A weekend fit for a food blogger
A couple of months ago Shaun bought Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant flavors of a World-Class Cuisine, a cookbook of traditional Mexican food. This book has changed our lives in many ways, most notably that we eat things like chard and cactus now.
On Saturday night, we made roasted cactus salad, which is basically roasted cactus mixed in with salsa fresca (he calls this essential tomato-serrano salsa or something like that—everything is very essential). We ate this with shredded poached chicken (a whole chicken poached ourselves!) on soft corn tortillas. The cactus was cut into bite-sized pieces then roasted in the oven for about twenty minutes. Bayless warns that after a few minutes the cactus will give off a sticky substance, like okra does. And, what do you know, cactus actually tastes a bit like okra. I don’t like okra, so draw your own conclusions. Also with dinner on Saturday night we had sangria made with juice we squeezed with our own hands.
I really wanted to make kabobs, so on Sunday night we grilled shrimp, summer squash, green bell pepper, and red onion on skewers. I made a super-simple marinade of mostly lime juice and also salt, pepper, and vegetable oil (no olive oil on the grill pan! It smokes!). I’m not above telling you we loaded this on a plate and ate it all with our fingers. With glasses of wine of course. Here I learned that even though loading alternating pieces onto the skewer seems like a good (pretty) idea, you should really skewer each item separately, especially the meat, to compensate for differences in cooking time.
I made a fruit salad of (Georgia) peaches, blackberries (Shaun’s favorite), and strawberries (my favorite) with a bit of mint which we ate in crepes for breakfast yesterday (and I ate the rest with my lunch today). There are several recipes on Epicurious for minted fruit salads, but I didn’t really follow one in particular, figuring on about equal amounts of sugar and mint. As it turns out, if your mint is really fresh as mine was, you need very little. One recipe I looked at called for 1/4 cup of mint, which is just crazy. I processed two to three tablespoons of mint and sugar together and used maybe half of it, and I was still worried I had ruined the fruit. Next time I will use even less. Mint is really good with fruit so if you’ve never tried it, I would definitely recommend it.
Last night Shaun made maple-glazed salmon, asparagus, and quinoa for dinner. I don’t have any pictures of it because my camera battery was dead by this point. The maple glaze was a mixture of syrup and soy sauce, totally winged, and it turned out really well. If you haven’t tried quinoa try substituting it for rice or couscous in a recipe. It is very nutritious and tasty.
There are a few more photos at Flickr.
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