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Sunday, April 11, 2010

Linguini with Lemon-Roasted Asparagus and Goat Cheese

I love asparagus!  Really, I do.  As a child, my experience with it was limited to the canned stuff smothered in cheese.  I happen to be a fan of cheese, but canned asparagus is just unpleasant (think mouthful of snot).  So I was surprised when I had fresh asparagus for the first time as an adult.  Ever since then, I've been happily experimenting with any new recipe I come across.  I saw this liniguini recipe last week on CRAFTzine.com and knew we'd have to try it soon.  Bonus: asparagus is in season so it's fresh and cheap!


This was a really simple and delicious recipe.  The veggie prep included washing and cutting the asparagus and slicing shallots.  The citrus marinade took only a couple of minutes, mostly spent mincing garlic cloves.  I zested and juiced a lemon and mixed it in with olive oil, garlic, and dijon mustard along with some salt and pepper.  The marinated veggies roasted for seven minutes which was exactly the amount of time the pasta needed to cook.  Then we tossed it all together and topped it with goat cheese and parsley.  Yum!  And it was all done in less than thirty minutes (Suck it, Rachel Ray).  Download the recipe in PDF here.       

 Zack chopping veggies

cry face.  shallots ain't no joke.

citrus-y goodness

roasted veg

Ta-da!


Saturday, April 10, 2010

Salmon & Couscous Packages

Spring time is here and it is time to step away from the heavy dishes. Tonight we dined on a recipe from The Diabetes Seafood Cookbook (don't worry neither of us have contracted diabetes just yet). The recipe was cooked in foil pouches like we had last week, but rather than a stew the couscous soaked up all the liquid. Laura and I are both big fans of dill and this dish delivered on that taste. The one thing we didn't like was the finished couscous. The liquid used for cooking was white wine and wine flavored couscous just isn't all that tasty. Next time we try this recipe we will either use just water or veggie broth in place of the wine.

We give this one 3 stars for now, but we did end up throwing out the couscous.

dill and sour cream, what more could you ask for?

 couscous underneath fish on top (wine to come)

the recipe side was cucumber with sour cream, we decided to add some more dill (it was a good call)
fish = good; couscous = bad

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Minted Potato and Chickpea Curry

Tonight's dinner comes from The Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker page 25. An upside to unemployment is that I can watch a slow cooker all day long, but this dish didn't need any babysitting at all. The chickpeas cooked all day in the cooker and most the rest of the ingredients were added about an hour before eating.

The dish was good, but could be better. First the potatoes needed more than the hour the recipe called for. Next time, we will either cut them into smaller pieces or give it more time. Also, to give it a bit more flavor we really should have gone with fresh tomato rather than canned. We omitted the fresh cilantro since neither of us care for the stuff. Next time we may try adding dry parsley with the spices to make up for the lack of cilantro. The fresh mint and jalapeno were particularly nice in the final dish.

We give this one 3.5 out of 5 stars, for now.

the ingredient list was smaller than most of our dishes

 sloooooow cookin'

we served it with brown rice

Ramen Radiator

Moore Food, Please is back from our short break, work woes have kept us busy and too exhausted to post recently. We do have a few dishes from the last few weeks to write about and hopefully we will have them all up soon.

Last night we tried a recipe from the Alton Brown book I'm Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0 and it was yummy. The recipe was Ramen Radiator (page 169). The recipe reminded me of the "silver turtles" I used to make when I was in scouts as a kids. The cooking method had us wrap everything up in aluminum foil and let the liquid cook the goodies with steam in the oven.

We will definitely revisit this recipe, with a few minor changes. The final dish was a little sweet for our taste, so we will probably omit the honey, cut back on the mirin and slightly increase the amount of soy sauce. We give this one 4 out of 5 stars, and with a little work it could easily become 5.

cremini mushrooms were caramelized in olive oil and toasted sesame oil

the goodies that were going into the pouches

what isn't visible is the half "load" of ramen noodles under the fish

we decided to eat like grown ups for once

mmmmmmmm