Summer has arrived here in the Pacific Northwest and it is time to enjoy the grill as much as possible. Tonight I want to enjoy the grill with a quick dish – grilled prawns. I bet there will be more time spent preparing the prawns than actually grilling them. But that is OK… because when a dish is quick and incredibly delicious, it does not have to take a large investment of time. I paired this dish with Sesame Asparagus Salad and white rice. Simple, delicious and easily extensible from one diner to a group…
Tonight I made a simple asparagus salad to accompany the Sweet Chili Grilled Prawns. With the dog days of summer here, this dish keeps you out of the kitchen and away from the stove, but delivers loads of flavor. This dish is great with the grilled prawns, but would also be wonderful with beef or chicken. This recipe is a tweak on this recipe from the AllRecipes website – a great resource for creative dishes. I added shallots and substituted Chinese mustard for the dijon mustard; it just seemed like the better choice in my humble…
Here is a variant of my Banana Pancake recipe – perfect for your weekend breakfast. Pancakes and waffles from scratch are not as hard as you may think. The mixes you buy were just created to simplify the making of these delicious breakfast dishes. But you already have all of the basic ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, eggs, milk, and butter) and can easily control what and how much you use – so why bother with a pre-made mix? In researching this recipe, I learned the basic difference between pancake and waffle recipes are…
Tonight’s cocktail is a classic – one of the six basic drinks listed in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David Embury. The daiquiri is simple yet elegant, potent yet enjoyable, and mostly overlooked (at least in my circles). Let’s fix that, shall we? The base daiquiri is just white rum, lime juice, and simple syrup. The International Bartenders Association’s recipe for this drink is 9 parts white rum, 5 parts lime juice, and 3 parts simple syrup. Yes, you read that correctly… 9 parts of white rum…
Last night I decided to try something new with Caprese salad. Instead of just layering the tomato, mozzarella, and basil and dressing with olive oil and balsamic glaze, I wanted to incorporate the basil into the dressing. My thoughts were to put basil into every bite easily and I needed a tasty medium to hold the basil. I could use olive oil (which would have worked just fine), but I wanted to punch it up a little. So, out came the blender and a bottle of champagne. Yes, that’s right… I chose to…
I did a quick check and guess what? I have not posted a classic margarita recipe yet. Well, it is high time to correct that oversight! I am not talking your cheap tequila and bottled margarita mix with ice into a blender kind of margarita, but the robust and intensely flavorful Classic Margarita. I found the ratio for the ingredients on the Serious Eats website, but I definitely tweaked it… and here is why. I believe using straight lime juice is fine, if you want to taste the standard tequila shot in your drink. I…
Have you ever wondered what I do with the remaining portions of raw ingredients that do not show up in a following post? I think solving that dilemma was critical to success when cooking for one – menu planning. It is easy enough to know that even moderate amounts (like one pound of ground beef) needs to be split into two or three (preferable) portions for different meals. But what about vegetables like bundles of asparagus, half peppers and half onions, half cans of diced tomatoes, etc? Typically I create a weekly menu and shop for…