Dork Chow

Archive for February, 2009

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Mango Lhassi

delicious Indian yogurt smoothie

See Mango Lhassi on Key Ingredient.

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The exception proves the rule. Mangos are hardly local to where I live, but once in a while it’s OK to indulge yourself in something exotic. I trimmed the sweetener from the original and skipped the canned mango in syrup. I serve it with a lemon for extra tartness.

Want to preview our dorkness before it gets blogged? My recipe online collection is at Key Ingredient, and I simply embed their recipe widgets in the blog. I have blog posts queued up, and also a backlog of recipes I haven’t even queued in the blog yet. Often a recipe will be on Key Ingredient for weeks before it gets blogged. I like how their tabbed format makes excellent use of the real estate, and I like how they automatically format the recipe in a consistent format. (Of course, in case Key Ingredient ever goes away, I have backup copies of all my recipes.)
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For Valentine’s day, I dined with Tom (the love of my life) and our dear friend Louis at Restaurant Bleu, which is the Restaurant arm of the Western Culinary Institute in Portland OR. For about $25 you can get a five course meal, with several choices for each course. That is a lot of bang for your buck when you consider what that would be a la carte.

My choices were:

• Soup:   Sunchoke and Garlic
• Appetizer:  Salmon Cake with Asian slaw
• Salad:  Green Salad
• Main:  Seared Salmon
• Dessert:   Cinnamon Creme Brule

Louis and Tom chose a meat platter as an appetizer.   Louis preferred french onion soup.  Tom had the clams entree and Louis had the pork.  Louis chose chocolate mousse for dessert.   At the end of the meal they brought us truffles.  All food was elegantly presented, and nicely spiced.  I am going to try to duplicate the sunchoke soup next autumn when there abundant local sunchokes.

Since it is Valentine’s Day, after all, I cheesed things up with a very romantic slideshow.  Enjoy!

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Creamy Maitake and Edamame

We modified this recipe quite a bit from the source …

See Creamy Maitake and Edamame on Key Ingredient.

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My daughter discovered this recipe while googling some ingredients we had on hand. We modified it because I don’t normally have heavy cream on hand, nor much care to use it very often. I used pignolia nuts instead of pistachios because that’s what I happened to have. I believe cashews, pecans, or walnuts would also work. This recipe could easily be made vegan by using earth balance and unsweetened soy milk instead of butter and half and half.

This post is for everybody, but especially my Foodbuzz friends. Please read it to the end.

Today I am totally blown away! Here I am this little unknown food blogger ranting on to mostly myself and a few local friends so I can glom the recipes into a nice PDF to give to friends for Christmas and suddenly this person called Adina Genn leaves a comment on my pozole recipe and says she wants to phone interview me about it and and its attendant mole recipe on behalf of the legendery Molly O’Neill.
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Asian Carrot Radish Slaw

Another delicious and healthy raw salad.

See Asian Carrot Radish Slaw on Key Ingredient.

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Sesame Seared Tofu with Jalapeno Miso Dressing

My friends over at Duo Dishes used this recipe to …

See Sesame Seared Tofu with Jalapeno Miso Dressing on Key Ingredient.

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Thanks to my friends Chrystal and Amir at Duo Dishes for this recipe. As you can see mine didn’t look anything like theirs. Chrystal says they didn’t really soak the tofu in the marinade but I totally did so maybe that was the difference. We tossed the extra marinade on the salad.