More food adventures!

A few miscellaneous comments about food and related excitement. :)

Saturday night was my first night at the D&D game, and the hosts celebrated by making all kinds of yummy food. My favorite was the panang style green beans, which were absolutely nummy. I decided I need to learn how to make those ASAP. There was also bok choy salad and grilled chicken and pork. I kept dipping bits of meat into the sauce from my green beans. :) (And I did track down a recipe for panang style sauce, which I will be making soonishly, I hope.)

Wednesday night's dinner was a bit of a disaster, unfortunately. My plan was for lemon pepper and balsamic vinegar salmon (from a recipe found in a magazine), along with green beans and fingerling potatoes. The first flaw was the salmon. Salmon has BONES in it! This was the first time I had ever tried to cook salmon (actually, probably the first time I have ever cooked fish in general), and I was traumatized to discover that the salmon had bones in it and skin on one side. Jeremy suggested cooking it anyway, as he had seen salmon prepared with the skin on and had to pick out bones before.

Cooking it was the next adventure. I suspect I had the heat up too high, and it didn't really "brown" like I was anticipating. Then again, I'm not sure that salmon should brown like ground beef does, so maybe I did get that part right. The balsamic reduction didn't work as nicely as planned, instead turning all bubbly right away and not smelling all that grand. It looked all black and unpleasant, like a tar pit, and I don't think much of it managed to stick to the salmon itself. The pan, however, seemed to be the perfect substance for it to stick to.

In the end, the salmon was mostly cooked. But between dealing with the bones and not liking the taste of it as much as I normally do (it tasted peculiarly fishy to me), I didn't eat much of mine. Jeremy soldiered through a bit more of his. The cats were highly interested in the salmon we didn't eat, but we decided with the tiny little bones, it wasn't a good plan to give them the leftovers. We also weren't sure how cats would deal with lemon pepper and balsamic vinegar.

The green beans turned out fine (thank goodness for microwave steamers!), but the potatoes weren't exactly ideal either. I bought a different type this time, which may not have been real fingerling potatoes. I also got impatient with them when the salmon and green beans were ready to eat, and the potatoes were not, so I may have rushed them a bit too much. Either way, they weren't nearly as tender and yummy as last week's potatoes.

I'm sure there will be more cooking adventures in the future. When I'm in town at least, Wednesday night is our "date night" where we stay home and have dinner and watch a movie. Thus far, dinner on Wednesdays has been a bit more elaborate than what we'd normally make. I've also informed Jeremy that he gets cooking responsibilities one of these Wednesdays. :)