Little Nest

I am pretty bored today, and my attempts in the kitchen have been a failure because I'm alone. It seems I can only cook well when I have someone else to eat what I'm making. So I decided to contradict that and tried this out:

I'm not really sure why it came into my mind but I made a list of things I had home and the idea popped into my head. Why not? So, this is my dinner with a couple more things, but I wanted to cook this in specific.

It actually turned out differently than I expected so I had to put the peas by the side instead of in the egg because I used small eggs which have almost no white part.

Burger Cooking

Remember those burgers I made and froze? Already made use of some of them:

The left one is mine, the right one his. This was about the second or third time I cooked for myself but ended up not eating this time.

Both types of burger tasted heavenly!And looked quite good too.

Of course the meat ones got a bit too small, I hadn't tasted a juicy meat burger in a long long time, tender meat, onion flavour... I'll try making them a bit bigger next time!

I am never ever going to buy hamburgers again after making these. They consume some time but the taste and to know what's in there compensates for the time used.

Until then, I'll try not to devour these while my sweet is away :P

Garlic Chicken

This was based on grandma's recipe:

This is a very tasty dish and quite cheap (if you can get cheap chicken) due to using very few ingredients: Garlic, olive oil, lemon and chicken.

Portuguese really like sauce on top of the rice and even tho it looks a bit less organized, it tastes really good. As I had to put some vegetables there, I decided to go with a salad since I want to use up all of the lettuce as soon as possible. It's a shame this is already gone. I managed to brown the chicken so well (I was so proud!) and not burn any garlic that I couldn't get enough of the rice and garlic.

This week my sweetheart is going back to the island for a week so, maybe you'll see a few less posts (or maybe more, who knows) of his lunch.

Hamburgers & Chickpea burgers

Another crazy idea for the weekend experiments:

I kept on complaining about the huge hamburgers that take too long to cook on the inside and they don't fit well in the frying pan! So I decided to fix it, as always, if I can't get it the way I like, I'll make it myself.

This was quite the challenge because I had never made anything close to these and cooking a batch of things scares me a bit because if one goes wrong, all of that will. I spent some time giving it some thought and my aunt, who is a vegetarian, suggested I made chickpea burgers too because she wanted to eat some of my food without meat in it.

Again, I have to thank JustHungry for the hamburger recipe. I changed it a bit since I fear the use of flour on hamburgers. I hope they still come out okay without it.

For the chickpea burgers I replaced the meat and milk, for ground chickpeas and soy milk. All the rest is the same. Oh, take a look at my homemade breadcrumbs xD

I just finished freezing and bagging them but I haven't cooked them because we had something else for dinner. It is a very entertaining process and I ended up making a lot of hamburgers without realizing. I made 33 meat burgers and 23 chickpea burgers. I hope it saves me more time than usual to make lunches ^^

Fishfingers

Again the kitchen panic of "Where's my..." "Why's this here?" I ended up making something simple:

Some salad, fish fingers and the japanese rice from the freezer (still kind of onigiri shaped)

When I start seeing too many dishes to wash I prefer defrosting to cooking because it'll only add more to the pile and i dislike washing dishes.

I don't have to cook tomorrow because my bf is having lunch with his colleagues so I wont be posting tomorrow.

Enjoy your cooking ^^

No veggies

My boyfriend was saying for a while (almost everyday) "please make me a dish without veggies" and since this week's been chaotic in the kitchen I made something simple: beef with garlic spaghetti.

I have too many things that don't belong or I don't use, that were brought up home (I am thankful for having free food, but I start panicking because I don't like throwing food away) so I couldn't plan for this week and thinking up of a dish on the day is not my idea of making healthy meals, I'm sleepy tired and just want to cook something fast and simple.

I'm not sure if I'll post something else this week but I'll try!

Cabbage leftover

Yes, we did have too much cabbage left from saturday and I didn't know what to do with it. This is what I turned out to make:

 

I sauté'd it in a pan with sausage added some soy sauce and voilá. I was too sleepy and my fridge was a mess! (It wasn't really, but the things were not on my usual places so I got lost. Never mess up a woman's fridge, it'll give her headaches!) I defrosted some japanese rice, cut some carrot slices on top and tried making a tomato flower, which didn't work but I still put it there.

We still have cabbage leftovers >.< We'll see what I can used them in.

Portuguese dish #2

We went out for lunch today and I couldn't resist to take pictures.

It's called baked cod with punched potatoes. It's served with olive oil, which is fresh on this season and minced garlic on top. This is one of my favourite dishes, not because of the cod, but because of those potatoes *drools* I can still taste them in my mouth.

I had that with 2 more people and the bf had this:

This was a huuuuuuge steak as you can see, I'm not sure if you can realize the dimension of this. Some of the rice and potatoes were already on his plate when I remembered to take a picture. Of course he didn't manage to eat it all, so I was able to taste a little bit of that delicious tender meat.

Of course, again, we couldn't eat anything for dinner, so we had some soup and a little salad.

Portuguese dish

What we had for lunch today with some visitors:

This is something my grandparents used to eat on their childhood, after going to church on Saturday morning, for lunch. They're usually served with cabbage leaves and some potatoes, carrots or just bread (due to the lack of resources back then) topped with olive oil. It's not very common to see people eating these blood and rice sausages because they're very high on calories and have a lot of fat content. I personally love them but it's something I eat once a year or less.

This is how it looks on the inside:

We also got fresh olive oil, homemade, and I love it when it still hasn't settled so I thought I' show you how it looks like.

Even with the flash, you can clearly see it's not clear and in cold weather it tends to coagulate and look really bad. If i can make it freeze I'll make sure to take a picture.

This year my family got 40kg of olives: 12kg to eat and the rest to make the olive oil. Here's a little sample of the olives already sliced, cooked in garlic, salt and bay leaf. They're stored in the cooking water with all the other ingredients in.

The sausage with potatoes and cabbage is a very heavy dish. We ate about 3/4 of one of these sausages and refused to dine anything other than a light salad and an (smaller) egg. Sometimes the egg I use is smaller than most eggs. It's not a quail egg. There's a variety of small chicken that lay eggs half the size of normal chicken eggs, but they're nearly double the size of quail eggs. I got some fresh ones yesterday so we used them as they're from family members.

I might show you some more Portuguese cuisine tomorrow so stay close ^^

Meatballs

I was dieing to try out basmati rice so I made something with a delicious sauce to go with it:

We hadn't eaten meatballs in a long time, mostly because they're a bit more expensive and I can't do much with it except for tomato sauce with them. Maybe next month I'll try to make my own, since I will probably get a little "gift" supply of meat soon.

What I really like about the basmati rice, is it's lightness. It has no stickiness and it feels so soft and light in your mouth and stomach. Despite eating a lot, I don't feel bursting like with japanese rice. I love them both, for different purposes, but 'm not sure wich one goes best with curry.

I ran out of "to-sauté" vegetables and the bf (I still have to find him a nickname because he doesn't like reading "the bf") is getting tired of carrots and green peas. It's a little hard to find vegetables to go with the food because he doesn't like beans nor peas. I can live without beans but peas... I love their sweetness.

Is there any way I could maybe mask these vegetables on something? I already did on soup, but after eating soup for a meal, he'll complain he doesn't want soup everyday.

When I was loading the pictures to my pc, I found some that I had no idea were they were and I just have to post one of those:

That's err... me sleeping with the cat on top. There probably was one underneath my legs like usual. I sometimes get these on my camera because the bf loves to take random pictures whenever his mind says so. It was probably 5 or 6 am I'm can't be sure (I was sleeping)

I might post something on Friday, tho not really sure. Thursday is hard to make something look good on any plate.

Oven baked lunch

Good morning everyone!

I didn't know what to call it because it doesn't really have a name:

It's true, I could've made it prettier but it tastes so good I slacked on the presentation a bit.

When I got home yesterday, it was very cold, specially in the kitchen... I just washed and cut the veggies, put them in a tray and oven baked everything with a bit of olive oil and salt. I usually add 2/3 garlic cloves to the olive oil for flavor but you have to be careful with garlic, if it burns the food will taste bitter. So here we have:

- Potatoes and carrots;

- a bit of sweet potato;

- whitefish/hake;

- Zucchinni;

It's not that fast to cook, but it's fast to assembly and gives me the time to run back to the bedroom to warm up.

Hamburger & Tonkatsu

I couldn't help playing around with the food:

I had to use up the corn I had on the fridge (next time I'm buying frozen corn it lasts longer and I don't have to "use up" on everything I eat until it's gone)

Since the bf wanted hamburger, I just put some veggies with it and I really lack the abundance of veggies on fall. Squash is expensive and we can't eat it that fast. Plus, this week the supermarket's veggies were really really bad so I didn't buy any! I have no idea how they can present food that's rotten, or dried out, it's a lot different than back in Madeira. (I had fresh veggies T.T)

I made an apple pie again, this time with a different crust than the first one and a double apple-layer:

We spent the weekend going out to either buy things or for classes so I didn't cook much, but I'll show you my lovely cats gathering with cold weather. One of them has a small problem being solved so she has that around her neck, but she'll be fine with another 2 weeks treatment.

The white and black one is a male and the other two female.They're between 5 and 8 years old.

Chicken Teriyaki

And the teriyaki is here again!

Apparently I made way too much teriyaki sauce and I don't know how to store it other than in the refrigerator >.< so I'll be making a lot!

On this one, I had to defrost rice because I ate all of the oven baked potatoes, I don't usually eat out of gluttony but I can't resist to those potatoes, specially while they're warm...

We also ended the veggies that were baked with the potatoes so I had to cut up some emergency veggies. We then have:

- Japanese rice with teriyaki sauce on top (bf loves it like this so I don't argue);

- Chicken Teriyaki;

- Cucumber (probably the last one of the season), carrot and corn.

It's not much, but I think it's only fair to show successes and failures when you're in the kitchen having fun.

I really did great with the teriyaki sauce today, it was the perfect texture, just like the one I was used to last year and those potatoes, oh the .... Where did they go? =D

Don't think I'll be putting much more this week, Thursdays are always hard to take a picture at something.

Oh, I forgot to take a picture, but on Tuesday the bf took the rest of the salmon teriyaki (he must really love teriyaki so much) with some rice and veggies.

Gyoza dumplings

I had this lurking on my "to do" recipe and I made it from scratch, meaning, wrappers too!

It was quite time consuming but to see the results at first try was overwhelming and they taste great.

The rest was a little color adding to the tupperware and I have no idea what goes well with gyoza but the bf wanted more than just vegetables, said he'd get hungry after a little bit.

So we have:

- Japanese rice with corn on top;

- Gyoza with cow meat and cabbage filling;

- Baby carrots and round green beans.

I made a lot of them and we ate some before we froze the rest.

These are the ones that got frozen and tossed in a bag afterwards.

The ones we ate, I remembered taking a picture on the frying pan but not on the plate, because the bf was too hungry to remember pictures

For the gyoza wrappers I used this recipe:

http://www.lafujimama.com/2009/08/time-to-wrap-things-up-homemade-gyoza.html

For the filling I edited Just Hungry's recipe:

http://www.justhungry.com/2004/08/is_my_blog_burn.html

Thank you both for sharing these recipes!