Cooking with Lentils

Photo from Whole Foods Market

I cannot remember the last time I cooked with lentils. This is partly because I wasn't sure what to make with them, and partly because DH was never all that crazy about them. Except in a good dal - DH and I like dal - I definitely need to learn to make it, but that's for another day. DH's sister does not eat meat, so she's always a good source for interesting vegetarian recipes. She made a fantastic lentil soup for Thanksgiving. It was delicious, easy, and low-fat, so I knew I had to write down the recipe.

Wegmans carries a nice line of different Laxmi products.

As usual, I had to make several modifications to adjust the recipe to what we had on hand. I don't own a pressure cooker, but knew it would work pretty quickly without since SIL did not use one at Thanksgiving. I had to use grated ginger from the jar, as I had no fresh on hand, chopped rosemary instead of a sprig (mine was already chopped and in the freezer), and I cut back on the oil and salt. I do like the idea of putting the fresh ginger slices and sprigs of rosemary in a bouquet garni - I'll have to slice up some fresh ginger and keep it, along with sprigs of rosemary, on hand in the freezer for next time. I also used quite a bit less spinach then called for - my family won't tolerate that much spinach in their soup! I doubled the recipe to have extra on hand for lunches - it nearly filled my 5-quart pot.

Lemon Lentil Soup with Spinach

This could be one of my favorite soups ever. The flavors work wonderfully together. They are subtle, and yet you can taste each ingredient on its own - each one adds something special to the soup and I don't think you could really skip any one ingredient without really changing this soup.

The soup goes together very quickly, mostly due to the fact that there is no chopping! I love a no-chop meal! I did take quite a bit of time smooshing the garlic against the side of the pot - to speed things up, you could cut the garlic into smaller - but still substantial - pieces and then leave those pieces whole. The smooshing was kind of fun, though. The soup has great color, but the lentils will fall apart and the smooshed garlic does look kind of stringy, so it's not the prettiest soup in the world.

This recipe comes from Peter Berley's Fresh Food Fast: Seasonal Vegetarian Meals in Under an Hour. This book looks fantastic. I've proclaimed that I am not a cookbook person, but this one is calling my name. Fortunately both SIL and MIL own it, so maybe I can just glom off of them for a while.

Hopefully tomorrow, when daylight arrives once again, I can get a better photo of the soup............my attempts to photograph the lentils themselves was a complete failure (my camera is automatic focus only, so it's hard to get it to hone in on certain things), so I borrowed from Whole Foods.

Tags: lentils, spinach, soup, vegetarian, low-fat

A Taste of India

One of our favorite ethnic cuisines is Indian. There are no Indian restaurants that I'm aware of in this part of PA, so we are left to fend for ourselves when we have cravings. As much as I'd love to have easy access to great takeout, I realize that this is a great opportunity for me to learn to cook it at home. I have no idea how authentic most of what we have tried is, given that in most ethnic restaurants, the foods are somewhat bastardized to better suit American tastes. Bastardized or not, I love it.

The first dish I made tonight is not exactly an authentic Indian dish - but it wasn't Americanized, it was a dish created to suit the British penchant for gravy. The story goes that a chef created Chicken Tikka Masala when the gentleman he was cooking for wanted gravy to go with his Chicken Tikka, a dry Indian chicken dish. Today, it is one of the most popular "Indian" dishes in the world. Whether it is native to India or not, it is one of our personal favorites. Recipes for the masala, the sauce part of the dish, vary greatly, but I suspect that one of the reasons I love it is that the versions I've tasted most definitely had cream as part of the ingredient list. Some might argue that it could be ghee or yogurt, but the velvety, rich flavor that I associate with this dish is most likely due to cream, an ingredient that I found listed for most recipe versions I was able to locate online.

Chicken Tikka Masala

I took my smattering of recipes gathered on the internet and spliced them together to fit what I thought would work well and taste most like what I craved. My job was greatly simplified in that we used some leftover Chicken Tikka from a restaurant we went to in DE over the weekend. I tried to keep this dish pretty simple to make and keep to ingredients that are fairly easy to find, not using too many specialty ingredients such as ghee, that can be expensive or hard to find. One exception - the cardamom pods - they were fairly inexpensive (as were the large bags of turmeric and garam masala) and I couldn't resist.

The results for the sauce were delicious. I don't know that I would change much, if anything. It's very satisfying to have a dish meet expectations on the first try! Although I was unsure of the correct balance of the different spices, I was pretty sure I could get the tomato and cream part right - it's really not at all unlike making a vodka sauce. I'd bet that most restaurant versions use a bit more cream than I did, but I tried not to go overboard with the cream, but still adding enough to give it that rich taste I love so much.

I served the Chicken Tikka Masala with roasted cauliflower. I knew I wanted to roast the cauliflower, but didn't know how I wanted to season it. Then I remembered a delicious recipe for Indian-spiced potatoes that I made a long time ago. I dug that out, tossed the cauliflower in the oil and spices, roasted it in the oven and again, the results were wonderful. DS, who immediately said "Yuk, cauliflower", gobbled up every bite on his plate and DH went back for seconds, exclaiming that he might like the cauliflower dish even better than the Masala. Can't get too much more successful than that!

Peela Gobi

The potato dish was named Peela Aloo, aloo being the Indian word for potato. So, I have named the cauliflower dish Peela Gobi, which, if I've looked it up correctly, should mean Yellow Cauliflower. (If I am incorrect, I hope that someone who knows better will speak up and correct me!) Turmeric, also known as yellow ginger or Indian ginger, is what gives everything such an incredible bright yellow burst of color, including curries.

In making these dishes, I have now stocked up on copious quantities of turmeric and garam masala, and cardamom pods, I will definitely be looking for plenty of Indian recipes - not only to help use these lovely spices, but because I always intend to do more Indian cooking and now that I have easy access to most ingredients I would need, and no access to good Indian food, no more excuses.

Tags: Indian, Chicken Tikka Masala, recipe, food

Cooking Light - December 2006

Browsing through the December issue of Cooking Light, I decided to try to keep better track of recipes that look I'd like to try. To that end, I am going to try something new here at The Savory Notebook. I used to wade through each issue and cook as many dishes as possible - rarely repeating the same dish twice - but I'm much more hit or miss these days. I tend to cook more based on daily whims, rather than keeping track of each issue and what catches my eye. This works fine and I don't think I'll ever get back to cooking quite that much again - it tends to be expensive and time-consuming - but I would like to try more new recipes.

Though I go through each issue and dog-ear any interesting recipes, I tend to put the magazine back on the shelf and forget about them. I also rely on the Recipe Finder/Kitchen Assistant for keeping track of recipes I want to try, but again, these can get lost in the shuffle.

Perhaps posting the recipes I'd like to try here on the blog will help? Maybe not, but it's worth a try. Thing is, what looks interesting to me changes from day to day. Many recipes I dog-ear never do get tried for whatever reason. I'm much more likely to try the recipes that are convenient for every day - easy weeknight meals that fit a busy lifestyle and a limited grocery budget. Items such as the cakes in this issue will likely go a long time before I try them - they look great, but I just don't make cakes all that often. I also love that over at the CLBB, someone will post a rave review about a recipe that totally missed my eye, causing me to go back and find quite a few treasures that were missed the first time around.

Any other Cooking Light fans out there that would like to join in, just send me a link and I'll link to your own list of recipes you'd like to try from the current issue.

Anyway, here is my list for December. I've linked to any recipes that are currently posted on Cooking Light and will post more links and/or photos if they become available.

Asiago and Balsamic Caramelized Onion Focaccia
Garlicky Broccoli Rabe
White Bean and Beef Soup with Tomatoes and Onions
Cranberry Upside Down Coffee Cake
Pumpkin Pound Cake with Buttermilk Glaze
Coconut Cake with Buttercream Frosting
Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake with Bittersweet Ganache
Pork Medallions with Gingered Cranberry Sauce
Farfalle with Creamy Wild Mushroom Sauce My Review!
Artichoke, Spinach, and Feta Stuffed Shells
Beer-Braised Beef with Italian Salsa Verde
Sausage, Escarole, and White Bean Ragout My Review!

No way these will all get made before the next issue arrives, but it's fun to put the list out there and have it as a reference tool.

Sweet Rolls on Sunday

After being a way for the holidays, I was ready to get back to cooking and baking again - even if it feels more like spring or summer than late fall outside - it's supposed to be 60º today. I had a hankering for sweet rolls, so I browsed the recipes at Cooking Light and found a recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls that caught my eye.


It's a bit of a miracle that these rolls turned out at all, but not only did they turn out, they are quite good. First, I proofed the yeast in 3/4 cups of water instead of a 1/4 cup. I dumped that out and started over. Then I added a full can of pumpkin puree instead of a 1/2 cup. To compensate, I just added flour until the dough became the right consistency. The final snafu was that the rolls never really did rise, even though I used a rapid rise yeast. This may be a result of me using far more pumpkin and flour than the original recipe called for. The rolls did rise pretty nicely during the baking time, however, so all was not lost.

Pumpkin-Cinnamon Streusel Buns

It's hard to really comment on the original recipe since my mistakes changed it quite a bit, but even with all my goofs, these rolls were moist, tender and quite good. I should have increased the cinnamon filling to compensate for the increased amount of dough, but the increased pumpkin in the dough helped add flavor where the streusel came up short.

I'm not sure how I would approach these the next time I make them - I liked that they had a lot of pumpkin, but I would need to adjust other ingredients to get a proper rise and a little more streusel flavor. Perhaps I'll try the recipe as written next time and go from there.

And this time the yellow tinge on my rolls is a result of the pumpkin, not the lighting!

I'm glad that I didn't give up on these - I probably would have had I not been a bit familiar with yeast breads - yeast breads are a bit more forgiving than other forms of baking!

Tags: pumpkin, cinnamon, sweet rolls, Cooking Light, baking, recipe, food

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Savory Notebook has been very quiet this week, but just wanted to pop in and wish everyone a wonderful holiday.

Baking: Procrastination in Disguise

Baking. Baking is doing something, right? You are up, moving around, active, creating - and to top it all off, the family loves it and encourages it. Right. Sort of. I've come to realize that my new found baking compulsion is really just cleverly disguised procrastination. I may well be doing something, but the bottom line is, I'm still not doing what I should be doing. It's a great excuse to not clean or do laundry or any of the millions of other things I should be doing. Then I get to procrastinate some more when it comes time to take pictures and blog about it.


Yesterday was no exception. More procrastination baking. And more cocoa. This time I blame it on the weather - it was nasty outside - pouring, windy, grey and just plain depressing. Why not warm up the house and my spirits with a little baking?

Chocolate Chai Snickerdoodles

Cocoa was part of the ingredient again, but for a very different kind of cocoa cookie. Over on the CLBB, someone recently posted about a Chocolate Chai Snickerdoodle. Sounded different and divine. I searched the internet to see if anyone else had tried this cookie and found that Anne at Anne's Food, Nicole at Slashfood and Jennifer over at Musings all made these same cookies.

I felt the cocoa was a bit overwhelmed by the wonderful spices, but it added a lovely color and probably a depth of flavor that would not otherwise be present. The spices are lively and have a nice bite - probably from the ginger and pepper. Funny enough, they complemented the Rosemount Shiraz I was drinking while watching Grey's Anatomy last night quite nicely. The cookies are light in texture - a bit chewy on the edges, softer in the middle. Not as dense as the previous two cocoa cookies I made this week - quite a bit lighter. Not my favorite cookie, and I'm not sure if I'll try them again, but it was fun to try something different and they are yummy enough to not go to waste, that's for sure.

Baking may be my favorite form of procrastination..........not only do I get to put off my dreaded chores, but the family is very forgiving........

Butternut and Gorgonzola

I do have a sweet recipe to share from today, but I'll save it for tomorrow. This blog is becoming more sweet than savory lately! Maybe I need to change the name...........sweet and savory.......

When November's issue of Cooking Light came, I immediately dog-eared a recipe for butternut squash and gorgonzola pasta. I have only made 2 recipes involving butternut squash - a soup and a risotto - but have been actively hunting for more tasty butternut recipes . This time, the recipe called for diced butternut squash instead of a puree. I was a little leery of actually having to bite into pieces of squash since I'm really not a huge squash fan, but I figured the strong taste of the gorgonzola sauce would be a good way to try it.

Fettucine with Butternut and Gorgonzola Sauce

The sweetness of the butternut squash pairs nicely with the sharp and salty gorgonzola. There is plenty of rich, creamy sauce, making it seem impossible that this recipe came from a healthful cooking magazine. I would definitely make this dish again, but I think I would caramelize the onions for a little added flavor. I was out of parsley, so no little pretty green flecks for us.

Mmmm...cheesey, creamy pasta - a nice way to end a wet, gray day.

So, I think.........

I finally figured out the problem.

I looked for things in my sidebar that might be causing problems with its size. The only thing that looked possibly too long was the Feedblitz email subscription box. I tried setting a smaller limit for this box, but it didn't seem to make a difference. When I removed it altogether, I was able to go back to pretty much my original widths.

So for whatever reason, Firefox seems able to resize the email box to the sidebar with no problem while IE seems to resize the sidebar to fit the email box.

There is still a button in the sidebar for anyone wishing to subscribe by email, but the white box will be gone for now until I can figure out how to get it there without resizing the sidebar.

Whew. That's 2 hours of my life gone....................

I need your help!

First, my question...........

When you view this page, is my sidebar lined up properly with the main content column or is it all the way down at the bottom of the page?

Over the last year, I have pretty much completely switched over to using Firefox. I thought I had my template all figured out to look nice in Firefox and IE, but today I used IE and found that my sidebar is not properly aligned with the main content column when viewing it on my computer with 1024 x 768 resolution. I hate it when that happens!

It's very frustrating. When I use Firefox at the 1024x768 resolution, it looks fine. When I use IE at the higher resolution of my other computer, it also looks fine.

According to my site trackers, 1024 x 768 is the most popular resolution, so I want to make sure it looks nice at that resolution. I can fix it so that it lines up at that resolution, but then it shows a pretty wide gap between the 2 columns when I switch back to Firefox. Not as nice looking, but at least all the columns are lined up properly.

It may be time for a whole new template so that I don't have to mess with this. This is one of the drawbacks with tweaking a template a little too much - it's hard to get it all to line up properly.

Thanks for any feedback - it would be greatly appreciated.............

EDITED TO ADD: I'm now checking my site with IE on my computer with 1280 x 1024 resolution and it appears that the sidebar is not aligned properly at this resolution either. As most of my viewers use IE, I suppose I will have to fix this. This will mean that Firefox users will see a big gap between the main content and the sidebar, but at least everything will be aligned for everyone. I swear I had this all sorted out months ago, but something changed somewhere to cause this break again.........not sure what..........ARGH!

Yummy Sandwich

When we lived in Indiana, one of our favorite restaurants was Biaggi's in Fort Wayne. Before I continue, one thing you need to realize is that we didn't have a whole lot to choose from by way of nice restaurants. Had we lived in Chicago, for example, where great restaurants are the norm and not the exception, I don't know if Biaggi's would have made our list. That said, it was in the unique position of being a nice enough place to feel special and grown-up to the adults but at the same time, it was kid-friendly and affordable too.

It's an Italian bistro-style restaurant with 19 restaurants in 11 states. The atmosphere was casual but elegant with uncluttered, clean lines - open and airy, yet cozy at the same time. Best of all, not one piece of memorabilia to be found in the entire place! The menu was fairly extensive, with many tempting pasta dishes and a decent wine list that offered more than the Sutter's Home garden variety wine list, another trapping of many chain restaurants. It was simply a nice place to have meal that was more than a few steps above your average Applebee's or Ruby Tuesdays' meal without breaking the bank and without having to leave the kids at home if you needed or wanted to bring them along.

Last night I made a sandwich that was based on a sandwich I ordered several time from Biaggi's. It's a panini-style sandwich with grilled chicken, bacon, roasted red peppers, goat cheese and a tomato-basil salad. This will not reflect well on Biaggi's, but one time they brought the sandwich and it was missing the bacon, the tomato-basil salad and the goat cheese. Huh? That was almost everything that made this sandwich great! I complained, they took it away to fix it and they brought it back. This time it had the bacon and the salad - it also had cheese, but it wasn't goat cheese. Now really, all of the ingredients are listed right there on the menu! How hard is it to read the stupid menu - especially if you're the cook??!! Fortunately, that was the exception to the usually competent service.

No more Biaggi's forus now that we're in PA - but this sandwich is easy enough to recreate at home. I cooked my chicken on the stove top instead of grilling - the damp, chilly weather wasn't very grill-inspiring. It would be great with roasted chicken too, or leftover roasted turkey. Something to keep in mind with Thanksgiving coming up. I did everything else pretty much as they did in the restaurant - our bread was a nice, crusty sourdough with rosemary which I brushed with a bit of olive oil before toasting.

All I needed was a panini-maker/grill thingy and it would have been perfect.............especially to help squish these down a little so that they actually fit in the mouth. Ah well, they were great anyway and no missing ingredients either......

Moving on to Savory.........

Enough with the sweets, my stomach hurts. In addition to the cookies I have posted, I have been tweaking several muffin recipes - 4 batches in 2 days - and have had it with sweets. That's not something that happens very often to me, so I really must have overdone it. Time to give the sweets a rest and focus on some savory......

There have been savory items cooking in the kitchen, just no real recipes to share. I had to work Saturday night and was surprised to come home to find that DH had whipped up yet another delicious chicken soup - this time with noodles and beans. Something smelled really good when I came in the door, but it didn't smell like chicken-noodle soup. DH revealed that one of the "secret" ingredients in his soup was a can of Amy's Organic Cream of Mushroom Soup that I had bought a while back and don't remember why. Over at the CLBB (as well as foodies elswhere, I imagine), many posters love to turn their noses up at anything made with a "cream of" soup. While not my first choice, I have to admit that sometimes those cream of things taste pretty good! So I wonder......does an organic label help lessen the stigma associated with condensed cream of whatever soups? Probably not, but it was a tasty use of something that's been gathering dust in our pantry.

Here are two photos...........me playing around with the white balance.....I seem to be getting a yellow tinge a lot lately. Not sure which looks better............


Last night I whipped up something based on the Chicken Sausage and Provolone Bake I made a couple of weeks ago. This time I used orzo, feta cheese, kalamata olives, capers and a bit of fresh basil. I think I liked my own version better. I served it with balsamic-glazed roasted green beans. The photo is a little blurry (and that yellow tinge again), but you get the idea........

Tonight, I will be recreating a delicious sandwich from one of our favorite chain restaurants that doesn't feel like a chain restaurant, Biaggi's. I miss that place. We used to be 40 minutes away from one when we lived in Indiana, but now the closest one is about 3 hours.

I'll be back tomorrow with a full report on the sandwich and photos, hopefully minus the yellow tones...............

Snorting Cocoa

Some people snort coke (among other things)............not me................I snort cocoa.

Cocoa is one of the few things that I sift. I hate sifting, but cocoa is a bit lumpy when you scoop it out of the can so, begrudgingly, I sift it. The ultra-fine texture of cocoa sends clouds of cocoa dust up into the air, especially when working with the large quantitites of cocoa that I've been using for the last two cookie recipes I've baked. Clouds of fine cocoa dust that apparently ended up going up my nose and even down my throat - not to mention all over my counters and mixer. Cough, cough. And not to kill your appetite, but it can be a little alarming if you go to blow your nose after working in clouds of cocoa. Sorry. TMI.

Photo from Martha Moments

Well, it's worth snorting clouds of cocoa to produce a yummy chocolate cookie. After trying the Dark Chocolate Cookies on Saturday, I decided to follow up with a recipe that I tried quite a while ago - probably in 2001, which is the date of the Marth Stewart cookie issue where I found this recipe. These are quite similar to the other cocoa cookies, but these are a bit chewier and a bit crisper, probably due to using all granulated sugar as opposed to a combination of granulated and brown sugars. I'd liken the taste to a chewy, cocoa-flavored sugar cookie whereas the other cookie was more like a chocolatey-chocolate chip cookie. It's hard to really compare the two because the first cookie is already showing signs of age, but there is definitely a difference and I like them both. I think the second one holds up better as a plain chocolate cookie, but the first has a richer cocoa flavor. All in all, two very good, somewhat similar cookies - each with its own texture and style.

By the way, this issue - that I've had for 5 years now - also had the Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies that I never noticed until someone posted about them on the CLBB. That's what I love about being able to read what other people are cooking - you end up trying things you might never have noticed, much less tried on your own.

Grammy's Chocolate Cookies

A side note - I've been using Hershey's Special Dark Dutch Process Cocoa which is why the cookies are so dark (and difficult to photograph). I'm trying to use up all of my Hershey's cocoa so that I can switch to the Penzeys cocoa I recently bought. I don't know if I'll ultimately be able to tell the difference, but I like that you can purchase the Penzeys cocoa in larger quantities - very nice for recipes that call for 1 cup or more of cocoa.

While I don't recommend snorting cocoa, it is definitely worth the minor inconvenience..........as long as they don't link inhalation of cocoa to any kind of life-threatening diseases and even then..............

Chocolate, baking and stress.

Dark Chocolate Cookies

Chocolate and/or baking. Or even better, baking something chocolate. The perfect stress-reliever. The job at the kitchen store is not going well, to say the very least, so today is my last day. Having been a store manager and being meticulous, I can't stand by and watch the whirlwind of chaos and questionable money handling without getting stressed out, so I'm outta there. Easy come, easy go. My family and I will have a much nicer holiday season without that job hanging over my head anyway.

The stress from the job has had me wanting to bake all week, but I've been too busy. I had to get DS to Tae Kwon Do this morning and will be working later today, but I had to bake some cookies. I don't make chocolate cookies all that often, so that's what I decided on when I started looking through my various Martha Stewart magazines and cookbooks. I finally decided on a chocolate cookie that actually calls for dried cherries, but I substituted peanut butter chips. Peanut butter, cherries, what's the difference as long as the cookie base is yummy, right?

These cookies are very good. The Dutch Process cocoa gives them such a rich, dark color that my youngest thought they were just really burned. He soon discovered that they didn't taste burned by any stretch of the imagination. These do spread a bit, but hold their shape just enough to not be too thin. They are a tad greasy coming off the pan, but are fine after they firm up - I've had this happen with at least one other Martha Stewart recipe and I wonder if the extra half stick of butter is necessary or not. The cookies are chewy and slightly crispy along the edges, softer in the middle, just how I like them.

These are a keeper and I'm very anxious to try them with the dried cherries next time.

Yummy Sweet Potato Side

Tonight I was planning to make a yummy sounding Rachael Ray recipe using flank steak, but somehow I forgot to check the recipe and get the necessary ingredients. Typical! Change in plans! I decided to throw together the rough ingredients for the Korean BBQ we made recently and use it for the flank steak.

As a side, I decided to revisit a recipe from Cooking Light that I made quite a while ago that I thought would go very well with the flank steak - Soy Glazed Sweet Potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a fairly recent addition to our diet. I had grown up thinking of sweet potatoes as tasteless mush hideously hidden underneath a sickeningly sweet layer of marshmallows. However, when I started reading how nutritious they are a few years ago, I decided to give them another try - with one condition - they couldn't be sweet. It worked! I like sweet potatoes quite well and so does the rest of the family. We usually cut them into thin rounds, toss with savory spices and herbs and then roast until crispy.

The soy glaze does not result in a crispy sweet potato, but it does create a very nice, caramelized glaze that is delicious. I stuck to our usual thin rounds to make sure they cooked quickly enough and it worked, but they didn't look very pretty, so I didn't take a picture. Wedges, as the recipe calls for, are probably the better option here.

In any case, it's a recipe worth sharing. I don't think I would have ever paired Asian ingredients with sweet potatoes if not for this recipe and the rave reviews....

Photo from Cooking Light
Soy Glazed Sweet Potatoes

What's for Dinner? Roasted Salmon with Horseradish Crust

As I searched the web for recipes for salmon, horseradish kept popping up as an ingredient and captured my attention. After narrowing my search for salmon and horseradish, I came upon a recipe from Global Gourmet that sounded easy, elegant and delicious.

The crust is easy enough to throw together, although I had a hard time getting it to puree in the food processor - nothing seemed to really want to move around and blend. It was also a bit difficult to get it to spread nicely on top of the salmon pieces - I had to flour my hands and pat the crust on - it was very sticky and wanted to stick to everything BUT the salmon.

The crust did have a wonderful flavor, but it did not get crispy, something I would have expected from a "crust". I did cut the butter in half, so that may have been part of it and perhaps a few minutes under the broiler would have helped it to crisp up and brown nicely, but I did not have it in the proper dish for broiling.

Everyone did like it quite well, I just need to figure out how to make the crust crispy and perhaps a little more colorful - maybe a little parsley thrown into the mix.

The lack of color in the crust and my lack of colorful sides to pair with the salmon also made for a rather boring picture, but I'll include it anyway...............

Roasted Salmon in a Horseradish Crust

Tags: salmon, horseradish, seafood, food, recipe

This, that and WDB #59

Things have slowed way down here at The Savory Notebook - partly because I have gone back to work, at least temporarily. Searching the classifieds recently, I found that they were opening a temporary holiday kitchen store at our mall, so I figured, what the heck. I worked in retail many moons ago and vowed never to go back, especially now that I have a family, but it's only temporary, right? And we could really use a little extra money, so I applied and was hired. They seem to be willing to work around my schedule which is complicated because of the kiddos. I've been surprised at how unorganized this company has been. I've worked only two days, have received VERY minimal training and I opened and closed the store today. The regional manager left yesterday - after opening on Wednesday (which is also the day we began our training!) and now we are left on our own - all of us new, none of us ever having worked for the company before. Scary!

My husband was in charge today while I was at work and I was very pleased to come home to a nice warm pot of chicken soup simmering on the stove. He doesn't cook often, he does a great job when he does cook. With me working some evenings now, he'll be getting a little more practice. When he makes soup, he rarely uses a recipe, so I don't have one to share, but the soup was delicious - it had crimini mushrooms, parsnip, carrot, celery, white rice, wild rice and barley. It was fun to have an evening of role reversal - me coming through the door after a long day at work to a homecooked meal. Only his was actually ready when I arrived and the kitchen was even clean and orderly - I don't think he is usually quite so lucky. No recipe to share, but I did take a picture.....


Last but not least, my entry for Sweetnicks' WDB #59. This past Halloween, Bailey got very excited with all the little ghouls and goblins coming to our door and started carrying around one of his favorite toys - a plastic pumpkin trick-or-treat bucket. For some reason, Bailey has always had a fascination with this thing - he loves to bat it around the house and carry it in his mouth. I never have been able to get him to carry it by the handle, like Eli over at Sweetnicks, but it still cracks me up and was especially funny to watch him carrying it on Halloween night. Silly dog. Don't forget to check over at Sweetnicks later on for the rest of the furry gang.

Bailey's on the lookout for trick-or-treaters and
is ready to join in the fun!

What's for Dinner? Beef Bourguignonne

Doesn't it seem like "Bourguignonne" has one or two letters too many?

Anyway, that's what was on the menu for tonight. Or almost wasn't. It was one of those poorly planned evenings in the kitchen that almost didn't turn out, but did. First, I procrastinated and didn't get dinner started until a little after 5. Then, as I was chopping the carrots and onion, I realized that this dish really needed to simmer for over an hour! Oh well, I kept plugging along and just took the chance that the beef would be tender sooner than the recipe indicated.

Turns out it was a good gamble - the beef was tender in about 1/2 less time - and everything turned out very well. I won't bore you with all the other missteps I made in the kitchen in my hurry to get everything on the table at a decent hour, but let's just say it wasn't a lesson in efficiency or grace. Ahem.

In any case, we enjoyed this dish from Cooking Light very much - it has great flavor and is one of those perfect cool weather comfort food dishes - and it will definitely be repeated in this house. Only next time I'll allow a sufficient amount of time for prepping and simmering........

No time for a good photo either.....this one's a bit fuzzy, but it will have to do..............

Beef Bourguignonne with Egg Noodles

Tags: beef bourguignonne, low fat, Cooking Light, recipe