So what have you cooked lately? (Year three!)

wild halibut, coated in minced parsley, juice and zest of one meyer lemon, juice and zest of two yuzu, normandy sea salt, coarse black pepper topped with a teeny drizzle of truffle oil...

served with steamed broccoli, cauliflower and carrots and brown rice.

it was a big hit!

aside from cheese products, the other thing i've been fond of recently is baking vegetables. the inspiration came from a bittman recipe involving parboiling then baking with butter and parmesan. it seems to work with various flavors, spices, and veggies. i want to try broccoli baked with wasabi butter for the next go-round.

(It's Burns Night tomorrow and I don't like haggis, so Neil is getting a haggis and I'm doing my favourite Scottish thing I don't eat often enough because he doesn't like venison, the freak)

since my bf has been off all month, i've been pretty lax on the cooking front (giant cheese balls aside). tonight i'm going to get back into it with a chicken stew since we've got the incredible non-shrinking bag of boneless thighs in the freezer taking up way too much room. i'm more excited about the superbowl cooking, though. in addition to the football-shaped port wine cheese thing, we're going to make asian pigs in a blanket. the cocktail-sized chinese sausages we found are to be credited/blamed for this inspired idea.

http://www.candyboots.com/wwcards/cardscans/salmonmousse.jpg

I had Mr. Jaq taste the final product. He took a big slurp of it, which surprised me 'cause I'd mentioned I thought it was hot. He was all mmmmmm, tastes nice but needs salt, OMG WOW!!!

Peeled and cut 1 eggplant into small dice (ended up maybe 2 cups?). Destem and chop the caps of 8 largish crimini mushrooms, also small dice. Saute eggplant and mushroom in olive oil until browned and eggplant is going mushy. Chop 3 sundried tomatoes (in olive oil). Chop 3 chipotles in adobo small and add to eggplant/mushroom. Add in a teaspoon of the adobo sauce from the can. Stir and let simmer for awhile. Add 2 cups of water, 1/2 tsp. oregano, 1/2 tsp. epazote, 1/2 tsp ground cumin. Let simmer for an hour or so, remove from heat and partially whiz up with an immersion blender - not too smooth. Add 1.5 to 2 cups cooked beans. Bring back up to a simmer and stir in 1 tbsp masa whisked into 1/3 cup cold water. Bring to a boil, drop to a simmer for 30 minutes. Adjust seasonings and add a dash or two of cayenne.

Thick, meaty texture from the eggplant and mushrooms, smokiness from the chipotles, not a whole lot of beans, and lots of chili heat.

For the other chili, how does the chili sauce figure into the dish as a whole? At the beginning? End?

I'm more used to what I think of as New Mexican chili or chile colorado? (though maybe it's not that, but just southwest or something) - basically you make a big pot of chili sauce and the beans are cooked separately. You might cook up some chunks of beef or pork in the chili sauce, but it's definitely more sauce than meat. If you want beans, a scoop gets added to your bowl. Generally served with tortillas.

I'm really pleased at how the eggplant/mushroom chili turned out. It's thick enough to use as a dip, like a chili baba ganoush.

lasagne is fairly labor intensive, but i can get four meals (for two) out of one batch so it evens out. plus once it's in the oven, that's it. you can forget about it and have a few glasses of wine. i haven't made any in quite a while, but i think we're having dinner guests this week so i might try doing the classic version with bechamel.

i've been craving middle eastern lately, so this past week i've been making hummus and foul and have just stocked up at kalustyan's so i can really go to town.

Sometimes I do make notes in cookbooks (reduce the qty of cloves in the peach butter by half) and sometimes I just go by memory (2x the garlic in the teriyaki marinade; don't substitute for the sherry).

I might make a project of perfecting the toll house cookie, though! That's a much more manageable undertaking.

that's what i thought it might be. delicious!

I did get a nice big bag of dried oregano for like 99 cents, though, that has much bigger pieces than I'm accustomed to seeing -- actual, visible leaves! And fewer pieces of stalk.

Things are iffier with things labeled ground beef or ground pork.

This is Wal-Mart's ground beef. They put 2 lbs. in a container that could hold 6 lbs., leaving a large area exposed to air, STRIKE ONE. The one time I bought ground chuck from them, the freshly-ground red look of the beef from the outside hid brown/smelly beef on the inside once it was crumbled up, STRIKE TWO. (They're using some sort of preservative on it, obv.) And also that one time, there were lots of inedible bits of bone and gristle, STRIKE THREE, HIT THE SHOWERS.

The local place, Vowell's, usually rotates between ground beef, ground chuck and ground round as a weekly special, and I buy about 10 lbs. when it's ground chuck's turn ($1.89/lb), repackage and freeze as needed. "Ground fresh several times daily" doesn't necessarily carry much weight with me, but when it's the sale item of the week and moving about as fast as they can grind it, I take it for true.

ARRRGH! i hate that. once upon a time in college, we had to get emergency beef rations during a barbecue and my housemate came back with like 4lbs of what turned out to be unusable steak from the supervalu.