the owl and the olive tree

Lemon chicken, and chocolate pot de creme for dessert.

This time there are pictures, because sithjawa was interested in how things came out looking. Pardon my less than expert photography skills.

( Food neep beneath the cut! )

Last night for dinner I made a big batch of split pea soup, which I love and jmpava does not care for. It's one of my favorite autumn and winter dishes: warm, filling, comforting, inexpensive, with a mild but distinct flavor. And it keeps beautifully, and freezes just as beautifully.

So even though it's just me who will be eating it, I made the whole six-person batch. Another portion has gone in the fridge for this week; four more will go in the freezer for later.

There's nothing particularly unusual or special about the recipe. It's just mine, and I like it. It does call for meat (specifically, bacon), but I have a note for how to convert it for vegetarians. I have been known to spice it up with curry spices or Middle Eastern spices, but, you know, often I just want the plain recipe, which tastes of peas and carrots and onion and garlic and thyme and bacon.

No pictures, because soup in general is hard to photograph well, and split pea, doubly so.

( Split Pea Soup )

A few weeks ago I saw rowr talk about doing the Washoku Warriors challenge -- basically a group of people who agree to make recipes from Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen. The cookbook appears to be a primer on Japanese traditional cooking, with an emphasis on home cooking -- the kind of thing people would make an eat for themselves (as opposed to restaurant or inn food, or fancy cuisine). It looked like a lot of fun, so I ordered the book and decided to give it a try with the first dish: San Shoku Domburi, or Three-Colored Rice.

One side note. Normally, I'm a very, um, relaxed cook. I adjust, substitute, throw things around, do what seems right. Normally this works great. However, if what I'm doing is trying to learn another culture's cuisine, I make the recipes by the book -- at least the first time. That's because I want as much as possible to try to taste the way it's 'supposed' to taste. Then can adjust to suit my tastes, once I have some idea what it's meant to be like. I also try not to make substitutions unless I absolutely can't find the ingredient (and with Uwajimaya down the street, that doesn't seem terribly likely).

Since I'm going to be doing -- hopefully -- many recipes from this one book, it feels a bit unfair to the author to publicly post the recipes themselves. But I am going to blog the process I went through to make it, so you can probably recreate it if you want (and if you're really curious about a particular ratio or something, feel free to ask).

( More, including pictures, behind the cut )

I went with the orzo, because a) it was the runaway poll victor, b) it turns out I had a package of 'garden medley' flavored orzo, which would go great with the flavor of the piccata sauce, and c) jmpava's swing vote was for the orzo. ;)

From Food 2009

(Picture taken with iPhone, hence not-great quality.)

( Chicken Piccata with Orzo )

( Thin-Sliced Winter Salad )

I got kale in the produce box this week and went looking on the Internet for a way to cook it. I found this recipe for kale, egg and toast by Orangette, which looked quite good -- except that jmpava doesn't like soggy bread. I decided to use udon noodles instead of bread as the starch base, because I've had several Japanese dishes that have an egg on top, and this reminded me a bit of those. A bit more tweaking (some soy sauce, some bonito flakes, some sesame seeds), and I had a Japanese-inspired kale, noodle and egg dish.

(This could be made vegetarian if you find a replacement for the dashi base, which contain bonito flakes, which are fish. Perhaps dried seaweed would work in that capacity.)

( Boiled Kale with an Egg, Vaguely Japanese Style )

This is my second bread-of-the-month bread -- a cheese bread. Not the kind of cheese bread that's regular bread with cheese melted into it, but bread with cheese baked in for flavor. I decided not to go with a sourdough on this one, because I was experimenting with the dairy (and the dough was pretty wet and dense), so I wanted to keep the yeast variable stable. I may try to make a sourdough cheese bread later.

This recipe makes two good-sized loaves, but it could be halved fairly easily. (This time I made one full-size loaf, to mail off, and three little loaflets about the size you'd get as starter bread at Spaghetti Factory or Outback. This is because an uncut loaf stales less quickly than a cut one, so the bread stays fresh longer if I make it into small loaves that can be devoured in a day or two.) It also uses weight measures rather than volume ones, and even so may take some tinkering, depending on how wet your cheese and yogurt are. If you don't have a kitchen scale, you can find flour and water weight-to-volume estimates online. I've included rough (very rough) volume estimates for the cheese and yogurt.

( Cheese Bread )

( In the end, it looks like this: )

This was meant to be regular lamb pitas, but a) we didn't really have enough pitas left, and b) they were a tiny bit dry and therefore cracked when I tried to open them. So instead I served it in salad form, which worked quite well (and also let me use a higher ratio of vegetables to meat/bread).

( Lamb Pita Salad )

The seasoned lamb mixture here helps keep the lamb moist and tender, and the flavor of lamb is strong enough to stand up to the onion and garlic. I think it'd also be great for lamburgers, served on a toasted roll with lettuce, tomato and yogurt sauce. Or lamb meatballs, over lemony tomato-orzo salad. Mmm.