Anyway. I have been cooking a ton of colorful, fun dishes in the last few weeks, and my process is a bit like mad science. I really enjoy playing with contrasts--colors, flavors, scents, textures--and my favorites usually end up capturing some of each. Like this first one, a pear-apple chutney. I looked at a couple of different recipes for inspiration, but ultimately ended up just throwing in a bunch of stuff. It was de-li-cious and very versatile--served as an accompaniment to grilled chicken, combined with curry-cream cheese to make Indian-esque finger sandwiches, and even a stand alone with crackers. It started out like this:
And after bubbling away on the stove for the best part of an hour, ended up like this:
While we appreciate a good ol' fashioned hamburger as much as the next guy (Troy makes a seriously good burger) we don't typically eat a lot of red meat--for both health and environmental reasons. Every once in a while, though, red meat does creep into my cooking, and the colors in this szechuan beef stir-fry were just begging for a photograph!
It may sound hoaky or cliché, but we think that a lot of Asian food tastes better when eaten with chopsticks. Plus, we just like eating with chopsticks, and we happen to have some really pretty ones that we bought in Hong Kong.
See? Pretty, huh?
I do cook a lot these days, but I rarely fuss with the presentation and especially not on a weeknight with just Troy and I. That being said, on a recent Wednesday evening I made a fabulous tabbouleh with chicken and feta and decided to serve it on a bed of lettuces as one of my recipes suggested (I have a habit of looking at 2 or 3 and sort of combining them plus adding some dashes of my own). It turned out so pretty and entailed practically no extra effort.
It frequently happens that Troy comes into the kitchen to find that just about every pot, pan, bowl, and spoon is piled up in the sink and the surrounding counter and all that just to make a salad! (Kidding. Sort of.) I must say that he is usually a very good sport about it. He has also often been forced to wait an extra 10...20...60 minutes for a meal. (It turns out that I am an equally poor estimator of time in the kitchen as I am in other parts of my life, surprising huh?) "When will that be done?" "I don't know, 20 minutes?" It's almost never 20 minutes. However, every once in a while I pull off something brilliant using only one pot and ready in 15 minutes flat. The other night was just such a triumph--farfalle in pesto with chicken, artichoke hearts, and both sun-dried and fresh tomatoes. Molto, molto bene.
Dessert is not really one of my specialties, but every once in a while I venture out, like with this Coffee Coffee Cake (coffee cake with coffee in it). I include the photo not so much for the taste of the cake itself--it did taste really good, though the amount of sweetener (regular sugar, brown sugar, and honey) in it was truly horrifying--but rather it's mostly for my mom. My mom is a great cook and I credit her with laying the foundation for both my palate and interest in cooking. When we were kids, she always tried to make us eat a "balanced, colorful" diet, introduced interesting ingredients, and never made us a separate meal, but instead pretty much always had us eat what the adults were eating. Her one achilles heel, though, is the cake. She is the Queen of the Tilty Cake. She always wants to make layer cakes for our birthdays, and she spends whole days in the kitchen trying to make a cake that will just stand up straight and look...cake like. Frequently, however, her yummy cakes end up like the Leaning Tower and she has to prop them up using all manner of tricks. As it happens, I used a fluted silicone mold for my cake, so there was really no way for it to tilt, but once I constructed this elaborate support system for the saran wrap to protect the sticky topping during transit, it reminded me both of a circus tent and also of many of my mother's propped up cakes. Smile.
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