Salmon Teriyaki

This is something I really liked to eat at the restaurant I worked on, but had never tried it at home. My first try has a bit too much soy sauce but the bf loved it.

I packed a furikake pack to go on top of the rice. Then some saute'd vegetables because the bf was super hungry and I usually cook both dinner and lunch at the same time to let the lunch cool down and then store it.

This was just for the picture to show the wasabi furikake pack.

I made something the day before but it had been a complicated day and the food was the one thing who had to pay for the bad day unfortunately:

There's couscous, broccolli/cauliflower and fishfingers. I did not have the head to put anything else in it, went straight to bed afterwards.

I'll be cooking some fun things next week so check by soon ^^

Bunny & it's Carrot

No, I did not cook rabbit. But it's probably gonna be embarrassing for a 20year-old bf to take for his lunch!

 

This came out of nowhere I hadn't planned for the bunny. When I thought about adding color to this, I found this little carrot in the refrigerator and the bunny idea came to mind. I looked over the web for various drawings of bunnies and ended up making my own cute bunny.

It's made from:

- Cheese;

- Turkey ham;

- Tonkatsu sauce and ketchup;

Underneath it there's:

- Japanese rice;

and under the raw carrot there's

- beef with tomato, onion and zucchini.

Blue!

Yesterday I was on a cooking spree! I even decided to dye an egg and some cauliflower blue ^^

 

Tho, I forgot to and used the blue tupperware, which makes it a lot of blue for the eye, more than I expected when I started taking pictures and noticed.

We have:

- Hard boiled egg dyed with red cabbage;

- cooked cow ribs;

- Broccoli and cauliflower;

- Japanese rice with sesame seeds on top.

I started the spree with the pie, followed by a big pan of rice:

I don't have a rice cooker and I know it doesn't taste the same, but I really like short grained rice and the restaurant I used to work in made rice this way and only used the rice cooker to keep it warm. It turned out really well, much better than the last 2 times so we used up some wamr before freezing the rest. Here is the rice in the freezer (I forgot to take pictures of it outside the freezer)

1kg of rice gave about 26 portions of rice (I shape them in onigiris because it keeps the rice from getting squished and looking like purée. Whenever we want rice, we grab some and defrost it so it saves up a lot of time.

Apple Pie

So, it's apple season and I was dying to make one of those! I happened to talk to a very special friend who gave me some tips on this one, so she's the one to thank for how it turned out:

I bought the crust from the supermarket and used up what I had bought for home on friday, I had lots of apples (still have lots!) and added a cream recipe that doesn't need any expensive ingredients.

For the filling there's:

- Sugar;

- Flour;

- Eggs;

- Milk;

- Vanilla extract or cinnamon stick;

On low heat mix it until it looks consistent. It takes a while but don't turn to high heat or it won't work.

After cooling, I put it over the crust and started slicing some apples.

There are various ways to keep fruits from turning brown but I use the dip in lemon water way. It works quite well and adds a little flavour. I peeled the apples, sliced them and dipped them right after cutting into the lemon water. When I finished cutting, I dried the apple slices and gently placed them on top of the cream in a circly way. I wanted it to turn out a spiral but the slices didn't go my way.

I finished to put the slices and I thought "something's missing" Of course! Cinnamon!

Much much better. I turned the oven on, waited a few minutes (I always forget to pre-heat before I'm done with the food) and put it in the oven until the apples were golden brown.

Next time I'll make the crust myself because the pie is so tasty that the crust doesn't match the filling's flavour. I now have to store it in my secret secret stash before the bf steals it away in a bite!

Turkey sausage rush

I came home really late last night but I didn't give up to laziness and before it overtook me I managed to cook this because we're still trying to save up some money and eating out should be out of the question.

I wanted to add some more color but I was making a different dinner and sleepiness hunger and laziness was too much at the same time. This time we have:

- Fusilli pasta;

- Cooked broccoli and cauliflower;

- Pan-fried turkey sausage with some spices.

Again, the multi-tasking really makes me feel good I'm not sure why. But today is the critical day again: I have to decide what to cook for next week before we go shopping and I still haven't come up with anything new.

See you next week! (Unless I decide to bake something in the weekend worth posting ^^)

Farinheira with scrambled eggs

Hi everyone, it's finally starting to rain! I really love the rain and it's started to cool too. I don't usually buy farinheira but my grandparents offered me some and they were calling for me from the freezer so I used them up.

This is a VERY high caloric dish, traditional from my country Portugal. I usually do it when I need something done quickly but only when someone brings the farinheiras for me, or else I just don't do it (last time i did this was on Spring). Farinheira with scrambled eggs is usually an appetizer and people don't make meals out of it (at least not traditionally, I know a couple of people who cook this for meals).

You can see in the picture that the balance is completely off: I made too much protein and too little vegetables. Well, the veggies shrank as I sauté'd them and the couscous was put in there in a hurry. So from left to right we have:

- Sauté'd vegetable mix;

- Couscous with 2 olives on top;

- Farinheira with scrambled eggs.

I was satisfied with how fast I could assemble this and how much I enjoyed multi-tasking in the kitchen while the bf washed the dishes. I have to start thinking of next week's dishes >.<

Curry again

And I'm back to the boring food presentation:

This time I didn't put any meat on because I intended to save it for something else I made, but it's not presentable enough for me to post it, so it's made the same as the last one with the exception of the potatoes and the meat. Underneath it there is Udon, a very thick japanese "pasta" which is very good, specially in soups, stir fries and curry. I must say the rice is more practical when eating curry, because the rice mixes with the curry, rather than the pasta who leaves a lot of sauce in the end.

It's been some frustrating days because I had too much food in the fridge that had to be used and I had to throw some chicken away because it spent too much time in there, I tried using all the vegetables I could and there's still more! I know it's always good to be able to have food income from family but sometimes it's more of a problem than a blessing. Plus, yesterday's dinner was too watery and I ended up not wanting to take a picture at it. Probably just a little cooking crisis that I'll have to figure out how to use the remaining things like tomatoes and turnips that I don't usually buy by myself. If you have any ideas on how to use these, specially the turnips since they're hated by the bf and he won't eat soup either. I thought of putting it on the curry but he'd notice.

Hope I'll be posting soon this week ^^

Kirby

Something I do not own but tried to make it out of an image:

 

First of all I had no idea what I was going to do because since last week was a bit busy, I couldn't manage to get all the ingredients for what I planned, so I had to adapt something and remembered this image I wanted to do some time ago. You can still tell I was missing stuff like the nori. I tried making Kirby's eyes with some egg but they looked too weird so i grabbed some Tonkatsu sauce and a fork and "painted" them on the ham.

Here we have:

- Pasta;

- Turkey strogonoff;

- Egg for the stars;

- Turkey ham, carrot, tonkatsu sauce and ketchup for Kirby;

- Cucumber.

That's all for today!

Seafood Pasta

There were some leftovers of fish in the freezer that were occupying too much space so I thought of using it this week. This is how it turned out:

 

I decided to do the seafood cooking aside from the pasta and assemble them at the end.

I used:

- fake crabmeat;

- shrimp;

- hake fish;

- Green bell pepper;

- Onions and garlic;

- (hidden) Turnip (shhh I don't think the bf noticed that or he would've complained)

I put it over the lettuce. I don't buy lettuce, this one was offered so I have to spend it somehow and the green looks good. I didn't have much time for the vegetables and since there were some hiding in the pasta I just added some cucumber. Then I made carrot flowers, which I have to thank AnnaTheRed and her blogging (http://www.annathered.com/) for her "How to" on that, and put the carrots on top of the pasta.

Bento lunch

I've been wanting to do this for a looong long time, and I didn't do so bad.

 

Please ignore the yellow broccoli, I completely forgot about it while I was cooking the rest so it overcooked

From left to right we have:

- Shrimp with tomato sauce and lettuce underneath to make a change of color from the silicone cupcakes;

- Red cabbage with a pinch of salt and vinegar;

- Tamagoyaki (without the dashi because I haven't found it in my city yet)

- Broccoli;

- Rice with carrot on top.

Also, this week I have planned all week days with food so you should expect some new posts this week. (last week I completely forgot to plan, so i had to think on the clock, it didn't turn out well)

Hamburger and Udon

It's been a while since I last posted, but lately the lunches haven't been all that presentable plus I've had some failures last week on food with a green onion quiche and some other things.

 

From left to right we have a hamburger cut in pieces and 2 pieces of fresh sausage, a little bottle with Worcester sauce (which we both love with udon) baby carrots, round green beans and on the extreme right the udon. I'm not quite sure where  udon should be used other than soup and yakiudon (sauteed with vegetables and chicken) but I like it like this too.

Although the quiche was a failure I'll give out one picture that was okay. The biggest problem was that I didn't dry green onions properly so when I opened it, it looked like soup, too watery i had to put it under some paper to absorb the excess water. It was very tasty tho.

 

I hope to post soon and always better plates/recipes/presentation!