BRRRRRRRUUUUUHHHHHH

wordpress app hate

also, fuck you wordpress iPhone app for being a pain in my ass and wasting about half an hour of my life.

Candied pecans

Amazing how much adding candied pecans to a salad really livens things up. I'll give credit to the goat cheese which is turning out to be the unsung hero of the kitchen thus far.
The spinach salad I made was pretty standard - grilled chicken (salt, pepper, cayenne, splash of maple syrup), spinach, strawberries and goat cheese. In hindsight I guess I could've thrown on some diced purple onion.
"Candy"-ing the pecans was simple enough. I just mixed in a tablespoon or so each of olive oil and balsamic vinegar with 1/4 cup (ish) of brown sugar into the frying pan on medium heat. Constantly stirred until the sugar had melted, and it was bubbling assertively. Threw in a cup of pecans and tossed it around to really let the mixture coat 'em up. Maybe 4 minutes for the initial mixture and another four to sweeten the pecans. Gotta make sure it's evenly coated. I then spread it out on some wax/parchment paper and let them dry for about half an hour. Make sure to separate the pecans individually because by the time they're done cooking they're already sticking together.

vegetarian lasagna

Had Q and Court visit this past weekend so I thought I'd whip up something special for them. Unfortunately, I've never made lasagna before so it was quite the process. We were all famished after a hike down Happy Creek Trail, so I'm amazed they didn't put up more of a fuss when I was taking so long to make the whole thing. It's a good thing they picked up some triscuits and hummus to munch on while they waited.

Anyways, the lasagna turned out great. About 98.2% of the effort goes into the prep, 1% goes into deciding how to layer it, 0.2% goes into the layering process and the final 1% in waiting. I used a recipe from my allrecipes.com iPhone app as a guideline, and improvised a lot from there. (Will update the post later when I upload photos from the making of)

First off, I decided to go with a from-scratch pasta sauce. Turns out it's really not hard - just sliced about five tomatoes into (rough) cubes, threw them into the frying pan with olive oil under medium heat for maybe about 6 minutes and let the tomatoes just fall apart. Added basil, salt, pepper, cayenne and brown sugar to taste. A bit too much cayenne pepper fell in, but I enjoyed the extra bite of the sauce.

Chopped up the mushrooms (less than the recipe), green pepper, onions and garlic. Decided to throw in some grated carrots in there too. Let that mixture grill in olive oil for a couple minutes (in the proper order too) before adding the sauce to the mixture.

Lastly, the cheese. Lots of open contemplation on how to deal with this layer. I had goat cheese (~350 g) and spinach (1 bunch) which I was excited about, but wasn't quite sure how to put the two of them together. James brought up the great idea of blanching the spinach and then using his hand blender to make into a paste. We then spread the paste on top of each (WHOLE WHEAT) lasagna pasta layer. It worked great.

In the end, the layers went as follows from bottom to top: Drizzled olive oil, thin layer of pasta sauce (maybe 1.5 cups?), pasta/spinach+cheese paste, then sliced zucchini. Repeat the sauce, pasta/paste and zucchini layers until the top where it was topped with a healthy layer of mozarella. It was baked in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, with the last 2-3 minutes on broil to help brown the cheese.

Seems a lot simpler writing it down, but I guess the disorganized array of vegetables around me and indecision slowed down the process quite a bit. I was super happy with the from-scratch tomato sauce. I honestly don't know what I'd change for next time except maybe try it with different types of cheese (feta? ricotta?) and maybe some parmesan on the top.