They say Variety is the spice of life, but in my house, It's probably cumin.

It's no secret that I love bargains. Especially bargains involving food/kitchen stuff/cutlery, etc; and, well, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I like to share my finds so you all can score some sweet deals too. Well, here you go (oh, this really only applies to lincolnites, unless there is a natural foods store in your area with a sweet bulk foods section): Buy your spices at "open harvest" on 16th and south street (West A dad, BorK, I'm pretty sure you dudes already do this). It is absolutely ridiculous. I was running low on quite a few things so I went to stock up and didn't even come close to spending ten bucks. I paid less than 20 cents for about 30 bay leaves, you don't even want to know how much cumin I got. a couple of years ago,Wifeshow hooked me up with some little hinged glass jars from hobby lobby that I store the spices in. It makes for easy finding and it gives the illusion of organization.

ok, foodstuff: I made some chicken stir fry about a week ago that turned out really well. I really like chinese food, but it's hard to replicate at home unless you have a wok (high heat and surface area are your best friends here, which makes it difficult to achieve with an ordinary pan.) . I do not. so this is what I do: Prep all of your ingredients so that you are ready to stir fry, you don't want to be doing any more knife work once you start. Get a cast iron pan super hot and then coat the bottom with some veg or canola oil. assuming you are using meat, add your meat and stir fry for about 2 minutes. assuming that you made a sauce of soy, hoisin, sugar, and oyster sauce for your chicken thigh meat to rest in, add a healthy shot of this to the pan and let it glaze the meat. remove the meat and set aside. Rinse out your pan, let it heat up again and then do the same thing but with your choice of veg. Go a couple minutes and then add the meat, a bit more sauce and then you are done once the sauce is as thick as you like. How's that for a super vague recipe? I thought so too.

ok moving on: I got a little grill happy last week. made some sliders out of elk meat. added some bacon extract to keep the elk juicy. Bacon seems to be best friends with game meat. kind of like Mr. "Q" and Ms. "U" (remember the letter people? I never bought in to that "quiet Questions crap, either). Also grilled some thinly sliced potates dressed in olive oil, salt, and peps. kind of a cross between a fry and a chip. good stuff.

the last dish you see is a recipe I tried from my splendid table book called plumped ginger caramel shrimp. Sounds weird, right? not always...it's delicious.

so good in fact, that I am imploring you to make some...tonight! Oh, and you might want to stop by open harvest first and pick up some chile powder, it uses a ton in the brine, but don't skimp, it's worth it.

DISH recommends:

hinged glass jars: Like I said before, I got mine at hobby lobby, they're like a buck a piece, and hold a fair amount. I need as much help as i can get organizing things. my life may be chaotic, but if you saw my spice cupboard (which is getting bigger and bigger), you would think I was a zen master.

plumped ginger caramel shrimp (adapted from the splendid table cookbook.)

Brine

1/2 cup kosher salt

1/2 cup sugar

1/3 cup chile powder

2 quarts warm (not hot) water

1.5 pounds large frozen shrimp, preferably in shells

Saute

4 large garlic cloves

4 inch piece of ginger

4 tbs canola oil

1/2 tsp blk pepper

4 tsp sugar.

Blend salt sugar and chile powder in a big bowl with the water. give the shrimp a spicy bath for 20 minutes. mince the ginger and garlic together. after the 20 min, drain shrimp, peel off shells, and pat dry. heat the oil in a saute pan (12 inch) over med-high heat. stir in the ginger/garlic, and black pepper, you can throw in a sprinkle of salt if you like. cook for a minute, stirring constantly. blend in the sugar and keep stirring until garlic is pale gold. don't let the pieces get dark, you'll regret it, maybe not as much as this, but... (never gets old...sigh...)

Drop in the shrimp and stir for another 1-2 minutes until the shrimp are turning pink and barely firm. served mine with jasmine rice, noodles would also be good. pieces.

I usually have egg on my face.

Eggs are pretty much the most perfect food in the world. You can do a million things with them, they are very compact, and when moderately consumed, they are insanely good for you. Wifeshow and I eat our fair share of them. The insanely face-melting breakfast sandwich pictured at left is made up of blanched asparagus, bechamel sauce, jarlsburg cheese, bacon, poached egg, and more bechamel (wife wanted me to note that you need to serve this dish on a big plate as it is insanely messy). Hey, back off! We walk to the store to get our own groceries on sunday, we can do the extra calories, that's my theory anyway. Which, by the way, we have been enjoying quite a bit. It's a couple of miles to get there, and we have a little two wheeled cart that we take to put our groceries in. I thought it would be worse than it is, but it is actually really nice. You get to have a visit with your favorite person, exercise, and you also get to look a little bit homeless, yay! sometimes you find change on the way there (although yesterday, all I found was a rusty penny and a used syringe, don't worry mom. didn't pick it up...this time--talking about the penny here).

the other dish is a cauliflower curry with perfumed basmati rice. Yeah, we eat a lot of curry. and eggs, maybe we should put them together....hmmmm.

perfumed basmati:

prepare basmati rice as you normally would, but throw these treats into the mix:

5 cloves, whole

1 cinnamon stick, broken up

healthy pinch of cumin seeds

2 cardamom pods, bruised

2-3 saffron threads (if you can get them).

after rice is done fluff it up, and then add a few glugs of olive oil (or ghee) and then stir it up. you won't be disappointed. watch out for the aromatics (cloves, cardamom, cin stick), you can easily pick them out, or eat them...if you're a little bit dangerous. (hold on tight)

tart attack!

I didn't notice until just now that two of these pics are soups. haha, well, whatever I guess. So we eat a lot of soup, big deal right? YES! it is a big deal. Beethoven once said, "only the pure of heart can make a good soup." Obviously we never met.

I have been receiving copious amounts of asparagus from my boss's mom. They come into the bakery on saturdays and bring goodies from their farm. I was wondering what to do with all of it when I came across a recipe for cream of asparagus soup. It was in a jamie oliver cookbook (which usually never fails me) so I figured I'd try it out. You start off by sauteing onions and celery together until they become translucent and turn sweet. Then you add only the stalks (reserving the tips of the asparagus for later) of the asparagus and about a quart of chicken stock, bring to a boil, and then turn down to simmer (for about 20 minutes). there isn't actually any cream in the dish, you just get a really creamy consistency from pulsing all the ingredients in a blender. After you have blended the soup, return it to the pot and throw in your reserved asparagus tips. cook them until they are tender-crisp. now, you are almost ready to plate (when you "plate" a soup, is it called bowling?). Garnished with a poached egg and toast and it was pretty much all over after that. the velvety egg yolk melds well with the freshness of the soup and you get an intense blast of spring in your mouth. the only other way I know how to achieve this is by swallowing a slinky, and I would NOT recommend that.

Let's see...other soup is a french tomato soup. It's a tomato soup that's heavy on the onions and seasoned with herbs de provence (dried basil, thyme, fennel seed, and oregano.) and then garnished with chevre. I placed a crostini in the bottom before I ladled in the soup. and then I had another. I love all things crunchy. especially things of the crouton variety.

that tart of a dish you see on the right is actually an almondy jam tart. It's super simple, just flour butter sugar, ground almonds, pinch o' salt pulsed in the queez and then pressed into a tart pan (with a removable bottom) and baked for about 15 min. After that, you just spread jam over the top and throw it back into the oven until it starts to bubble. Just let it cool...hot jam is actually, pretty hot, trust me.

DISH recommends:

tart pan with removable bottom: You can do lots of treats in here. Quiches, tarts, cakes, pies, whatever you want. I thought I would never use this but I actually use it quite a bit. this is just the first one I could find, maybe there are better deals out there, maybe not. I can't remember how much I paid for mine.

gelato ticket

I'm the type of person that can't stand to have things in my possession that I don't use (just ask my gallbladder). I hate knowing that something is just lying around gathering dust, when it could be put to good use. So, naturally, I had become quite frustrated with owning an ice cream maker. Honestly, up until last week, we had used it once or twice in three years, and that's just ridiculous. I decided that it was way past time to give it another try and so on our day off together, we made some mint chocolate chip gelato. Gelato is an italian ice cream that uses infused milk and is a bit more dense than traditional ice cream. you make a custard and whisk it into the milk and then add it to your ice cream maker. I'm really glad that I tried making this because now that I have the method down, I will experiment with it a lot.

Last thursday, It was so nice outside that I decided to have some grill time. Meat treats over high heats equals tasty eats. I made an adobo spice rub out of garlic, lime zest, paprika, black pepper, cumin, kosh, and olive oil (at least I think that's all that I put in). Rubbed it on some chicken breasts and then seared them over high heat and then backed them off to finish cooking. ok, I'd like to take a moment here to talk about why spice pastes rule. well, for starters, they're a huge time saver. I have nothing against marinades, per se, it's just that they take so much time. a spice paste crams all that flavor into a concentrated form that you can basically cook with in little to no time at all. the difference in time is like comparing riding a bus in mexico (just ask wifeshow, now THAT was a fun day!) to traveling warp speed on the enterprise (sorry, I saw star trek over the weekend, good flick, recommends it.) ok, sorry, back to the chicken...I sliced them thin and served them on some grilled tortillas with red cabbage, grilled scallion, avocado, and lime squirtys. Delicious!

ok, last pic. Wife and I made pasta on sunday. If there is one recipe I post that I really want you to try, it's this one. The difference is totally ridiculous, in a good way. ok, maybe not this ridiculous (ok, seriously, well, two things. That is a frisbee hanging from her belt, I know because I had that frisbee and she is wearing a wedding ring, which means her husband probably took that picture. I'm totally speechless.) but still... It really doesn't take that much time, and it is so worth it. Having a roller will definitely help your cause, you could try it without, but it will be a lot of work.

Tuscan Pasta dough (variation from bon appetit)

1.25 cup durum semolina flour

2 eggs

1 tbs olive oil (eyeballed it)

1 tbs salt (" ")

2 methods here. You can mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl, make a well in the center and add the wet ingredients, using a fork to blend everything together top make a rough dough, or you can just whizz it into a food processor and jog the button a couple of times to get the same result (I use to do it by hand...I use to think I was being old school, now I know I was just being silly.) turn your dough out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth, about 5 minutes. cut it in two, make balls out of it and flatten them into disks. cover with plastic wrap and let it rest for 30 minutes. ( If you are going to be more than half an hour, knock it into the fridge until you can get to it later, just take it out about 30 minutes before you plan on rolling.

Set pasta machine to the widest setting( usually "1") and feed the dough through about 4 times (or until super smooth). now cut your dough in two. Cover one half with a towel and take the other half and feed it through the next narrowest setting about 2 times, switching to the next setting after every 2nd time. (I did this until I got to setting"5", the second to last setting.) the pasta will be about 2 feet long and pretty thin, like 1/16 inch (make sure to lay it on a lightly floured surface and lightly flour the top also, this will make cutting and unraveling way easier!). Now loosely roll your pasta strip until it looks like a scroll of dough. cut into desired width with a sharp knife. Repeat process with remaining dough (s). You can either hang your pasta to dry or let it dry on parchment for about 20-30 minutes. Now you are ready for the sauce of your choice, or veggies, or just olive oil and parmesan. make sure to only boil for about 3-4 minutes, time may vary slightly, serve al dente. enjoys!

DISH recommends:

A pasta machine/roller. This one is made by norpro. about 40 clams. they usually make good stuff. I think I have an "imperia." but don't want to go check right now. while this does have the potential to be a "dust gatherer," this pasta dough is so good, you won't want to return to the land of the inferior dried stuff. use it well.

keeping chickens in business

Crazy busy week at work. although, I have a sinking feeling that every week is going to be like that from now on, at least until the market is over. We are making ridiculous amounts of bread and it seems that we keep getting more and more accounts. I guess that's a really good thing though, job security and whatnot. I did break up the week a bit by taking a day off for our anniversary. We had a really good time, did some gardening made some great food, rode the scoot. I didn't get around to making pork belly, so I settled for making some gougere (cheese puffs). They are super easy and are a great little snack or appetizer. The steak oscar turned out pretty decent, but I think that i kind of screwed up the sauce. Oh well, still tasty, but it was a little rich. The curry dish you see is actually a variation from a new cookbook called "how to eat supper." It is from the npr radio show "the splendid table." I have made a couple of recipes from it so far and have really enjoyed it. I don't necessarily like the layout (the recipes usually start on one page and end on another), but that's probably me just being picky.

other newsicals: garden is still doing pretty well. I don't think that my okra is going to happen so it will be replaced with beans or something. Wife and I are working on planning out the "Viking Party." just wait...it's going to be epic.

Dish Recommends:

"How to eat supper," the splendid table cookbook. So far, I like this book. I'll let you know if it lets me down, but I don't see that happening.

ps..will try to post cheese puff recipe later in day, too busy right now.