Recipe: Trout with Orzo

Last night we had morganlf and bellwethr over for dinner, which was lovely. I made the following, which was also lovely, if I do say so myself.

( Trout with Orzo )

(no subject)

As we head distinctly into late-fall/early-winter (yeah, I know, it's technically not till a month from now, but still), it's getting harder to cook from the produce box. Not impossible by any means, but harder.

That isn't a shock: when you have fresh tomatoes, green beans, sweetcorn, peaches, and so on, it's really not hard to make things tasty. There's also enough variety in spring and summer foods that you can eat only in-season without reapeating too often. Not so much the case now. Right now, the local options are essentially winter squash (pumpkin and butternut and delicata and sugarloaf and acorn), root vegetables (onions and carrots and potatoes and parsnips), winter greens, cabbage, apples and pears. It's actually a fair number of options, but all in the same categories, so it takes a lot more invention to keep it interesting. Squash with butter and brown sugar! With butter and sage! With olive oil and cilantro and minced chipotle peppers! In creamy soup! In chunky vegetable soup! In curry! In chili! Stuffed with meat and rice! And one looks forward so eagerly to the first snap peas and asparagus of spring.

Tonight: lamb chops with mint sauce, parsnips and carrots roasted with sesame and honey, cabbage slaw, sourdough rye bread. (The bread came from the farmer's market, not me, though.) The bread was really good dipped in the oil the chops were broiled in.

psa: lj backup

LJ is having server maintenance tomorrow. There's no reason to believe that this will cause any data loss, but it's a good reminder to back up, if you care about that sort of thing.

I use LJ Archive for Windows. It backs up posts and comments. There are other programs out there that you can find by Googling, but I've never tried any of them.

Also, LJ Archive has a word count analyzer, which will tell you what words you use the most (less super-common words like 'the' and so on). For me, the top twenty are:

1. actually
2. today
3. start
4. changeling
5. nice
6. someone
7. bread
8. sauce
9. stuff
10. cook
11. food
12. garlic
13. post
14. game
15. oven
16. maybe
17. couple
18. usually
19. problem
20. potatoes

...which is sort of hilariously accurate. Food, fantasy, and equivocation, that's me.