The Mother of Zucchini

OR the father? My grandparents have a fair-sized piece of land where this year they decided to plant a larger variety of vegetables, including zucchini. The green beans were also big but when I got home and found 2 of these in the kitchen counter, I thought they were pumpkins!

I have had a bad experience with big zucchini before, and they WERE actually pumpkins, I couldn't pierce through the skin. So I was a little drawn back by the size. The result? The skin is so thin I almost couldn't believe it, and they're not sour like most supermarket ones.

One of them went to some rice and a soup. I'm still thinking what I'll do with this one considering it's size (it weighs 2,1 Kg) ... Maybe I'll stuff it? or just slice it into some dish?

For a better notion of the size: I placed a normal sized pencil next to it.

Now I'm waiting for the tomato season which should be in a few weeks to see how big they'll turn! If I get a chance to go to their farm soon, I'll show you what other things they have planted there.

Egg pudding

This was my weekend experiment!

I know, it doesn't look like an egg pudding at all.. that's because I used brown sugar instead of refined sugar. I have tried in so many ways to replace sugar with fructose or another kind of sugar that is not so harmful, but the cakes and puddings fall a lot as you can see. The recipe I used contained sugar,eggs,milk and lemon zest, nothing else, the only change I did was on the sugar.

A little note to anyone who uses brown sugar, it is sweeter than normal one! Lucky me, the pudding mold I have is small so the top less sweet part of the pudding mix went first and I used a pan for the rest.

This is how it looked in the middle of cooking. It's a very handy mold that came with the pan so I can just pull it out and it fits perfectly. As for the pan cooking.... It didn't go so well

I managed to make the upper pot not touch the lower one and stay in place like this, but the heat didn't go through and it still looked the same after two hours. I gave up and as soon as it cooled off we ate it, and at the first bite... ugh too sweet for me! I was so sad because I love egg pudding but it was horribly sweet and just thinking I had another one in the fridge waiting to be eaten :( My bf loved it which made me a bit relieved because at least I wasn't going to waste too much food. The next day, we tried the pudding that actually cooked and it wasn't that unpleasant, I guess the sugar stayed on the bottom of the mix and all of it went to the pot mold.

It shrank but it was tasty and consistent with no bubbles inside :) Next time I'll simply adjust the sugar to 1/3 of what I used.

Bon apetit!

Cupcakes #2

Here's my little Thank-you experiment of the weekend!

I don't know where to start writing this... After I got my bento boxes, I realized the trouble a couple friend went to get them and I can only imagine the hours wasted traveling from one place to another, so I thought of making something to show my gratitude because some may thing "but it's just 2 boxes!" Well, I've been wanting to get those for 2 years almost 3 now and had no luck.

I picked these cupcake liners because they were subtle and yet colourful, something I would like to receive if it was for me.

Then I started mixing the ingredients first for the chocolate cupcakes, which were the only ones I took a good picture before baking.

The recipe said to fill these up to 2/3 of the way and 2/3 I did. The orange cupcakes said to fill the liners 1/2 of the way and well... compare the results with these baked goodies:

The chocolate ones didn't change much in size but the orange ones are spilling on the outside of the liner! They were very different in consistency too. The chocolate cupcakes were a bit more gummy and the orange ones light and puffy.

The hard part started with the frosting: First of all I forgot to take pictures because i was too busy whisking because I had to do it by hand, or by arm :D I don't have a machine to beat the frosting so I thought it'd be easy to do it by hand... I don't know what I had in mind... I started  mixing the chocolate frosting and after I couldn't feel my arm, I called the bf to come mix it for a while. As soon as he did, the mixture started blending and 3 minutes after it was good to frost the cupcakes! I was so happy I did the vanilla buttercream frosting in a few more minutes (still with the bf help for the last minutes) and stuck them in the fridge.

I let the cupcakes cool overnight and woke up very early to frost them. I had never frosted a cake nor used a piping bag EVER in my life. Just tried following what I saw on videos, guides, etc, and experimented with a few tips for the piping bag. After the 3rd try I found the one I wanted and then it was pretty simple. After doing the vanilla frosting, I gained trust to make the chocolate and you can see the difference on trying new stuff. I topped them and carefully packed them for a long trip to school to my couple-friend's hands.

I hope they liked the flavour of the cakes and the frosting. I didn't try any with frosting but the bf offered to serve as test subject to try them out. He said the vanilla one was too sweet but the other one was okay.

I'll wait for their review of the cupcakes :)

Stir-fried noodles

I was hoping to post something on the weekend but house cleaning took over and I have been desperately waiting for my bento boxes:

Emptying the refrigerator/freezer for a clean up has started! I try to use all that's in there or at least 80% of it. For this I used the rest of frozen veggie mix, fake crabmeat, noodles, carrot, tomato an the last slices of chorizo.

I didn't expect it would make that much but I was sure he wouldn't feel hungry after this. Unfortunately he hasn't been too well with his stomach so he couldn't eat it :(

I don't really have much to say, except "I want my bento boxes!!"

Until then! :)

Meatballs & mashed potatoes

One of my experiments that went great!

I always do meatballs with tomato sauce but I wasn't much into tomato sauce today. We've eaten Ikea's meatballs with mashed potatoes and they're tasty and no tomato sauce, that's where I got the inspiration for this try out.

You can't see from the picture because of the sauce but I made a little "fence" for the meatballs putting them in the center with mashed potatoes around it and sauce on top. on the left there's oven baked sweet potato, carrots and broccoli. Mine had spinach purée instead of the carrot.

The taste turned out great, tho next time I'm going to stir-fry the meatballs alone first so they get a little golden brownish colour.

We dined out today so I don't know if I'll make something for tomorrow. *craves for her japan stuff*

Salmon Teriyaki #2

I just finished the big stock of teriyaki sauce I had in the fridge:

We bought a more expensive salmon and I was worried it might be just that, but it was of great quality and tasted wonderfully. I had to bathe my cat so I didn't do anything fancy but the salmon teriyaki was simply delicious!

Not being able to heat my food is a bit of an issue to me, specially with fish because I hate cold fish. Even so, I took lunch for me too and by the 3rd bite I got used to the room temperature fish.

After I took the picture, I put some teriyaki sauce over the rice, the bf loves and I don't argue with that.

Lately we have been playing an MMORPG which makes us sit at the computer until bedtime :D

On another issue, I am almost positive I'm cursed (or doomed)! The friend who brought me stuff from Japan met with me on Monday, but  things were still packed so, he said he'd go home and be back later with them. By then I couldn't care less what he gives me; been waiting on this for 2 years now and seems I did not get any luck. I ended up not meeting him thus not getting my stuff and not being able to take pictures and blog about them. I will do it when they're in my hands!

Two meals

It's been a long week and too many things to do/places to go. I did some cooking but nothing too complicated:

Thursday's lunch

I had to use up the eggplants on my fridge but I didn't expect to suddenly have my bf say he wanted the ones I made for myself.  I added the furikake because it had no colour but still... It has been awfully cold here (for me of course, it's about 2ºC and I think I'm going to die already) and the problem of having a big kitchen is the cold. No matter what I put there, it'll get me freezing and running back to the very warm bedroom. So I avoid cooking too much at this time.

The lunch consists on eggplant with turkey sauté'd, plain rice topped with furikake and the eggplant I showed the recipe on a previous post. This time I put the chili peppers and it was wonderful. I never liked eggplant because my mum didn't know that the sour flavour could be removed and it was always so yucky... Now I love it and I can cook with it with pleasure.

Friday's lunch

Friday was also a rush thing... I only remembered to make next day's lunch at midnight and by then I was in bed, ready to sleep. This was one of the few I made in the morning; I find it too hard for me to wake up and start going at it in the kitchen. Took me around 5 to 7 minutes to scramble the eggs, warm up the rice, slice the tomato and fry the korokke. After cooling/packing, I went right back to bed with my cats.

This week I didn't put much veggies because the supermarket's veggies were in very bad shape. It annoys me a lot to have to go through 30 zucchini to find that 29 are rotten or almost there and 1 is old but still not rotting. I have tried finding other places to get my veggies but they don't really change much. It depends on the week I guess.

If I'm lucky, I'll get a few things from Japan on Monday so I'll save the rest for when I can talk about those ^^

Have a wonderful weekend!

Rolled pork with apple

Something I've been wanting to try for a while now:

I put some steaks to defrost the night before and was convinced they were turkey, so when I read that sweet goes well with pork, I was a bit sad I didn't have pork to use the mountain of apples on my fruit basket. when I went to make them, i was surprised we still had pork at home, because none of us is a fan of pork meat. Good thing was, I could use my knowledge and stuff them with apples. I pan fried them and then, after roasting the potatoes I let them in the oven for a bit.

I just love small potatoes, and can't stop eating them! but they don't give that great of a picture like this, it's better on a plate :S

I was too hungry to cook any veggies so I took cucumber and carrots out of the fridge (see how potatoes blind me? :D) and sliced them.

That's all for today, more tomorrow!

Korokke lunch

Continuing with the spree! It's lasting more than usual:

There's 2 korokke with raw finely cut cabbage, carrot "fingers" 1, 1/2 tangerine and some white rice. The bf said it was wonderful, he didn't even complain about the raw cabbage.

It all went fine until the evening, when I was supposed to cook the Torihamu from Maki's recipe on Just Bento after marinating it. I got distracted with studying for my exam... resulting in slightly burnt torihamu. It's still good tho, but I'll give it another try sometime later:

And there's a little something from yesterday night. It's been rather cold here so I tend to sleep with 3 cats on top/ below me. I was reading before bed time and one of them cuddled with me under the bed covers:

Cooking Spree

It's been a while since I had that feeling of wanting to cook something new!

Korokke! I used a youtube's recipe ( i love cookingwithdog) and made some soboro for emergencies (Recipe from AnnaTheRed)

This should be enough for 3/4 good lunches. Everything worked perfectly in the kitchen! The soboro's sauce evaporated nicely, the korokke got golden brown and i managed to make about 18 of them, for rushed evenings/mornings. Here they are just before being frozen:

I had never tried panko before and I must say it was wonderfully crunchy! Something you can't get with normal breadcrumbs, or at least me. I'm not a fan of deep fried things, specially the smell of hot oil and mushy, greasy food, but most of the oil was gone from these and none of it got inside. I was so pleased with this, specially because it fills me up quite fast, and I've got a bit stomach.

We went for a walk on a different place, the tide was very high, cold but sunny. I miss seeing the sea everyday like in Madeira, this was the best I could get (it's Tejo river).

For dinner, we ate out and I took a picture because most people out of portugal have no idea you can cook this "thing" like this:

Can you guess what it is?

Fried eel! How does that sound to you? These weren't the best ones I've eaten but when well fried they're really good. Not so good for health but I eat them once a year, if lucky. Usually is eaten with tomato rice and saute'd bell pepper salad.

Do you know some unique foods from your country?

Pan-fried Shrimp, Garlic & Lemon

I'll be talking about a giveaway at the end of the post, stay tuned!

I forgot to take a picture at the bento box (tupperware actually) but I took one at my plate:

It took a bit to make this because I had to peel the shrimp and save the shells for stock. Underneath there's plain rice and the vegetables came from the freezer and sauté'd.

Shrimp with skin on, defrosted.

I decided to leave the end of the shell for better presentation.

For the shrimp, what I did was:

- Heat a pan with a little olive oil and put a small dried red pepper along with whole (slightly mashed) garlic. Let the flavour come out a bit and then start putting the shrimp (which had salt and some lemon juice) gently and flip it over until it's nearly cooked. Don't overcook shrimp or it'll feel like chewing gum.

Here's the shrimp just cooked.

As you can see, I didn't peel off the garlic because I like the flavour that it adds to the rest and prevents the garlic from burning too quickly. It's a shame whole shrimp can be so expensive. We can't really afford buy this, and this one we got was from relatives that were really nice in sharing some :D

Yesterday I was running through my RSS feeds and one of them had a "Win a Tamagoyaki pan"! I immediately read the whole post and wanted to enter the contest. I have been looking for a tamagoyaki pan for a while now and there are none available in my country :(

So, if you want to join the competition and give it a try, here's a direct link to the post. Thank you Sarah for hosting this event!

Some news

I am finally back in shape from a nasty flu! It's been a hard week with so much to wipe from my nose and trying to sleep that I didn't make anything worth taking a picture. I did however take a picture of what my bf did for me on one of the days:

Don't you miss anything here? No matter how hard I try, if he cooks, he will never put vegetables in it!

Yesterday I made some lunch for me for today because I had classes all day. I guess the kitchen was angry at me for not using it for nearly a week and so, it punished me: First the eggplant i was saving to try out a new recipe was rotten from the inside -_- this is the 2nd time this happens; I buy rotten-on-the-inside eggplants...

Lucky for me I had some zucchini so I changed he eggplant with it. Then I forgot to defrost the meat and ended up burning it a bit when I stir-fried it. If that wasn't enough, when I cut it to bite-sized pieces one of the pieces fell to the back of the oven, then the rice would refuse to cook, I cooked a sweet potato (never cook them, they taste awful when cooked), I cut myself and to end the night beautifully me and my bf started a long fight (until 3am).

The food however tasted so good today, it felt so warming to eat my own food at a public garden even though it was cloudy. I should cook more for myself!

And finally the last news: I decided to upload a song I sang on youtube - Hallelujah the Jeff Buckley version. If you're curious, give it a little try on your ears it won't hurt (much) :D

Farfalle with bell pepper sauce

Today I looked at BookDepository to find that they're giving away free ebooks! I looked through some, searched on something I'm planning on doing (and I'll be sure to post!) and got to some Italian recipes of pasta. All of it combined, got me to make a little experience, and a well succeeded one:

I'm almost finishing the chickpea burgers staple and those fish fingers have been on the freezer for more time than I wanted them to, so this time I tried a different approach: instead of pan-frying and deep frying the fish and the burger, I baked them. The burgers were brushed in a little olive oil because they had no fat in it but the fish fingers didn't so I added nothing. Baking is a bit more useful to make 4 meals at a time than frying because you do it all at once plus you have the fat amount reduced which is a plus.

With the farfalle, I cooked it but there was colour missing (there still is, it's all golden brown green-ish but) so, inspired by the Italian food videos/articles, and the lonely bell pepper in the fridge, I made a little invention which turned out nice. Here's the recipe of it:

- 1 green bell pepper chopped in small pieces;

- 3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped;

- Olive oil;

- 1/2 teaspoon of fine chopped basil ( I didn't have fresh basil but I bet it would taste a lot better);

- salt, pepper and a little sugar to taste;

- 4 tbspoons tomato sauce (or if you can, replace it for a fresh medium-sized tomato);

Heat the olive oil and when it's hot enough, put the garlic and be careful so it doesn't burn! Don't mince it or it'll burn really fast. When the garlic is golden brown, put the bell pepper and wait for it to cook, remembering to steer it. When it looks cooked, add basil and the tomato sauce and stir frequently until some of the liquid evaporates. Taste it and season to your liking. I had to put a bit of sugar because the tomato sauce was too acid, I use this trick on tomato soup as well to reduce the acidity. After seasoning it, turn off the heat and pour it over the pasta and mix it until all of the pasta has a little of the sauce. Serve warm and it'll taste heavenly ^^

Oh, and please ignore the background, this is something I have to improve because when I take pictures of the food, I usually forget where it is and there were some dishes/silverware drying where I took the pic.

Pan-fried tofu & couscous "gratin"

It's been raining for about 2 weeks (or maybe 3 I'm not even sure anymore) without a sunny day, and yesterday afternoon I found myself in an enjoyable experience: under the rain. I always try to leave school at the time my bf leaves work so we can go back home together. Here's his lunch for today!

There is a pile with couscous underneath, fresh tomato slices, cheese and oregano. On the lower part I put some snow-peas and some stir-fried tofu "steaks" (slices).

The tofu is an old recipe from my mum (or at least one of my favourite ones she made a long time ago).

She always uses extra-firm tofu (something like cheese tofu) boils it until nearly cooked. Then grabs a frying pan, slice sthe tofu, some chopped garlic, a bit of olive oil and some soy sauce. She Pan-fries it until golden brown on each side (or at least make sure it's stiff on each side because you might not be able to see the golden with the soy sauce). When it's cooked, just eat it warm and it'll be delicious.

Since it's been cold, my bf's been warming up his food in the microwave from work so I made use of that aspect to plan the food.

The tomato-cheese-oregano idea came from something I made in summer called "pan pizza" which is made of bread with tomato slices, cheese, salt and oregano on top, then slightly grilled or baked in the oven until the cheese melts, making it look like some sort of pizza.

I was quite surprised when he actually said he LIKED the tofu, usually he says "mm" or "it's okay". I might be doing some more tofu recipes because it's cheaper than meat and this month's budget is super tight for me at least, having to pay school and some workshops.

I'll leave you with the little adventure "underwater" :D stay safe and warm!

Yesterday, instead of taking the bus from my school to my bf's work, I walked half the way with a classmate, went through a shopping centre, did some quick shopping and went out. It was raining quite a bit when I left the centre but I would never expect the rain to get THAT worse... in 3 minutes I was on the tips of my toes avoiding giant puddles and when I reached some stairs, they had turned into small waterfall. In 15 minutes (which was the time I took door to door because I stopped for about 5 in the rain jut looking around and listening, I love rain ^^) the main road was a river, and I am not exaggerating.

At some point I regretted waiting on the rain because it got so hard even the umbrella couldn't stop it from dripping on me.

When it stopped raining, my bf went out of work (lucky bastard, he never gets the heavy rain) and we had to cross the road to get the bus, the problem was on the "crossing" part... We tried thinking of different paths but we'd always have to cross the road with half a meter of water on each side. We reached a point where half the zebra crossing was covered in water. At that moment,  the bus came and we ended up running in water, to catch it, which reached to 1/4 of my legs. With all that water, the result was 1h and a half ride home of really slow buses and flooded streets.

Fast and simple

Since X-mas we've been trying to reduce protein and sugar incomes so our bodies don't suffer anymore than they already did.

This was a fast to cook and assembly meal and I just added the carrots for extra vegetable/color

There's beef with onions and tomato sauce on top of a leaf of lettuce. Then there's broccoli carrot and rice. We had the same thing for dinner along with a tomato soup bowl.

I'm looking forward for next year's experiments. I hope I finally get my bento boxes (you have no idea how many setbacks I had on getting these >.<) and might buy some bento books. Where I live there's not one single store that sells anything bento related in the whole country.

So, some of my year's resolutions will be:

- Assembling proper bentos;

- Improving my photos of food & background;

- Losing the extra weight from christmas;

- Getting my cat fully healed (she's getting better really slowly and I'm stating to worry if her belly's fungus will ever disappear);

- Get the car back!!;

- Finish my degree so I can get another one;

and some more I just don't feel like writing for now ^^ Wish you all a Happy new year and hope all your resolutions come true!

X-mas meals

And here is most of my meals for X-mas eve and day, I thought I'd share them because even for me, it was a different kind of X-mas meal than I'm used to at my home town. In Portugal there are variations of what should go to the table according to the region: some cook turkey, some lamb, salted codfish, cow meat marinated in whine and garlic, and so on... This was my grandparents' version:

There were some home-made olives, salad, cooked shrimp, whine and the seafood soup at the center

- For x-mas eve, we had seafood soup, salted codfish cooked and then baked with mashed potatoes and a few more treats on an extra table (because the dinner table was just too small (or full?:D)

The seafood soup

I forgot to take a picture at the codfish and mashed potatoes at the beggining, but I still wanted to show you (If I could I'd get you to taste a bit, it was really good) This is what was left when I remembered:

And this was the worse part, or the best:

"The extra table"

Back row: a sweet my grandma made out of almonds and sweet potato, dark dry figs, almonds and raisins, white figs.

Bottles: 2 different home-made liquors, one out of goat milk and the other one out of figs.

Front row: 2 types of olives, bolo-rei and pumpkin puffs. I couldn't find a better translation for the puffs but in portuguese it's called "filhoses".

By X-mas morning the puffs were gone and for lunch we had roasted chicken with potatoes:

We could only eat one for lunch (5 people)

I took this one just for reminding myself how I should roast mine:

This next week I'll have soups and very little or preferably no sugar and minimum amounts of food so I can burn the weekend's.

A few words/news

I'm sorry I haven't written any posts but this while Christmas time and my sudden too short budged until the end of the month kind of gotten my mood down. It is very complicated for me this time of year because I love my family but I also love my bf and for reason's I can't specify, I can't have them both. Also not having a car anymore... Well, let's say it's been a chain of turn-off events that have succeeded in preventing my posts. I did try something a few nights ago but it didn't taste as I expected and I only took a picture at it after it was cut:

I had leftover curry from the day before and my failed attempt to make gyoza dumplings frustrated me so much I went insane and tried making a big gyoza. (I just divided the dough and put half on top, half on the bottom, like a pie!) Turns out the dough gets really hard to chew after baked, but the curry was still nice.

I'm not sure I'll post much for a while, but I'll make sure to take pictures at Xmas' foodies, not made by me but grampa doesn't really mind I take pictures of his doing.

Also, I'm expecting a book I won (Special thanks to Pikko for hosting the event) and some goodies from Japan which should arrive around February! Let's see if I finally dive into Bentoing more seriously and make sure to include meals for me too!

Oh, and whenever I make Farinheira again, I'll make sure I make a How-to post for those who keep looking for it, or you can just leave a comment and I'll tell you everyway I know to cook it.

That should be all thanks for reading and Merry Christmas and a Happy new year!!!

Leftovers & Veggies

I thought I'd be able to get creative after a great day in the kitchen, but I ended up just caring for the healthy rather than the cute.

This is the first time I've ever put peas on his lunch because he said he hated them 2 years ago :P I guess that's changed because he didn't complain. When I made this, I wanted to put some kiwi on a cup but since he wanted to microwave his lunch, I put it on a small tupperware aside. Maybe I'll get this solved after I get a little something I'll be sure to show here and talk about it! Until then, we'll just have to wait and stick to the tupperwares and separating microwaveable from non microwaveable.

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