Pork chops and sauerkraut

This recipe comes from the blog Serious Eats. Manda directed me to this blog a few weeks back and I've found a number of tasty recipes on it, including this one. Kev gets a lot of credit for this dinner. I did some of the prep work and tossed the potatoes into the oven to roast but he did the actual cooking, so yay for him.

The pork chops went really well with the sauerkraut. The sauerkraut was slightly sweet from the apple juice so it had that pork/apple thing going on that works so well together but it was a nice change of pace from the usual pork chop/applesauce combo (I almost typed asslesauce, that doesn't sound nearly as appetizing).  The potatoes were just tossed with some olive oil and onion soup mix. Low brow but tasty.

For dinner tonight I made this ginger salmon recipe from Budget Bytes. It was good. Not life changing, but pretty good and easy to throw together. The thing I was really impressed with was the mushrooms I made. I told Kev to pick up a vegetable to go with the salmon and he came home with mushrooms.

Not a vegetable but we love mushrooms in this house so I'll let it slide. I wanted to do something "asian-y" with them to go with the flavors of the salmon so I put a bit of sesame oil in the pan, tossed the mushrooms with some sriracha, fish sauce and sweet chili sauce in the bowl where I made the salmon glaze so a little but of that made it into the mix too. I sauteed that while cooking the salmon and they came out great. Oh so slightly sweet with some nice heat in the background and very delicious served over rice. Probably one of my better 'wing it' recipes I've thrown together.
I wish I had taken a picture of them.

A new ice cream post to come soon.

Ice cream part 3

It's a double whammy tonight! Two posts! In one night! Because I'm a total slacker!



For our third batch of ice cream Kev and I decided to go with something chocolaty. The recipe was for a Guinness Milk Chocolate ice cream but this turned out to be a Baltic Porter Chocolate ice cream. The Baltic Porter was one of Kevin's home brews and I used semi-sweet chocolate rather than milk chocolate. You could definitely pick up the beer in the ice cream and it was very intensely chocolate even though I used one ounce less chocolate than the recipe called for since that's all that I had on hand.

It was delicious, of course. But I think this one ranks at #3 behind the butterscotch pecan and white chocolate ice creams. The base for a batch of tin roof is chillin' in the fridge now. That's vanilla ice cream with fudge ripple and chocolate covered peanuts. My fudge ripple is cooling now and I'll make the peanuts tomorrow. It's a bit more labor intensive with the add ins but it's for a special occassion. Kev's parents are coming into town this weekend. Hopefully they'll like it!

Thai Coconut Chicken Curry

I can't believe I forgot to post about the grand finale of my adventure through Thailand. I did make some curry. Thai Chicken Curry in Coconut Milk to be exact.



I came about this recipe by googling coconut milk recipes and it was one of the first ones that came up. I already had almost all of the ingredients on hand so it was a nobrainer to make. I added extra curry paste and threw in some frozen peas for some extra vegetation. Overall the recipe was ok. It tasted good sure, but it didn't really have any heat to it. I probably used too much coconut milk (I just used up what I had left) so that probably mellowed out the curry paste quite a bit. That was my only real complaint though and that's easily remedied by kicking it up a notch with the curry paste. I'll definitely try my hand at curry again.

One recipe leads to another...

I feel like I've started some sort of recipe chain reaction. First I made the Thai steamed snapper and then after that I realized I had most of the ingredients for Thai Lemon Shrimp. All I needed was some coconut milk and dinner was made!

And a tasty dinner it was! So incredibly simple to make. I just thawed out some shrimp, tossed it into a baggie with the marinade ingredients to get happy and then the actual cooking time was just a few minutes. Waiting for the udon noodles to cook was really the only time consuming thing but it was still just about 20 minutes to make dinner. Kev fussed over the shrimp tails but I told him if it mattered that much he could take them off before I cooked the shrimp. He didn't, so he can just shut his trap.:-p

Anyway, back to this chain reaction thing. So now I've got this coconut milk hanging out in my fridge that needs to be used up. It's tasty stuff and a fairly expensive ingredient so I definitely need to do something with it. I'm thinking maybe a curry since I have red curry paste now thanks to the steamed snapper. I've never made a curry before so this could be interesting. Thai was easy enough so maybe I can handle curry.

In other recipes that I've tried, this recipe from Martha Stewart via Serious Eats is pretty awesome. I'm mostly talking about the cauliflower. The salmon was fine, but the cauliflower blew me away. I'll never be afraid to cook with anchovies ever again. Try it, it'll make you really love cauliflower if you don't already.

Thai Steamed Snapper

Tonight's dinner was one of the better weight watchers recipes I've had. Tonight wasn't the first time that I've had it. My friend Jen made it last weekend when we came over for dinner and Kev and I just gushed over it. Spicy, flavorful, super filling and only 8 points! Nice!

I added some mushrooms to it when I made it. Mostly because I just like mushrooms but it added some extra bulk so there'd be enough for lunch tomorrow. Jen originally used Mahi Mahi when she made it. I used the snapper that's called for but I think I might've liked it with the Mahi Mahi better. I forgot the onion but I don't think that made much of a difference. I'll definitely make this more often. It's a easy way to make a tasty, healthy fish dish which I've been trying to eat more of lately.

ramen upgrade

Couple weeks ago I spotted this entry over at Serious Eats re: Ramen Hacks. It has never occurred to me to tamper with the salty, unhealthy goodness of ramen before, but why the hell not?

I sent the b/f to the store with a very specific list, snow peas, scallions, flank stank, soy sauce and beef flavored ramen. He came back with sugar snap peas (so very very sweet and tasty) and cup o' noodles. Not the ramen in a bag... erm... okay! Make it work time.

Quickly steamed the sugar snap peas, marinated cut up steak in soy sauce, and barely fried it. Let the cup o' noodles hang out for one minute with some hot water, drain, stir together, dash more of soy sauce and presto! Not ten minutes later (including prep time) dinner was served.



One minor change I would have made would be the cup o' noodles. Since those come pre-seasoned (whereas the bag o' ramen has a separate seasoning package) I couldn't control the salt, plus I got a little soy sauce happy, and everything came out pretty intensely seasoned. Now I've got to start planning my next ramen hack... chicken? Ramen n' cheese?

Also sorry for the bad photography. I assure you it looked much more pleasing than in the photo.