This picture is underexposed.
But it’s a picture of fava and artichoke pasta, made roughly following this recipe. I used way less breadcrumbs than the receipe called for. Also, I added some lemon zest and thinly sliced mint over the top once it came off the stove. It was more mild flavored than things I tend to make, but I liked it. Would make again!
In addition to working on my CS 107 homework for hours on end and battling the monster that is C (well, mostly, refreshing myself on pointers & malloc), I fried some fish! My parents picked up some rock cod at Market Hall and I dipped it in egg whites, then panko. Then into the hot oil they went, with some thyme pulled from the front yard.
I was surprised at how well it turned out since I’ve never been particularly adept at frying things. Perhaps all that’s needed is more practice…
Things I made for dinner last night, using what my parents bought from Ranch 99 and the leftovers in the fridge.
Lobster noodles with vermicelli.
Roast duck fried rice. Apparently my camera decided to focus on the edges of the rice, so the center is out of focus. Shallow DOF ftl.
Moogle wasn’t for dinner, but he was certainly helpful in cleaning up the floor after dinner. Also, he really, really likes lobster. And duck. And rice.
Here are the layers of the turducken I’d previously posted about. Nom.
From the inside (left) to the outside (right) — chicken, duck, stuffing, turkey.
My brother has nagged me to get a Turducken for Christmas dinner for a couple years… I think mostly because he thinks it would be funny, not so much because he wants to eat one. But, this year I ordered one from a meat shop in San Jose that has pretty good Yelp reviews for their turducken.
For $135, we got a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. All deboned & full of stuffing. I baked it for about 17 hours (initially at 190F, then later at 350F) and fed eight people. We finished about a third of the bird. This turducken was far better than the one we had tried for Christmas dinner a few years ago — that one was a log of meat, supposedly a turkey on the outside, but it had been deboned/processed enough that it didn’t resemble much. Also, it cooked up into a dry log, unlike this one. I suspect leaving the skin on the duck and the chicken based the turducken from the inside.
I won’t get another one for a long time — but as far as novelty items and large protein sources go, this one was pretty awesome.
Shamiq and I wanted to try to make our own rolls.
Turns out it’s pretty hard to make them look pretty. Instead they look more like modern art.
But it was a tasty endeavor.
This weekend I bought a piece of fish labelled as “black cod” from Monteray Market (Fish market?) in Berkeley. I cooked it up in a little soy, black bean paste and sesame oil… But I was surprised to find that my fish reminded me a lot of Patagonian Toothfish/Chilean Sea Bass, which I try to avoid eating. It was fatty, slightly flakey and mild flavored. My dad got suspicious and pointed out that maybe “black cod” was a name for a scarier sounding fish, the same way Patagonian Toothfishes are marketed as “Chilean Seabass.” Wikipedia tells me that there is a black cod — complete with anti-freeze proteins in its blood. But also, that “black cod” is sometimes applied to sablefish, and Wikipedia even adds that sablefish is similar to Chilean Seabass. Now I’m wondering, which fish did I eat?