I like food. Food tastes good.

Dear Food Diary,


Following a few boring food weeks, Sarah has been on a crazy recipe-creation kick.  Let me show you them:

That's a relatively standard crab cake (crab meat, mashed potatoes, scallions, cilantro, lime zest and minced chili, panko-crusted & pan fried) on top of a spectacular asian spring-greens salad with sweet quick-pickled red onions and mandarin oranges.  Her dressing was one lime's worth of zest/juice, the rice-vinegar & sugar pickling brine, soy sauce, mandarin orange juice, and olive oil.


It was great -- a sweet, crispy, tangy, slightly spicy feast.  


Tonight, she made a greek turkey-burger.

Unfortunately, turkey isn't all that photogenic.  But the burger was delicious.  Ground turkey tends to dry out, so Sarah increased the moisture content by grating a quarter onion into it and adding worchestershire sauce & lemon juice.


Last week we fell back on one of our favorite standbys: turkey potstickers and non-fried fried rice.

These snakes get high:

Thank You Consequence

Dear Food Diary,

Our theme for this year's Thanksgiving was "A Celebration of Pork."

For breakfast, Sarah made french toast and sausage.

Then we tried to recreate a tostones plate we had at Conga a few weeks back for lunch.  I ventured out into the cold temperate November air to deep fry some plantains on the grill's side burner while Sarah put the rest of the elements together. 

It really only turned out okay.  The pork could have used a little more marinade time, and the plantains were pretty meh.  Really, though, any time you combine lime, avacado, and cilantro it's hard to complain too much.

Sarah put a lot of thought into supper.

We closed out the pork-related portion of our "Celebration of Pork" with some Banh Mi.  It was awesome.

Darker with the day

Dear Food Diary,

Today I quartered a bunch of potatoes and onions, then dumped them in a baking dish with several cloves of garlic and some chopped carrots (plus salt & pepper).

I put that in a 325-degree oven and left the house for about 90 minutes, pretty sure that when I got back I'd either have the beginnings of a good meal or one hell of an insurance claim.

After 90 minutes, the house was still intact and our veggies were mostly roasted, so I added a few chunks from this bag of turds and tossed it all back in the oven.

Actually, that's half-frozen cubes of Surly Darkness from the bottle I opened a couple weeks ago.  Not a bag of turds. 

After 20 minutes back in the oven I added some unpronounceable sausage from a Ukrainian deli in Coon Rapids.  Then, 15 minutes of additional oven time later, there was this: