You get a little better smoke on a real smoker than a pellet smoker . I picked up my Traeger pellet smoker at a garage sale for $70 . The thing I like about it is the thermostat heat setting . Set it and forget it . I really like it . I have been cooking a lot on it lately because the oven on my Wedgwood stove quit working . If you can afford it get a pellet smoker . It’s like power steering . You can convert your Weber into a smoker . I use mine as one with large chunks of oak wood . Put a foil pan with water in the bottom . No need to convert it .
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No cooking tonight, we ate out in a Thai restaurant. As starters I had a Som Tam, a green papaya salad. Hubby had a Lab Neua, beef haché with herbs. Both quite lovely.
We both had Pad Thai as main, mine was beef and he had a gambas noodle. Very big dish, we had a hard time finishing the dishes.
The red light distorted too much the food on the photo, unfortunately.
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I was craving lamb tonight. Looked at 3 grocery stores on my way home from work for a leg of lamb but no luck. One store had a pre-seasoned leg of lamb but I generally don’t care for pre-seasoned meats. Finally found some shoulder chops.
Boiled little red potatoes while the lamb marinated in a little OO and Penzey’s lamb seasoning. Then roasted a bundle of skinny fresh asparagus (tossed with a smidge of OO and lemon salt prior). Once asparagus was done I broiled the chops. While waiting on the chops I decided some quality control taste testing was needed on the asparagus. Some how ALL of the asparagus disappeared by the time the chops were cooked…As chops rested I smashed the potatoes, drizzled a little oo, seasoned with kosher salt, pepper and thyme and popped under the broiler until they became a little crispy. Hit the spot!
Starting to see a little cooler weather so a heartier meal was quite nice. Froze the raw asparagus ends for a future soup. Down side of no fridge is that fresh vegetables are a challenge for a solo cook. Purchasing some items from the grocery salad bar if I need a small amount of celery, etc. Simply no space to store larger amounts. Makes meal planning an interesting balance between craving, economics and efficient use. The food nerd in me is fortunately finding this more of an interesting exercise than the pita it actually is. Kind of like painting. Sometimes I find that by drastically limiting the palette I am forced to move in directions that my natural inclinations would never explore. Often times it results in a bit of new discoveries.
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I’m always discovering . Moving backwards in time . Lamb is what’s for dinner tonight . If you have a costo near you the racks are fantastic .
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The last of the Chinese sausage fried rice I made tonight. This sausage is wonderful! I’ve never had it before and am so happy I impulsively got some last time I was at the Chinese supermarket. They’ve been in my freezer for a few months because I don’t know how to cook Chinese sausage, but I’d heard it was good. I finally googled what to do with them tonight. When cooked, the sausage is almost like candied bacon, with hints of anise and maybe cinnamon.
I also made teriyaki chicken and some broccoli, but that wasn’t really very interesting, so no photo.
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I LOVE Chinese dried sausage in fried rice - the hint of sweetness complements the savory flavors so well. Unfortunately I’ve never found a restaurant that serves it that way. Yours looks excellent!
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God, all your dinners are killing me! i’ve been back from Paris trip for a month now, and just posted about it on the appropriate board, if anyone’s interested. but the pics aren’t posting, so i have to keep going back and adding.
here are some recent dinners
last night was bockwurst with sour cream mashed potatoes and red cabbage braised with bacon, apple cidar vinegar, br. sugar, aleppo, s&p.
indian dinner party at my friends’. i made Milk Street’s spicy dal soup with coconut milk (delicious - glad i froze some), chaat masala salad, spicy indian corn salad, and a friend made Smitten Kitchen’s tikka-like chicken. wonderful stuff, need to do that soon.
black bean soup - not as creamy as i would have wanted but pretty yummy with spanish chorizo.
BF made a really great dinner one night of pan fried chicken thighs, mushrooms with sherry, green beans with barberries and walnuts, and buttery mashed potatoes,
albonidgas soup. picked up some really fatty ground pork in chinatown and made the most amazing meatballs with them, and then winged the soup. so good. also glad i froze a batch.
made my first batch of homemade tortillas (bought a press) and carnitas tacos. tortillas were good but i want to make them thicker next time.
(um, somehow i think an old Portugal pic of octopus snuck in there and i can’t figure out which one it is to delete!) (and, pics seem to be out of order. oh well!)
(LW, i’m with you and Presunto re the holiday season shenanigans. I’ve never been into the holidays much, and less so now. )
But happy to be seeing all your wonderful food again!
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Your photo of the Indian Party Chicken is swoon-worthy.
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Yum!!!
Back tweaks hurt like the dickens. Getting Big Bertha (big butt TV) out the door with my brother this morning didn’t work out too well for me. But she’s at the Best Buy store for her trip to the TV graveyard, and it’ll be Aleve for a bedtime snack for me. Hopefully I can move tomorrow morning.
So dinner was easy - a chicken BLT panino on marble rye and potato chips, and a glass of milk.
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Fabulous stuff, MC! I have missed seeing and hearing what the BF cooks.
I ate the big chunk of home smoked salmon today with pasta in a crème fraîche sauce with beetroots and mushrooms. Needed to use up the vegs so they went in the pasta.
`
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Wow!
How do you smoke your fish? Which smoker did you use?
Dat salmon, tho…
T’was a C.O.R.N. dinner - a half package of lemon tagliatelle (which really isn’t all that lemony), the rest of the chicken from last night’s panino, a carrot, 1/3 of a large sweet onion, and a small head of broccoli, and whatever heavy cream was in the container.
Pasta cooked and drained, with a bit of the pasta water saved.
Veggies chopped and sauteed, with chopped chicken added in at the end and a Tbsp or so of fresh lemon juice, a half glass of wine, some of the pasta water, and the heavy cream. Simmer, simmer, simmer, and sprinkled with about a Tbsp. of dried lemon zest and a handful of grated Parm-Reg.
Dinner. With the other half-glass of wine.
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I’m so impressed you made tortillas! And the while indian dinner spread looks fantastic- i’ve made a chaat salad a few times and loved it
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This past week was just a stressful blur…
Saturday night i met friends for dinner, we went to biang biang and ate everything from dumplings to tofu salad and several noodley dishes.
I got my act together and did some cooking yesterday, a big batch of vegetarian borscht (i like the version from serious eats), and i add in cannelini beans so it’s more filling. Also made mudjadarra, which i serve over fresh baby spinach so it wilts.
At the store on impulse i decided i needed stuffing. So i made a small batch of stuffing with smoked seitan “bacon”, chestnuts, leeks, carrots and celery, sage and thyme. That was dinner with a side salad. Tonight was a bowl of borscht with a gob of horseradish stirred in (it was missing something), and a blob of plain greek yogurt on top.
The rest of borscht and the mudjadarra will be a few lunches and dinners this week
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The meatball soup looks great. And that’s good to know about the fatty pork, nothing worse than dry meatballs.
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thanks! the tortillas are the easiest thing imaginable. masa harina, salt, water, mix up, let it sit for a bit, pinch small amounts, roll into balls with your hands, press!
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thank you. that fatty pork is revelation!
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