Salmon, butternut squash and dill mac&cheese

Part of the mac and cheese month! Mmm why don't we make this more often?

Hot Chocolate!

This post would make a lot more sense in the fall or winter instead of the spring, especially since both this winter and this spring have been unseasonably warm. But it doesn't matter: on a cold warm, snowy rainy drizzly day, a nice mug of hot cocoa can be just what the doctor ordered.

We had some extra dulce de leche from when we made empanadas. And when life gives you dulce de leche, you make lemonade hot chocolate!

This recipe was pretty rich - it was almost like a drinking chocolate - so you might consider adding more milk.  Or just some churros...

Pickles!

This is the recipe I used and the result. I used whatever spices I had. Lay loose on the cardamom.

Fish Friday: Deconstructed Sushi

A typical fast Fish Friday:  fresh salmon, served raw, pan fried salmon skin, a ripe avocado, and some brown rice. We serve it with soy sauce with a dangerous helping of wasabi.  Easy, fast, healthy, and delicious!

Even though we occasionally (and with some success) try more complicated dishes and meals, sometimes simple is best.  Like this blog post, for example.

C & D

Pizza Pizza!

Sausage and peppers pizza: see below for our recipe

Elizabeth has weird eating tastes.  She doesn't eat corn (really?) and she doesn't like pizza as much as most Americans do.  The problem isn't that she's not American (she is), but rather that a lot of pizza just isn't that good.  (We're looking at you, Pizza Hut and Domino's.)  Enter our completely homemade pizza.  Well, kinda - the sauce on our first pizza came from a jar, and the cheese and sausage on the 3rd pizza were store bought, but everything else, from scratch.  We promise!  And also, how could you expect us to package our own sausage?  We're still full-time students!  And we don't want to know how the sausage is made!

A little while ago, we bought one of those kits where you can make your own fresh mozzarella cheese.  It's a close call whether it ends up being cheaper to make it ourselves than to buy it from the store, but perhaps we had a stronger sense of ownership in the cheese, making it taste better (maybe the love made it better... wait, of course the love made it better).  For more on the labor theory of value and its applicability to the culinary arts, please see our forthcoming economics blog.

In any case, we decided to take our cheese and make some pizza. Our favorite pizza dough recipe actually makes enough dough for three pizzas, so we made three different pizzas (over the course of several days).

I Scream, You Scream: Ice Cream

For Ben's birthday last year, Elizabeth got him an ice cream maker.  We had been talking about getting an ice cream maker for a while, so we were excited to get this bad boy.

We had a somewhat disastrous first foray into ice cream with an avocado ice cream that didn't initially set (possibly because the core was not fully frozen - yay impatience!) and then froze like a solid block in the freezer.  Also, it tasted kinda bland.

This vanilla ice cream we made, though, was SO rich and creamy, Elizabeth could feel the fat being added onto her Insanity abs.

Fish Friday: Salmon with Lemon Caper Butter, Garlic Asparagus and Basil Couscous

Some point last semester, we decided to eat more fish.  For one, we found that we were eating a ton of beef and chicken, which was getting a little boring.  But also, fish is healthier, and if you saw our earlier series on the cleanse, we begrudgingly care about this.  So we decided, completely coincidentally with Roman Catholic tradition (both of us are Protestants), to make our Friday dinner a fish dish. It was actually the alliteration that berthed Fish Friday; Fish Tuesday just isn't that much fun.

So it's our tradition to go to Whole Foods on Friday afternoons (we're high rollers) to get fresh fish - whatever's on sale - and whip up a new, relatively healthy fish dish. We've had fish and chips, which we pictured earlier, and a whole variet of steamed, grilled, fried, deep-fried fishes, including tilapia, cod, branzini, salmon, tuna and chilean sea bass (for you old timers, the Patagonian toothfish).

This Friday we decided to make some salmon with lemon caper butter, garlic asparagus, and basil couscous.