A varied week

It has been an interesting week in the Casa del Raglan, filled with a fair amount of food, almost none of which I managed to document the entire way through. With every recipe I make, I am filled with enthusiasm and take pictures of the process as I go along, but as the dish gets near the end I forget to take pictures or get too busy with the cooking itself. This week is a tribute to some of those dishes. I did manage to have one recipe that's documented the entire way through, and one recipe that I have pictures of the finished product, not the making of.

This was an amazing recipe I found for Curried Pork Burgers on the Canadian Living website. I've never had the best luck with burger recipes, and the fresh coriander had me worried since I find it tastes awful at the best of times. However, this recipe was quite a winner, and the burgers were amazing!

This was a case of getting distracted by the meal, since once the burgers were finished grilling on my roommate's Foreman Grill, I was wanted to eat the burger immediately rather than take pictures of it getting cold. It was worth not taking pictures, this recipe is amazing!! Go try it! NOW!!

These were french fries that I made to go with a panko crusted baked fish filet for fish n' chips. The fish itself may not have been the best choice (Tilapia, a.k.a. tasteless), but the dish in general was quite good. This was pretty much the only picture I took of that adventure, the breading of the fish being really messy and not camera friendly.

I was quite proud of this. My Mom has a not-so-secret family recipe for Rigatoni, which I ate throughout my childhood and loved. I attempted to make it years ago and failed, miserably. I ended up throwing two thirds of the casserole out, it was that bad. I had bee a bit skittish in attempting to try it again until recently, when I was able to summon the courage to try it again due to a) Italian pork sausages being sale at my local grocery store, and b) I called my Mom to clarify some things about my copy of the recipe. I'm glad I did, since it worked beautifully this time and tasted just like I remember. It was a bit time consuming to make and required my attention most of the time, so picture taking was forgotten about most of the time. It also resulted in many oil burns on my hand since I was paying too much attention to the camera while taking pictures instead of the cooking pork sausages. Thanks to my years of working in a grocery store kitchen, I didn't feel those burns after about five minutes, and they haven't left any marks.

This was a dinner/lunch leftover recipe for my mid week slump. It's pretty much Kraft Dinner with hotdogs and green onions. I boiled the hotdogs while boiling the pasta and threw the green onions in after I mixed the cheese sauce in. I like to leave the kd covered for five minutes before serving since it thickens up the sauce a bit. All it needs is some ketchup and you have the most Canadian dish ever.

This is the more-or-less fully documented meal! I pulled out my Nova Scotia Cooking Recipe book and made two recipes; the herbed biscuits that I made last year and posted about here, and the Bubbly Bake. The biscuits were great as usual, and I was fairly pleased with the bake as it went along. The sauce tasted amazing as it was being made, but I'm not sure what happened during the baking. My roommate is more knowledgeable about seafood than I am, and said that wine will give scallops a very sharp taste, which explains the strong aftertaste the scallops had when finished. I used cooking wine since we had run out of real wine, but I'm wondering if I try this again with real wine it might be better, and with a nice wine... I hope so, because if I can get rid of the sharp taste this bake was awesome!

Bubbly Bake
Serves 4

Ingredients
1 lb scallops
1/4 cup butter or margarine
2 tbsp finely chopped green onions
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
2 tbsp flour
1/3 cup 18% cream
1/3 cup white wine
salt and fresh cracked black pepper to taste
1/2 cup bread crumbs

Rinse scallops and set aside.
In saucepan, melt butter, and saute green onions and mushrooms until onions become transparent.
Add flour and mix thoroughly; add cream and stir until sauce has thickened.
Add wine, salt and pepper, stirring until completely blended.
Add scallops and pour into a 1 1/2 quart (1.5 L) casserole dish. Top with bread crumbs.
Bake in preheated 350F oven for 25 minutes.

The biscuits were great for soaking up the sauce!

Something evil this way grows....

I have a linear garden of purchased, inherited, gifted and grafted plants. Half of them are herbs and my forlorn tomato plant, the rest are a mix of decorative plants like my Mom's ficus and the giant fern. They all sit along my windowsill and my dining room table in the sunlight. However, recently I discovered that something had creeped into my indoor garden.

At first I had no idea what it was, it was just a random plant growing through my Rosemary. Both my roommate and I were baffled, and it decided to take advantage of us. As we were pulling the Rosemary aside to further inspect this invasive plant, it stung both of us. The sensation stayed in our fingers for a good half hour after the fact. This is what led me to believe that it was a stinging nettle. I found my heavy duty carpentry gloves to cut it out of the pot and dispose of it, once some pictures were taken to send to my Mom for confirmation of it's identity. She gardens and spent several years working part-time in a plant nursery.

The bit that really confuses me about the whole situation is that not only is my garden indoors and 14 stories up in the air, the soil I use is bagged and purchased from garden centres. Soil like that is usually sterilized before being put on sale, so random seeds shouldn't be an issue! My Mom more or less confirmed my suspicions about the evil plant being a stinging nettle, and also mentioned that seeds can lie dormant for large periods of time. They sit in soil, and when the conditions are right, they can then grow. I guess a warm, sunny window that get's a good watering regularly was absolutely perfect.

Evil!!