So here’s what I came up with, while playing around with the blood oranges: mixed baby green salad with vinaigrette dressing, thin-sliced shallots, and blood orange segments. I also made salmon with shallot-citrus-butter sauce, but it got eaten before I had a chance to photograph it :)
Blood oranges! I saw these at the grocery store today, and decided to try them out. They taste just about identical to regular oranges, but are a nifty crimson color. (The one in the photograph is an orange section with the skin removed, which is the way I wanted to prep them to go with tonight’s dinner — had I been thinking more photographically, I probably would have cut some cross-sections. Oh well.)
One of my Clarion classmates came over for dinner today (yay!!), so I whipped up some jerk chicken (spicy marinated Jamaican-style chicken) with mango salsa (mango, red pepper, red onion, cilantro & lime juice). Then, after dinner, vanilla ice cream and the cookies from my last post. Yum!
I don’t do a lot of baking, but tinaconnolly and I made these as a team the last time we got together, so I thought I could pull it off. For some reason, last time they were puffier, whereas this time they are flat and crinkly. I’m puzzled as to what made them come out so different, but at least they still taste good!
Lately I’ve been working on a fun little side project, turning some of my photographs into book covers for AnthologyBuilder.
For those who haven’t heard of it, AnthologyBuilder is a print-on-demand service with a library of short stories from which people can create their own custom anthologies. Once people have chosen the stories they want, they can pick out the cover art for their book.
A few of my personal favorites:
Underwater – http://anthologybuilder.com/cover_demo.php?cover_id=195
Forest – http://anthologybuilder.com/cover_demo.php?cover_id=190
Cat – http://anthologybuilder.com/cover_demo.php?cover_id=192
Fire – http://anthologybuilder.com/cover_demo.php?cover_id=267
Tentacles – http://anthologybuilder.com/cover_demo.php?cover_id=265
My designs are in good company. Other …
While I was home for the holidays, tinaconnolly came to visit, and we made Quiche Florentine. Our version featured eggs, cream, spinach, onion, bacon (optional, obviously, if you wanted a vegetarian version), and gruyere cheese — in a homemade crust (Yay pastry chef Tina!).
Every year Austin sets up a Trail of Lights at Zilker Park. Peter and I went last night, so I got to play around with my camera (the photograph shown above, for instance, is one where I zoomed out while taking a long exposure). My favorite display was the tunnel of stars near the exit:
As usual, I’ve got more photos up on my flickr site.
I can’t stand regular oatmeal. The flavor is fine, but the gloppy texture just doesn’t do it for me. Most oatmeal is made with rolled oats — oats that have been hulled, steamed, rolled, and flaked so that they cook quickly. Steel cut oats (aka Irish oats), on the other hand, are hulled oats cut into two or three pieces, rather than being squashed flat.
Steel cut oats take longer to cook, but they have a lovely chewy …
After seeing Gord’s post mentioning that he had a big box of tasty satsuma/mandarin oranges, I went out and got some for myself. Yum!
Two ripe bananas were transformed into muffins:
I had to search around a bit for a muffin recipe that only called for 2 bananas (most want 3), and ended up using this one. They go really well with honey butter (which Maureen had at Thanksgiving — tasty and easy, just mix honey with room-temperature butter).
