veggies steal the show again!

Lamb ribs with a salt and rosemary dry rub

Roasted potatoes

Brussel sprouts sauteed with garlic and bacon

starring corn

The corn side-dish stole the show tonight. My boyfriend said he just took all the words in bold from The Flavor Bible and threw those ingredients in with the corn (it probably helped that two of those ingredients - bacon and cilantro - are two of my boyfriend's favorite things). The combination was wonderful, and definitely something we will make again.

Trout with a sage brown butter sauce

Crispy oven-baked potato "chips"

Spaghetti squash with parmesean cheese

Corn: corn, bacon, cilantro and hot pepper

lobster tail with risotto

Our friend from Australia is visiting, and since he was so nice and fixed my tripod so I can stop whining that my pictures are crooked, we thought it only fair to make him a fancy shmancy dinner.

Lobster tail cooked in chicken and vegetable broth served on top of crimini mushroom and pea risotto

beet pancakes

This morning we had a variation on one of my favorite breakfasts we made last fall: beet pancakes. Seriously, I have been thinking about these for months, and they are just as good as I remember them. Our CSA starts up again next week, and my fingers are crossed for more beets...

Beet pancakes: beets, horseradish, flour, egg, bacon and dill, topped with asiago cheese or wasabi mayonnaise

Pork sausage patty

Tomato slice with an over-easy egg

steakhouse

New York Strip

Parsnip puree

Beet greens sauteed with garlic and onion

Yellow squash with basil and parsley

one, two, three, breakfast

Pork sausage patty

Spaghetti squash with aged gouda

Over easy egg

semi-homemade

My boyfriend and I have not had much success making our own pizza dough. So when we feel like an easy pizza dinner, we aim for a small but important step above frozen: store-bought (but fresh!) plain cheese pizza to which we add our own toppings.

Pizza with pepperoni, cremini mushrooms, olives, onion, "real" mozzarella, oregano and thyme

fish & chips

Fish: halibut, panko breadcrumbs, parsley and dill

Chips: shoestring potatoes, carrots and radishes

Grilled leeks

Mix of collards, mustard greens and spinach sauteed with red wine vinegar

how to effortlessly make a perfect runny egg

This morning my boyfriend experimented with a new egg technique, and it worked out amazingly well. If you want to exert zero effort striking the balance between an egg that is cooked but with a yolk that is runny, you need to try this:

1) place slices of bread in hot pan
2) crack an egg over each slice, so that one yolk lands on each slice of bread
3) turn to low heat, cover, wait 10 minutes

The end result is a perfectly runny, slightly over-easy egg served on toast that has absorbed a bit of the egg flavor (from the white that seeped through). Having the bread underneath the egg lets enough heat through to cook the egg, but helps to avoid the dreaded over-cooking.

Perfect egg on Tuscan round

Warm Capresse salad: grape tomatoes, mozzarella, fresh basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, crispy home-made bacon bits

one pan, five minutes

We were out enjoying the beautiful weather with friends, having some beer, and I turned to my boyfriend and said "We can't have crap again for dinner". (The odds are high that beer with friends will lead to bar food for dinner, and last night we had nachos, the night before burgers. These were both meals we made at home, and, don't get me wrong, our burgers were kind of fantastic, but I couldn't stand the thought of another greasy meal of that variety). By the time we got home it was after 8:30...and my boyfriend had this beautiful, light and tasty meal on the table literally five minutes later.

Pan-seared Halibut with carrots and leaks sauteed with white wine, finished with fresh dill

classic breakfast

Now that we have an herb garden, my goal is to include at least one of our fresh home-grown herbs in every meal. This morning the herb we chose was oregano. For a lot of the herbs we normally use dried (like oregano), it always comes as a pleasant surprise how fragrant they are fresh. Really, the smell is intoxicating!


Two over-easy eggs on toasted Tuscan bread, served with crispy bacon and a potato and cherry tomato hash, finished with grated Asiago cheese.

team work

My boyfriend decided to make a ham/cabbage/radish hash for dinner tonight, but we couldn't decide what to have with it. My boyfriend initially wanted either beans or rice, but those were the last things I wanted after having a burrito for lunch. We talked about grits as a possibility for a while, but then it came to me - we had weird sesame pancakes from K & S in our freezer (seriously, if you go to a vaguely sketchy international market like K & S and don't buy random weird things to try, you are doing something wrong).

I absolutely loooooved these pancakes. We didn't get them as puffy as the picture on the packaging, but they had that wonderful chewy quality that I associate with dim sum while still being crispy on the outside. I will probably dream of these pancakes tonight, and in that dream they will be lightly dusted with powdered sugar, with maybe a drizzle of dark chocolate.....mmmmmmmm.....


Ham steak, cabbage, radish and banana pepper hash served on a fried sesame pancake

green eggs & ham

Any time the secret ingredient is eggs, ham, or something green, it goes without saying that either the Iron Chef or the challenger will make a dish that is a play on green eggs and ham. Well tonight it was my boyfriend's turn, and the secret ingredient was the ham steaks we get from our CSA that we never really know what to do with. (Or, given how much of it we ate between the eggs and the side salad, maybe the secret ingredient was arugula?) Whimsy aside, this was a fantastic breakfast-for-dinner, and definitely makes up for the failure that was our egg-in-potato from last week. This meal was completely and utterly satisfying, but not at all heavy - in other words, it was perfect.

Sunny side up egg covered with arugula

Garlic, shallot, horseradish, wasabi mayonnaise, thyme and sage (from our garden!) spread

Ham steak

Served with corn bread and a salad of arugula, red and yellow cherry tomatoes, olive oil and balsamic vinegar

risotto success!

This is not the first time we've made risotto, but this was the first time it came out absolutely perfectly. I think this will be a turning point - we will be making this a lot more now that we have mastered the technique. As my boyfriend said, risotto isn't about following a recipe or exact quantities, it's about understanding what needs to happen to the rice (which is mainly that it needs to absorb moisture slowly).

I should also say that the arugula (my idea!) was fabulous on top. The white wine we used was on the sweet side, and the pepperiness of the arugula was a perfect foil for the sweetness of the wine and the overall creaminess (because when your risotto is a success, it is sooooooo creamy!!!).


Pork chop

Risotto (arborio rice, garlic, red onion, chicken stock, white wine, butter, peas and parmesean cheese) finished with arugula

lo mein

Lo mein noodles with red onion, garlic cabbage, broccoli, spinach, shitake mushrooms, egg & cilantro

not just any baked potato

Earlier this week I saw something awesome on the internet (maybe on foodgawker?...you know you look at food online too much when you can't remember your source...): a baked potato, hollowed out, then used as a bowl for breakfast. The key is cracking an egg directly into the potato bowl and then baking so the egg gets cooked sunny-side up in the potato. I know - sounds amazing.

Unfortunately, I have no idea where I saw this, and even if I did there is little chance we would have really followed the recipe, because it sounds so straight-forward. But - I'm sure you see where this is going - our baked potato breakfast-for-dinner did not live up to expectations. Don't get me wrong, it tasted good (because really you can't go wrong with the flavors inside our potatoes), but the potatoes didn't quite cook as well as we would have liked, and one of the potatoes completely fell apart during the hollowing process. I think the secret is that the potatoes need to be cooked (and maybe cooled?) before-hand.

We will be trying this again, and maybe next time we will be more successful on the technical side, and that will also translate into a more beautiful final product. (Clearly what I saw online looked much much much better than this, which explains why it was so inspiring, while this is...not so inspiring).

Baked potato filled with pork sausage, spinach, green onion, tomato, and a sunny-side up egg, topped with asiago cheese

gooey on the inside, fresh and crunchy on the outside

Quesadilla with pork roast, a blend of Italian cheeses and tomato

Topped with radish, jicama and cilantro slaw and salsa verde

can't get enough of that slaw!

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. We really did eat a radish, jicama and cilantro slaw again tonight (making this the third night in a row where these ingredients have played a prominent role). What can I say, the combination is amazing. Not only is the crunchiness extremely satisfying, but it is delightfully bright, which is exactly what we are in the mood for with this sudden burst of 80 + degrees weather. Tonight that punch of brightness was necessary to push our otherwise wintery steakhouse meal into spring.

For our other side we took the tart-making technique acquired this past fall during what I like to call "butternut squash tart mania", and made a delicious tart with whatever we had in the fridge that seemed like a good combination. I don't normally plug brands on the blog, but it has to be said that the Trader Joes pie crusts are incredible. First, they are easy to work with, which is important given that the key to this tart-making technique is combining two store-bought crusts into a ball, rolling the whole thing out, then folding the edges over the ingredients. These crusts are very durable and resilient (and we do have basis for comparison, as this whole process was much more difficult when we used another brand of crust). Second, they have come out perfectly every time (even tonight when the tart was slightly underdone it tasted great). So Trader Joes, if you wanted to send some free crusts my way I'll gladly talk about how awesome they are again and again and again...

New York Strip cooked to a perfect just-below-medium-rare

Slaw: julienned radish, jicama and carrot with cilantro and rice wine vinegar

Tart: oyster mushrooms, caramelized onions, banana pepper, pecorino cheese

whole fish - seriously, a whole fish.

Dinner tonight was madness...wonderful, wonderful, madness. And it all started with buying a whole fish at K & S...because you can do that kind of thing there. Now I have seen my boyfriend butcher meat many times now, but somehow this seemed different. I attribute this to the fact that the meat has never still been in possession of its face. I felt a bit better about the whole thing when I learned that the fish was already gutted and de-scaled. But still. Something with eyes was inside my fridge.

Anyways, even though I was a bit freaked out by the whole fish, the preparation ended up being extremely quick and easy (we're talking 15 minutes to get the fish prepared for cooking), and the end result was great (because isn't everything made outside on the grill great?), we just had to be extra vigilant to avoid swallowing bones.

On tin foil, layer red cabbage, water cress, daikon radish and green onion

Mix together radish, jicama, green onion, cilantro (aka last night's leftover taco toppings), garlic and olive oil and stuff inside fish (in this case, red snapper)

Place fish on tin foil with layered goodness and wrap

Put on hot grill until fish is nice and flaky

starting the day off right

Fluffy scrambled eggs topped with Grana Padano Stravecchio Oro del Tempo cheese

Pork sausage sauteed with red onion and oyster mushrooms

Toasted Italian Round with butter

chicken soft tacos

It's spring!! The weather could not have been more beautiful today, and I think we were inspired by this perfect sunny day and the clear end of winter when we were thinking about what to make for dinner tonight - we were drawn to ingredients that would taste light and fresh (i.e., radishes, jicama and cilantro). Sure, I would never describe my weekly burrito at Qdoba as "light and fresh", but it is totally possible to make tacos that come out that way when you go light on the sour cream and cheese and heavy on the crunchy vegetable toppings.

I also need to point out that I took about 20 minutes taking pictures tonight. I am beginning to think that my particular food-porn fetish is ingredient-porn.

Cubed chicken breasts sauteed with banana peppers, garlic, red onion, chili powder and salsa verde

Black beans

Cilantro (we planted an herb garden today and it includes cilantro! in case the focal point in my photo wasn't an obvious clue, we loooove cilantro. so excited to grow our own!)

Jicama

Radishes

Mexican green onion

Tomato

Grana Padano Stravecchio Oro del Tempo cheese....wait, what???? Okay, so the cheese we used has the longest name ever because we received a fantastic surprise two days ago - a package of gourmet Italian cheeses courtesy of my boyfriend's mom! I used to think cheese-by-mail was sketchy, but now I am totally a believer. This was a wonderful surprise - thanks Lynn!