Dinner

We had Margot and Joanna over for dinner, and I made chicken adobo, rice, pumpkin fritters, no-need bread, chapatis for the adobo, a cheese plate and lemon mousse pie. We played a lot of Nintendo Wii and watched Curb Your Enthusiasm. Mike and I had a double TKO in Wii boxing, it was amazing. Margot and Joanna each scored a run and tied in Wii Baseball.

Fritters:

Bread:

Ooh gourmet!

English blue cheese, brie, honecomb, quince paste. We also had white truffle porcini mushroom oil and hawaiian black sea salt for the no-knead bread.

New placemats cause the old ones were getting grungy.

Fight!

Swing batta!

Keep your fork, there's pie!

Lemon Mousse Pie

I had another batch of the yummy lemony crust from the lemon tart last week, so I thawed it and made it into a lemon mousse pie.

Weighting down the crust to prebake it. The rice helps keep the dough from puffing up.

Dissolving gelatin in lemon juice, mixed with rind. I then creamed together confectioners sugar and cream cheese, then added to the lemon gelatin. I next whipped heavy cream, and folded the two batters together after the gelatin had set for 15 minutes in the fridge. The pie had to sit for 2 hours after assembling.

Pie crust cookies are always a good leftover (and they make good garnishes!)

Chapati

I made chapatis to go with the adobo I made for the dinner party. Here's the dough -- almost 1:1 whole wheat flour to water, plus curry powder (like a tbsp or so). Let sit for 2 hours. It's very wet dough so you need a lot of extra flour to roll it out with.


Frying -- cast iron pan, chapati is brushed with ghee on both sides.

Oooh yes. Easy to reheat in the microwave.

Pumpkin Fritters

Here is one of the dishes I made for our dinner with Joanna and Margot! A nice, quick appetizer.

These were soo tasty! Pumpkin, flour, curry powder, cardamom, salt, pepper, egg. Fried in peanut oil and salted at the end. Yum!

Chole - Chickpea curry

Last night Mike needed some sinus relief, so I made a chickpea curry called chole, with shrimp added. I used ginger, garlic, chilis, red pepper paste, onions, curry poweder, garam masala, chickpeas and water from the can, and shrimp.

It was very spicy!



I had a craving for a sunny side up egg, so I added that on top. The creaminess made such a perfect contrast to the curry. Egg and curry = friends4evar

Weight Training

Cleaned the house to warm up! Gonna have Joanna and Margot over tomorrow for Chicken Adobo, curried chapatis and a secret dessert (actually I just haven't planned it yet, heh).

Workout A
Bench 4x10 @ 20
Overhead lift 3x10 @ 20
Squats 4x10 @ 20 <-- improvement!
Abs 3x20
Supermans 3x15
Curls 3x10 @ 10 per arm
Tris 3x10 @ 10 per arm <-- improvement!

Lifting

A nice, solid guide on Strength Training. This blog looks promising, I like it!

http://stronglifts.com/how-to-build-muscle-the-definitive-guide/

Runnin

Weight Training

Cleaned house and did laundry as warm up!

Workout B
Incline press 3x10 @ 10
Pullups 5x5
Lunges 3x10 @ 20
Calf raises 4x20
Abs 3x20

I am trying to convince Mike that we need to adopt a stray kitty I have named Snow Cat. Any advice appreciated!

Runnin

2 Miles completed today:

Weight Training

I ran 1 mile to warm up today and hit a new personal best mile! 10:13!



Workout A
Bench 4x10 @ 20
Overhead lift 3x10 @ 20
Squats 4x10 @ 10-20-10-20
Abs 3x20
Supermans 3x15
Curls 3x10 @ 10 per arm
Tris 3x10 @ 10 with both arms

Tri Tip Roast

Tri tip is not my favorite but I've never made it and it was a good price at Trader Joe's. We also got some wine, this is a bordeaux, which I've never had before. I enjoyed it. We're going to try working on our wine education. I know that I love Nero d'Avola, syrrah and vin santo, but we want to try more. Mike likes Cabs.


Coco wants steak.

Here it is after searing and baking in the oven until 130 degrees. Let stand for 10 minutes until almost 150ish.


Perfect.

Sorry for the flash but it was otherwise too dark. Tri tip, rice noodles with broccoli and sesame oil, and a side of palm hearts. Sauce is oyster sauce, peanut sauce and hoisin mixed.

Palm Hearts

My first recipe (well, I only made part of the recipe) from the French Laundry cookbook Jeremy let me borrow. I want to go to dinner there soon but it's a couple hundred dollars for all the courses. I think Mike and I might go there for Christmas but we'll have to see what's available.

I left out the marrow beans from this recipe because I didn't want to do anything fussy, but I loved the idea of coating the palm hearts in panko. I had both, so it was a simple thing to make. Coated in flour, egg, then panko and fried in peanut oil. This is my new favorite oil: light, flavorless, and high smoke point.

These were soooo good. Crispy, briny, and kinda like artichoke hearts. Some times almost creamy and nice and salty. Mike was reminded of scallops.

Suppli

OK the main reason I wanted to make risotto was to have leftovers, to make suppli!! Or arancini, but that's the sicilian version. Basically, these are balls of risotto stuffed with cheese, breaded and then fried. YUM OH MY GOD.

Traditionally they have sauce, meat, even peas inside, but I wanted just cheese. Couldn't get a good pic of the inside but I tried. I think these were stellar. I made the sauce w/ tomato, tomato puree, basil, oregano, garlic and olive oil.

Coconut Pudding

This was supposed to be a gelatin/jello kind of dessert but it never solidified. I guess not enough gelatin. I boiled coconut milk (the light version), vanilla, anise and pink food coloring with some cane sugar.


Poured into vintage tin molds after straining out the anise seed. It was a very good pudding but not what I expected. I served it with chocolate covered bananas.

Shrimp Stuffed Squid

I marinated baby squid and shrimp in Hot Lime sauce, mango chili vinegar, chilis, lemon and mint for two hours. Then I chopped up the shrimp and tentacles, and stirfried them quickly in the marinade and added some breadcrumbs.



Then I stuffed the squid and broiled them. They were soooooo good! This recipe was from the Silver Spoon (although it was modified).

Negra Modelo Chicken

My current favorite beer is Negra Modelo, and we had one bottle left so I made beer chicken.

I browned the chicken first (only salt and pepper on it) and then poured in the beer and braised for 30 minutes. At the end, I poured off the beer and browned the chicken again.

Served with pasta.

Lemon Tart

Another recipe from the Silver Spoon cookbook. I have to say I was disappointed in the filling -- maybe I used the wrong pan tho, because I used a removable bottom tart pan and my filling leaked out. My bottom crust was very soggy and the filling was very concentrated because so much leaked out. But it was extremely tasty!

Here is the crust. I am going to use it for a lot of things. Oddly, there was no water in the recipe. I had to add some! It wouldn't hold together with just butter and egg yolks. It contained a lot of sugar, and lemon peel as well.


Even adding a scant 1/4 cup of ice water, it was still crumbly.


Here is the filling, basically butter, eggs, sugar, lemon juice and lemon peel.


Baked. You can see the second pie plate under to catch what leaked out.


Dusted w/ confectioner's sugar.


Food porn close-up!

Flat iron Steak

This is my new favorite cut of meat. This cut was only recently "discovered": flat iron cut

It's still nice and cheap, so buy it now! I marinated it in Hot Lime sauce from Jeremy (thanks!!), mango chili vinegar and a bit of soy sauce for about two hours. Melted some butter in my Le Creueset (thanks, Mom!) and seared it for 4-5 minutes a side. Nice and RARE. I think I heard it bleat for momma.


Paired with asparagus risotto:

Asparagus Risotto

My first try at making risotto. I think next time I will not boil the asparagus, I like them a lot crispier. I'll just fry them at the beginning when I sweat the onion and garlic.

Coating the arborio rice w/ the butter:


Chopping the asparagus. See how limp? Not my favorite.


Adding ladle-fulls of stock to the rice. Took about 20 minutes and a lot of attention:


All absorbed. Added parmesan at the end. It was very creamy, toothsome and tasty!