I made one of the side dishes to help my mom out.  She typically asks me to make sweet potatoes, but she asked me this time to make green beans, for reasons unknown.  I immediately went to The Pioneer Woman to see if she had a recipe for green beans and, since she did, I made that recipe on the faith that anything that I’ve made from her blog has always been good.  This wasn’t an exception!

I made her recipe for Spanish Green Beans.  The ingredients were quite simple: green beans, tomatoes, onion, bacon and cayenne pepper.  My husband was oh-so-pleased to see bacon in the ingredients since he’s a baconoholic and he knew that there would be extra bacon that he would be able to eat afterwards.  I ended up using 1/2 a teaspoon of cayenne pepper instead of a 1/4 since I’m a spice addict and since I can never fathom how such a small amount of spice can impart such a strong flavour.  It did the job quite nicely, the dish was spicy, but not in an overpowering way.  The true test was how popular the dish was, everyone had some and no one mentionned the spiciness level!  I didn’t come home with much leftover beans (and what I did bring home I ate for lunch today).  I also simmered the recipe for about 1 hour or 1 hour and 15 minutes, so the recipe had a bit of a chili-esque consistency, especially since I used cut beans instead of whole beans.  I would make this side dish again in a heartbeat.

Later on this week, we had pasta, but it’s hardly worth mentionning, since I basically only added ground beef to sauce that was already made.  I used whole wheat pasta, so bow to my… nutritional skills?

On the exercice/diet front, I’m happy that I’m feeling more motivated to work out this week.  I haven’t missed a day so far.  I’ve realised that getting to the gym is really the most difficult step, because once I’m there, the time really flies by.  There’s really nothing like the feeling of accomplishment I get after a workout, I just have to remember that feeling when I’m feeling on the fence about going to the gym or not.  Tonight, I’m going to work out at my dad’s fancy gym downtown, the Mansfield Club, with my brother, so that’s a nice break in the routine.  Their weight lifting machines run smoothly like butter.  Their cardio equipment is equipped with individual televisions, without exception.

So that’s what’s happening right now.  I should be back to cooking this weekend though, since I promised my mother that I would make at least one side dish for our Thanksgiving Day feast!  I’ve been put in charge of green beans, but I will find a way to make them interesting, I promise!

I’ve already read in one of my favorite forums (www.weddingbells.ca), in one of the discussions groups on cooking and recipes, that Pad Thai is notoriously difficult to make well at home.  It would appear that the cost of stocking all the different ingredients required is so high that you might as well go spend 7$ at a noodle joint and eat good Pad Thai.  But I figured that it would be worth a try to make it at home even if the result isn’t so sublime as what’s found in a restaurant (I loooooooove Pad Thai.  I think it’s purely wonderful).  And that’s basically my review of the recipe.  It was easy to make, it tasted good (a little bland, but that might have to do with me hoarding my peanuts at the bottom of my bowl to scarf down all at once… hehe).  It was nothing like real Pad Thai.  I might have used too low of a sauce to noodles ratio.  It also didn’t have any spice to it, whereas I usually request spicy Pad Thai when I go to the restaurant (at which point the waiters usually eyeball me to see if I can take it… trust me, I have an iron stomach so far as spice is concerned!)

(that’s not what my recipe looked like, at all… just including a picture for inspiration… also, it’s 11:30 a.m. and I’m already hungry!)

Incidentally, this wasn’t such a healthy recipe since I estimate that it includes about 500 calories, which is more than what the recipe mentions, and it really doesn’t include that much protein.  Again, I might have used too much noodles (I forget the size of the bag), since I didn’t want to have any extra lying around.  Also, I now have a jar of peanuts lying around in my kitchen, which is a terrible thing considering my love of nuts.  Apparently, it’s impossible to buy small quantities of peanuts! 

(Also, this is trotting through my mind, I’m thinking of possibly including an exercise/diet angle to this blog since I’m feeling a bit stuck exercise-wise.  I’ve pretty much reached the weight that I’ve always wanted to be at and that I’ve been working at since January 2009, so I need to figure out where I go from here.  I might start a more intense weight lifting program like the one featured in this book that I’ve heard a lot of good things about: The New Rules of Lifting for Women.  The word goddess is included in the title, how can I resist?  hehehe… More details to follow…)

Nonetheless, we found a recipe that satisfied these criteria in Rachael Ray’s Columbus Day Pork Chops.  You can find the recipe here.  It is basically a pork chop with macerated strawberries and basil heaped upon it.  I liked it a lot.  We didn’t follow the recipe insofar as the pork chops were concerned because, really, my husband could cook a pork chop well before Rachael Ray came along.  The pork chops we chose were not nearly the thickness that were recommended in the recipe, they were only about 160 grams each (and that includes the bone!), but I’d like to think that I eat at least somewhat healthier than Rachael Ray does!  I served salad as a side dish (bag of mixed greens, what could be easier?  I know that this is one of the ways in which I waste money, but I truly can’t be bothered to wash, drain, cut lettuce myself).  My husband wanted his strawberries sans maceration, so I served them directly over the salad.  I had mine with maceration in balsamic vinegar  served over the meat and it was delicious.

Basically, this is a recipe that doesn’t really require a recipe.  It was really easy to make and a good way to incorporate strawberries into our diet before the local berries disappear and get replaced with the tasteless winter ones!  (estimated calories: 350, very good!)

I love vintage posters.  I find that I see them the most often in restaurants, showing old ads to food and booze.  I love the artwork of them, but I don’t think that food and booze is really my thing (or at least, not enough to put pictures of it on my walls!).  Then I discovered vintage travel posters.  They make my heart sing.  Travelling is another one of the luxuries that has been cut out of my life for the time being, but it’s one of the things that I truly love.  Here’s a few of the posters from this website that I particularly enjoy.  There are tons of vintage posters on that website though, so it’s worth a look around.  You can also order them in pretty much any size, so it’s very convenient.  I tried to choose a selection of posters that include a variety of colours to make a more interesting gallery wall.

I think that these would look really nice in a living room as a gallery wall (so maybe 2 rows of 3 frames) or in a bedroom.  I felt inspired by this bedroom (source unknown) where they used the full length of the room to put up a row of frames. 

This would make a small bedroom feel bigger, I think, since it elongates the width of the room.  This might be something to consider for our future bedroom, although I think it would do better in a living room or hallway since it’s kind of busy with all of the colours.  I also tend to like simple black frames the best, although I can also see the appeal of white or silver frames.  I think that I have more idea for wall art than I have actual wall space in the future condo!  I guess that means that I’ll have refined my idea and isolated the best ones by the time we’re actually ready to move in.

Now that the fundraising has been completed, Myriam was nice enough to give me a copy of the recipe that she used to make her famous caramel.  Apparently, her race partner and her made quite a few batches of caramel before settling on this particular recipe, which has just the right sweetness level and unctuousness.  I’m sharing this recipe with you in the hopes that you’ll make a batch and invite me to eat spoonful and spoonful of it with you! 

Myriam’s Fleur de Sel Caramel

Ingredients:

• 2 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups corn syrup
• 3 cups cream (35%)
• 4 tablespoons salted butter
• 2 teaspoons fleur de sel

1. In a large thick-bottomed pan, combine the sugar, corn syrup and 2 cups of the cream and bring to a boil (medium-high heat).
2. Boil the mixture for 10 minutes while continuously stirring it and while bringing the temperature progressively down to medium heat.
3. Remove the pot from the heat and slowly add the last cup of cream to the mixture.
4. Return the pot to the heat and boil the mixture for 10 minutes on the lower heat while stirring occasionally.
5. Remove the pot from the heat and let it rest for 5 minutes.
6. Add the butter while stirring constanty and incorporate the fleur de sel.
7. Let it cool down and pour it all down your throat without bothering with a spoon. Mmmmmmmm…

This is some seriously good stuff.  I might make some of it the next time that I’m asked to bring dessert to a potluck meal.  Some caramel dip and apples would be just as good as anything else, right?

(also, since the obsessive calorie counter in me has to speak out, I ran this through a nutritional calculator and I estimate that a cup of this caramel would set you back about 800 calories.  This means that a tablespoon of this deliciousness is about 50 calories.  Well, it’s not diet friendly by any means, but it’s no worse than say, peanut butter, which I can also eat by the spoonful straight from the jar.  That’s why I want someone else to make it and let me taste it.  I can’t be trusted with this sitting in my fridge!)

Yesterday, I got the slow cooker out to prepare this recipe for Chili Chicken Tacos. I specifically searched the delish website for recipes that included chipotles in adobo sauce, since you’ll recall that I used some of that in last week’s Park City Cashew Chicken. A quick internet search revealed that, once opened, canned chipotles can be kept about 2 weeks in the fridge or just about forever in the freezer. Well, freezing a can of chipotles for the sake of the 60¢ worth leftover does not seem worthwhile to me, so I decide that I had to use this ingredient once more.  Did I mention last time that it smells divine?  Well, I walked into our appartment yesterday and the whole place smelled like the adobo sauce.  Heaven to me, less so to my husband who was at home for most of the day.

Anyways, I made the recipe with some alterations (of course! I can never seem to follow a recipe perfectly).  Since I have a large slow cooker, if I had used only the 1/2 cup of salsa mentionned in the recipe, there would not have been enough liquid to come even close to covering the chicken.  I used the full jar, approximately 400 ml.  I used more chipotles than what was mentionned in the recipe (3 heaping tablespoons instead of 1 to 2.  I like my spice!).  We ate the chicken in flour tortillas instead of hard corn tacos.  I’ve never really understood hard tacos: they always create a huge mess and they’re so hard that they hurt my mouth.  We also ate the chicken in the tortillas with only salad, not all of the toppings suggested in the recipe. 

This recipe was good.  It’s nothing super special, but it was flavourful and satisfying.  I love Mexican food.  It always hits the spot for me.  One of these days, I should actually use the blender we received as a wedding gift and make some daiquiris or margaritas to go along with the food.  I feel bad for my poor unused blender, sitting all by itself in our kitchen cabinets!

(from the home of Erinn Valencich, found via Little Green Notebook)

I love all of the neutral greys used in this room and find that the room feels very soothing.  And I can’t get enough of the pops of bright pink (fuschia?).  I think that pink and grey go absolutely perfectly together and set each other off nicely.(haha… my bridesmaids dresses for the wedding were a medium grey and the flowers were mainly tropical pinks… at least I’m consistent, right?)

I wish I could find a mirror similar to the one above the bed.  I love sunburst mirrors since they combine a retro and a modern look so perfectly.  (for a lot of sunburst mirror ideas, see here)  Sadly, my googling skills render me unable to discover the exact origin of that particular mirror.  But there are many such mirrors available to find. I think a mirror above the bed would be a great idea, particularly since I’m looking to bounce light around as much as possible to make the condo appear larger than it is (that sounded like one of those warnings on side mirrors on a car).

Also sadly, John Robshaw no longer makes the particular quilt shown in this room, although his current linens are also amazing.  Not that I would have wanted to copy the room exactly (not sure how my husband feels about pink accents! He did wear them for our wedding, but an inquiry would be needed).

So, all in all, my love for this room brings me back to the idea of doing a very neutral room in terms of wall colour and bed linens while adding all the punches of colour through artwork, curtains and cushions.  I think that this would be very relaxing without being bland.

You can find the recipe here.  I was sure that a pan sauce that included horseradish and dijon mustard would be tangy and delicious.  I was concerned about the cream in the sauce, since my husband does not like creamy sauces, but it turns out that that was the least of my concerns.  The sauce tasted pretty much like nothing.  It was not very flavourful at all.  Ok, I’ll admit that my husband and I are both huge spice fanatics and that we generally eat food that’s really spicy or flavourful.  But even once I’ve admitted that, I still maintain that this recipe is bland and uninteresting.  I don’t think that my ingredients are what’s at fault either, we bought high quality dijon mustard with a lot of bite to it and we bought the only prepared horseradish that we could find at our grocery store (but a quick taste test confirmed that it does indeed taste like horseradish, you know, there’s FLAVOUR to it!).

The couscous was better than the Toasted Almond Couscous that accompanied the fateful apricot chicken because there was a bit more liquid to it, so it made for fluffier, less bone-dry couscous.  We squeezed the juice of half of the orange into the couscous since we figured that the rind would not be enough to impart a strong orange flavour to the couscous.  Well, even the juice of half the orange wasn’t enough to truly flavour the couscous.  Also, despite my previous comments less than a week ago (how quickly we forget!), I used dried herbs instead of fresh in the couscous.

Needless to say, I’m not particularly looking forward to eating the leftovers of this meal tonight and this isn’t a recipe I’ll be making again.  If you feel like giving it a try, I recommend using more mustard and horseradish than what the recipe calls for.  Oddly enough, I feel like the flavours of the recipe dissipated into the air, since our whole appartment smelled like horseradish afterwards!

Since I felt a bit decadent after the last Rachael Ray recipe I made, I wanted to make a healthier recipe this time around.  I’ve got to be careful with Rachael Ray recipes, the portions tend to be huge, even when the recipes themselves are relatively healthy (I ignore all the recipes that call for cheese or cream or that kind of thing.  My husband’s food aversions will keep us both trim!).  I made a recipe that my younger brother Tom had made a few months ago for his girlfriend (awww!), Chile Chicken and Basil.  I served it over rice. 

The flavours in this dish were really awesome.  A stirfry is a stirfry, but I found that the sauce was really flavourful.  I used red chilies instead of serrano chilies (although they could be the same thing for all I know!  which is spicier?).

vs.

This dish also made me really appreciate the different between fresh herbs and dried herbs, especially in a recipe where the herb features prominently in the ingredients.  I will put my frugalness aside and buy fresh herbs more often now.  And I will resolve to (maybe?) grow fresh herbs once we move into the condo.  I say maybe because I have a notoriously black thumb. *sigh*