with vodka (as cheap as possible). Add two sliced cloves of garlic and two seeded chopped habaneros. Let sit.

This was originally intended to be a beverage. I thought a bit of spice would perhaps distract from the cheapness of the vodka. Perhaps it would make for a very exciting shot, I thought. Note that it originally had only a fraction of that much spice. And hey, they had chili vodka in Hungary.

It proved to be quite strong, even at the original small dose of pepper. And it turns out that the spiciness didn't cover the bad taste of the vodka; it just added a horrifyingly potent aftertaste.

It gets stronger as it sits. This has been in my fridge for about a week. This morning I dipped the tip of my little finger in it for the tiniest of tastes. It woke me right up.


The plan now is to let it sit. Eventually it may be convenient to basically have liquid spice sitting around. it's basically some sort of sadistic cooking wine. Alternatively, it's an invisible way to do something terrible to someone's food or beverage. But that would be pretty mean.

Broccoli Ravioli

We made ravioli tonight from scratch. Well, Aaron started making them then had to take a long phone call so I ended up doing a bunch of it. I don't have the recipe on hand. I don't know that Aaron does either; the first thing we did was swap broccoli for spinach and then things got out of hand from there.

I'm hoping to try it myself in the next few days, minus the parts that didn't work out so well. Then I'll write it up properly.

Seville Chicken

This recipe comes out of the same cookbook as last time. Again, I changed it a bit more. Again, it was delicious. The biggest deviation I take from the recipe in this case was the replacement of slivered almonds with dried cranberries. I did it wrong. As I did them the cranberries were fine but very unremarkable; they could have been awesome.

Ingredients:

5	boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 1/4 cup	uncooked brown basmati rice
2	chorizo links, cut into chunks
1	onion, chopped
1	orange, peeled and sliced, with a thin section of rind reserved
3/4 cup	white wine
2 1/2 cup	chicken broth
2	garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 cup	dried cranberries
	flour
1	yellow bell pepper, sliced
1	red bell pepper, sliced
6	roma tomatoes, diced
1/4 tsp	thyme
	olive oil
	salt
	black pepper
	flour

Procedure:

To the flour add salt and pepper to taste. Dust the chicken with the flour mixture and fry in olive oil until well browned. It's fine if your pan is not large enough to easily fit them all frying at once; you can just do them a few at a time. Don't worry about cooking the chicken through as it'll cook for plenty of time later. Set the chicken aside. The recipe book recommends that you only need about 10 tsp of olive oil to fry all of the chicken but I found about twice that much to be appropriate.



Cook the garlic and onions for a few minutes in the used oil. Once they begin to brown, add the bell peppers. Cook until they soften a bit add the chorizo and stir fry some more.



After the chorizo gives you a bit of fat in the bottom of the pan add the rice and cranberries. Stir this around on high heat for a minute or two to tease the rice a little bit. I'm not sure exactly what this does, but I did it and it didn't seem to hurt anything.



Add the tomatoes, the broth, and the wine. Also stir in the thyme and the orange peel. Bring this all to a simmer and return the chicken to the pan. Simmer for about an hour, until the chicken and rice are tender. Just before serving, stir in the orange pieces and allow them to heat through. Serves five.



This recipe is supposed to have almonds instead of cranberries. I forgot to get them at the supermarket so I worked with what I had (and hey, cranberries go wonderfully with orange). The mistake I made was assuming for some reason that cranberries should be cooked as if they are almonds. Since I added them with the rice they got to simmer for the full hour. Over the course of that time they plumped up and basically lost all taste. I think the best way to do it would be to add the cranberries ten minutes before serving (or perhaps even right at the end with the oranges). That way they would still be sharp and firm. In that case a hint of cinnamon may also have been appropriate, or maybe even a bit of brown sugar.

The chicken was another deviation I took from the book. They recommended thighs. I used breasts. I think they suffered for not having skin; the flour didn't adhere to the chicken very well. The pieces are also huge. I think a better way to do it would be with chicken chunks, maybe a sixth of the size of the breast. They're more convenient to eat as well as having more surface area to hold onto the fried crust.

The recipe specifically wanted crushed garlic. I cut it into chunks and crushed it using the bottom of a mason jar. It was a bit juicier than I'm used to from mincing garlic but I don't know that the difference is relevant.

This recipe will be revisited. It was really quite delicious. I think it helped that I haven't cooked with thyme before. It's a nice little spice.

Spanish Chicken

This recipe comes from 500 Best-Ever Recipes: Mediterranean (ISBN 0-681-63051-5). At times the recipe was unclear about which things were in which pan and what was being cooked versus set aside. I'm fairly sure that I ended up doing more or less what they wanted. In any case it ended up great so I'll write up what I did.

Ingredients:

1/2 lb	chicken
1/3 lb	bacon, diced
1 lb	tomatoes, chopped
1	red bell pepper, chopped
1	green bell pepper, chopped
1	large onion, chopped
3	garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp	ground paprika
3 tsp	parsley, chopped
	salt
	black pepper
	olive oil

Procedure:


Mix the paprika with salt to taste, about 1 tsp, and rub on chicken. Begin frying it slowly in a bit of olive oil. Meanwhile, start the bacon in another pan.



When the bacon starts to brown (and has given off fat) add the onions and garlic. Fry until the onions are browning and soft. Then add the tomatoes to the bacon mixture. This is the sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper.



Add the bell peppers to the chicken pan (it doesn't matter if they don't really fit) and let the chicken finish cooking. Then mix the chicken and peppers into the sauce. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes.



Add parsley. Makes four servings over rice.

This worked out really well despite ambiguities in the recipe. It's not spicy at all, which is something I would typically want in a chicken dish over rice, but it's plenty well flavored. I think making a sauce by starting with bacon is a strong idea but it was a little strange for me after not having eaten bacon in so long. In the future I may replace the bacon with a small amount of the co-op's wonderful greasy chorizo (which is also frequently used in this Mediterranean cookbook). That would add a bit of spice and perhaps trump a lot of the vegetables, though.

The recipe called for skin-on, bone-in chicken. I used skinless boneless chicken breast strips. It worked great. If I repeat this recipe I'll go even further and and use pieces of chicken cut into chunks.

Despite similarities to a pasta sauce, I think this would be really strange over noodles. Rice was for sure the correct choice.

Red Eyes

Hey all,

I invented these little guys over the weekend while in South Dakota for Taylor's wedding. He put us up with a family friend, Sandra. She was outrageously hospitable, providing beds for seven (!) of us guys (including Ryan, from whom I stole all of these pictures) and filling her fridge with food and beer for us. She treated us like family, which was wonderful.

On Saturday morning we took it upon ourselves to host a breakfast get together. After having stayed up until two or three in the morning drinking beers and telling stories we dragged ourselves out of bed at eight and got to work on food. We had some pancakes, which were tasty but I'm not sure what (if any) recipe was used. There was a fruit salad which is below even my standards for what can be written up on a cooking blog. My contribution was Red Eyes, which I guess I came up with. However, they are based heavily on One Eyes, taught to me by Pokey.

They are simple but very tasty.

Ingredients:

9	English muffins
8	eggs (approx)
3	roma tomatoes
	butter
	salt
	pepper
	milk

Procedure:

Crack your eggs into a measuring cup. It's important that you be able to pour well out of it. You can do the eggs however you want, I guess, but I added a few splooshes of milk (perhaps 2 oz total) and a lot of salt and pepper. Then whisk them.

Using a butter knife, cut the center out of each muffin (to make them look like rings). The hole should be just barely larger around than a roma tomato. The larger the hole, the tastier it will be, but also the more fragile. Then carefully pull the muffins in half and butter the formerly inside half.

The muffin holes can be toasted and eaten with butter and jam or whatever. They are English muffins, after all.



Slice the tomatoes into a few dozen slices. You'll have 18 half-muffins and each one should get a slice or two of tomato.

Heat some butter in a pan. Put an english muffin in, butter side down (yeah, that's a lot of butter. Don't worry about it. It's good for you. Pour in egg until the hole in the muffin is about half full.



Now, this is a bit trickier than you might suspect. The muffin has a rough bottom so the egg will try to escape. The trick I found to work best was having a very hot pan, then slowly pouring in egg with one hand while using a few fingers of the other hand to press the muffin flat against the pan. Once the bottom layer of egg solidifies you're safe to pour in more.

After letting that cook for a bit add in a slice or two of tomato to the cavity. Fill any remaining space with egg to try to keep the tomato from escaping. Cook the egg through. This will require you to flip the muffin, though it's unclear precisely when it's best to do this. They tend to not look that pretty in any case, so I'd just not worry about appearances and just flip it as soon as you build up the confidence.

You can serve these with salsa or plain. Despite having so few ingredients they are very tasty. They're more of an appetizer than a meal so it's hard to say how many servings this makes. A handful.

I would have really liked to put avocado in these with the tomato. However, we did not because Taylor is allergic and we felt it would not be appropriate to kill him on the morning of his wedding day.

Cheese may also have been nice. I would probably put it on top of the bottom layer of egg but under the tomato so that it's sort of a surprise (rather than being a visible garnish type feel on top).

Chicken with Spicy Onions

This is another recipe out of India's 500 Best Recipes. It was good. I'm going to have to start using these cookbooks more, since I'm finding that the people who write them really know a whole lot more about food preparation that I, an occasional cooking blogger, do (fancy that).

Ingredients:

1.5 lbs	boneless skinless chicken (approx)
2 tsp	ground turmeric
0.25 tsp	chili powder
2	small onions
1 bunch	fresh cilantro
1 inch	fresh ginger (approx)
1	chili pepper
1 tsp	cumin seeds
1/6 cup	plain yogurt
1/6 cup	heavy cream
0.25 tsp	corn starch
	oil
	salt

Procedure:

Mix turmeric, chili powder, and salt to taste (I used about 1 tsp, which worked fine). Cut the chicken into small chunks (perhaps 1-inch squares or so) and rub with this. Fry until the outside of the chicken is sealed. Don't worry about cooking it through; you'll cook it more later. Set the chicken aside, covering it to keep it warm.



Chop the cilantro coarsely. Mince the ginger an dice the onions. Mix those three ingredients together. Mince the chili peppers. Fry about 3/4 of the cilantro mixture with the cumin and peppers for a few minutes, until the onions soften.



Return the chicken to the pan with the mixture. Cover and cook gently for about 15 minutes.



Turn off the heat. As the pan cools down a bit, mix the yogurt, cream, and corn starch. Fold those in. Bring the pan back to the heat and cook until the chicken is tender.



Just before serving, add the rest of the onions, cilantro, and ginger. Serve over rice. Makes 4 servings.



This recipe makes a very tasty meal that feels very Indian to me, a person who has never been to India. It's probably the turmeric and cilantro combination. I'm starting to really appreciate those spices together. The ginger helps too.

Where I failed in this recipe was the chili peppers. I ended up with peppers that were quite mild. If you see the size of the pepper in the picture you probably can guess this... the larger a pepper, the less scared you need be of it. This was fine since the dish is well seasoned by itself. However, a bit of spice would have added to it. I anticipate making this again.

Pork Chop Bake

I didn't really realize that this was going to be an update until after I had made it. However, I was so struck by the simplicity and tastiness that I felt it appropriate to share.

Ingredients:

4	pork chops
1.5 cups	dry rice
10	small tomatoes
1	onion
6	dried hot chili peppers
	broth
	water
	salt
	pepper

Procedure:

Soak the pork chops for a few hours in broth. Then brown them, seasoning heavily with salt and pepper. This is just to make them prettier. You'll be baking them in a bit so you don't have to worry about cooking them through.

Put the rice in the bottom of a glass baking pan. Add to it 2 cups of broth and 1.5 cups of water. Add salt and pepper to taste. Chop the onions and cut the tomatoes into quarters. Put those on top of the rice and add salt and pepper to taste. Throw the hot chili peppers in there too.

Put the pork chops on top of the tomatoes. Cover the pan with foil. Bake at 350 F for 45 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 15 minutes. Makes four servings.



For broth I've recently taken to Kitchen Basics vegetable stock. I really like it, as it has a lot of character to it without MSG. It also has no MSG added and no MSG produced through hydrolized vegetable products and all that other nonsense that they're using nowadays to sneak MSG into things while claiming that there's none added. Note that I don't universally avoid MSG; I like chinese takeout and Doritos as much as the next guy. I just prefer to cook without it. It spooks me out a little bit.

As another aside, I'm starting to get skeptical about this technique for the hot dried peppers. It's been claimed to me that if you boil them with something, some of the heat will boil out of them and into the food. I have not found this to be the case.l In the future, if I want to use them, I will crush them and actually add them to the food. For this recipe I would probably use 1 or 2; they're quite hot. Six would be overkill.

Good Grief

It's been ages since I've put up an update. Sorry. I've got 3 that I'll try to get written up in the next few days.

Artsy Fartsy Pineapple

Dearest reader, this one doesn't actually involve any cooking at all. It's just a cute way to present a pineapple for a party. I've stolen it from my neighbor who brought just such a fruity presentation to my mom's recent birthday party.

Wash the pineapple. Discard the bottom and remove the top, reserving it for decorative purposes. Quarter it the long way. Separate the edible part from both the core and the rind, leaving a thin amount connecting the core and rind on each end. With a little wiggling the entire edible part should be able to move relative to the husk (you should be able to remove it in tact, though you will not do so).



Now slice that bad boy and push alternating sections out in opposite directions to make it look fancy. Serve.



Modeling here with the finished product is the always charming Chris. Photos stolen from Andy.

Chicken Lo Mein

This is a lot like fried rice from way back when. However, I think it's a little more exciting. Or at least, I took some more liberties with the recipe. This turned into an add-whatever-you-want kind of recipe so I can't provide precisely how much of everything I put in. However, I can say with confidence that the meal is pretty robust.

Ingredients:

1 lb	dry spaghetti (I prefer whole wheat)
5	carrots, grated coarsely or sliced thinly
8	asparagus stalks, chopped
2	small broccoli heads, floreted
4	celery stalks, chopped
1	jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced
1	onion, chopped
3	garlic cloves, minced
2	eggs, scrambled
1/2 lb	chicken, cut small
1 can	sliced water chestnuts
maybe 1/4 cup	soy sauce
a few tbs	cock sauce
to taste	whatever you want

Procedure:
Cook the spaghetti mostly, leaving it a firm al dente. It'll finish up later. Drain and set aside. If you're not running the vegetables concurrently, you may want to toss them with some oil to keep them from clumping while they wait.



Cook the chicken most of the way through. Add vegetables. You can add sauce as you go to prevent you from needing more oil. Stir this all around until they start to soften.



Add the pasta and stir a lot. At this point it's also time to go crazy with sauces. The pasta isn't quite done yet, so it's really thirsty. I stuck with mostly soy sauce and hot sauce. I also threw in a few tablespoons of brown sugar, a floop of barbecue sauce, some lemon juice, and a bunch of black pepper. It turned out not particularly sweet, so I think another avenue would be to use a lot more brown sugar as well as some jam.





Cook this until it's done. There are plenty of noodles, so ever so often you can just grab one out and eat it. This will also allow you to keep tabs on your seasoning. If you cook it for too long your pasta will start to dry out. This is why you want your vegetables to be mostly cooked at the point where you add the pasta.



Makes 6 large servings.

This is a really fun recipe because you can really throw in whatever you want. If you screw it up, you've just invented something new ("it's not a bug, it's a feature"). The choices of vegetables and sauces are completely free.

I had chicken in this but it's really not an important feature. The noodles really trump it; this meal would lose little by the omission of the meat. The eggs were similar. I would next time either up the egg count to three or skip them entirely. They come up sufficiently infrequently that you forget about them, then, every time you get a piece, you wonder what it is.

I've found that I really like asparagus. Make sure to not cook it into a mush though. You cut the carrots small so they'll cook before your asparagus is obliterated. Same for the celery.

Enjoy!

Sweet Potato Breakfast Scramble

This recipe is based strongly on one I found here. I did change a few things, but in some cases I suspect it was for the worse.



Ingredients:

3	Andouille links, sliced
1	sweet potato, sliced
1	onion, sliced
1	garlic clove, minced
1	jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced
	salt
	black pepper
	cinnamon
	cumin
	eggs

Procedure:



The whole point of this meal was to use up some sweet potatoes. I cut up two, which you will probably realize when you cut up just one and note how much more I have than you. Two was too many, not only for the meal, but for my pan.

The preparation here isn't particularly exciting. Fry the sausage until it's mostly done, then add the sweet potatoes (and probably some additional oil). Cook those for a while then add everything else. The cumin won't really matter in the end as far as i can tell but go crazy with the salt, pepper, and cinnamon. Especially the cinnamon. Trust me. Mix well then serve with a fried egg on top.



Child's play. The recipe makes three hearty servings, each of which should be topped with a fried egg.



What excites me about this is that I don't think I did it particularly well but it was still good and unusual. The egg on top really does make this feel like it's going to be a salty greasy breakfast food (though it actually is not particularly greasy). Then BAM! Spicy cinnamon sweetness.

I imagine this will make your breath terrible, so I recommend eating it before spending time with people you have no interest in smooching.

The biggest mistake that I made was slicing the sweet potatoes instead of hashing them. My concern was that sweet potatoes are hard, so hashing them is a pain. But slices were more of a problem for me than hashing a potato would have been. They were too thick to cook in a timely manner and too wide to really fit on a fork with anything else. And with this dish, it's all about getting a little bit of everything in every bite.

As I've shown before, it is possible to cut sweet potatoes into fries or hashes. Perhaps the more clever way to go about doing so would be to boil (or microwave) the potato for a few minutes to soften it up and make it take more easily to a cheese grater or fry slicer.

The recipe I worked from did use cilantro, which I did not. I'm skeptical about whether it belonged.

That's all for now; we'll see if I can write up Lo Mein for tomorrow night.

Photodiary 4: Stir Fry

I'm surprised that I haven't done this one before. The stir fry is really my proto-meal. Almost everything I make is a stir fry in some manner of disguise. This one is in the worst disguise, I guess.



I've got two more updates in the queue; expect them soon.