Category food

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Tonight’s dinner is going to be some Morningstar Farms Buffalo Wings. While they are spicy enough on their own, it’s nice to have something else to dip them in.

Well, a few days ago I picked up the bottle of sauce displayed above, Mae Ploy Sweet Chili Sauce. I first had this wonderful sauce at Satay Ria, a truly excellent Thai / Malaysian food shop in the Great Lakes Crossing food court. Not only does the food taste good, but the owner is always working, and he’ll make me veggie spring rolls specially upon request. They really are great.

Anyway, this chili sauce is an excellent almost plum sauce, but with a really good kick from pickled chilies. I’m especially fond of using it to accent any type of asian roll, and I’m certain it’d be good any place a sweet kick is desired.

Oh, also, one can purchase this chili sauce at Meijer and Cost Plus. It’s typically under US$3/bottle in either place.

Want to see stills from the commercial and listen to it’s theme song? Then click here.

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This morning (well, afternoon) I made myself a rather tasty breakfast of porridge and coffee. So, per usual, I snapped a picture of it.

The coffee is just the standard beans that I roasted and ground myself. Really nothing too special, just good coffee made in a coffee press.

The porridge, though… Wow. For all the stories I heard growing up which alluded to porridge tasting like glue, being bland, or just otherwise being awful simply aren’t true. A good porridge seems to taste like an oatmeal cookie without the raisins and sugar. It’s extremely tasty and considerably better than standard instant oatmeal. It’s also really rather healthy. That bowl right there is right around 300 calories and 6.3g of fat. 280 for the oatmeal, then right about 20 or so for the blueberries.

See, I’d never thought to give the stuff a try, but when helping and move apartments, I came across a can of steel cut oatmeal and asked about it. Les said that it is extremely good, but takes a while to cook.

A few weeks later I was watching an episode of Good Eats, and during a section where Alton Brown was discussing oats, he mentioned pinhead, (also known as steel cut) oatmeal and how good of a porridge it can make. Hmm… Maybe there is something going on here, I think…

Skip ahead a few more weeks and I find myself at Cost Plus poking around the food area, and I come across a 500g can of pinhead oatmeal from Hamlyn’s Oats of Scotland for $3.49. It’s not quite the stuff that Les uses (McCann’s), but it was a bit cheaper, and it’s a purely non-GMO Scottish grain, so I figured I’d give it a go.

Well, I must say, I’m very happy with the end result. It took a little bit of experimenting to find an exact combination of cooking time and adjuncts so that the porridge polishes off the flavor so that it suits my palette, but I did, and here’s the recipe I seem to enjoy using:

Click for recipe…

[Crossposted to and .]

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I thought people might be interested in seeing a picture of the impromptu salad that I made up for part of Easter dinner at my parents house. It’s baby spinach, watercress, roma tomato, and carrot. To the above picture I added a mushroom blend containing baby bella, shittake, and oyster mushrooms, but only once I was at my parents house, because I didn’t want them to get soggy. The dressing I chose is Brianna’s Real French Vinaigrette which seemed especially wonderful because it doesn’t contain any typical pre-made salad dressing crap like sugar, corn syrup, etc.

Also, I mixed it up in a bus tray, which is especially convenient because it provides plenty of room for mixing things around, properly tossing a salad, etc. And it’s easily washed / sterilized.

While I had no idea how the salad was going to come out (I threw it together while walking through the market yesterday) it ended up being extremely tasty, and almost all of it was eaten.

Here’s the pictures relating to the salad, all in one place:
· Salad mixed up in the bus tray.
· Mushroom blend used in the salad.
· Salad, mushrooms, and dressing.
· A piece of a slug which I found in the watercress when washing it.

[Cross posted to and …]

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As I tend to do, I’ve taken another photo of a mid-afternoon snack. This time it’s a pecan sticky bun from Ridley’s Bakery and Cafe (in Troy, Michigan) and some coffee that I had just roasted. The coffee is a 50/50 blend of Organic Mexican and Organic Sumatra and is absolutely wonderful. When it was placed in the press, the coffee had been ground for about two minutes, and was still warm from coming out of the roaster. Mmm.

Oh, and as is demonstrated by the picture above, the new camera doesn’t suck. It’s much, much more flexible than the Coolpix 3200 I briefly had. While the CP3200 isn’t a bad camera, it’s just not very good for detailed shots of food and the like.

So there’s this coffee shop on the way to work, right in Utica, called The Daily Grind. All over the store and it’s cups I see this “Coffee For Independent Thinkers” logo, so I decided to look into it. Well, it seems that this is the branding of CrimsonCup, a distributor specifically designed to work wtih independent coffee shops. Well, that’s good… The first coffee place to open directly on my way to work happens to be independently owned. Not bad.

It’s interesting, I live in Shelby Township and I have to go at least 3/4 of a mile out of my way to get to any of the (numerous) Starbucks. Thusly, I’d almost never go.

[Crossposted to and .]

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Well, I’m feeling especially post whoreish tonight.

After the earlier meal, I decided that I needed a bit of dessert. I haven’t been eating many fresh fruit and vegetables, so when I was at Nino Salvaggio‘s earlier in the evening to get dinner’s ingredients, I ended up picking up a blood orange. Having never had one before, I wasn’t so sure what to expect, so I got the camera ready. Well, I wasn’t disappointed…

This orange has a surprisingly deep red color to it’s flesh, and a somewhat sour, almost pink grapefruit-y taste. Very good, and a very nice alternative to standard naval oranges. I’d highly recommend them. :)

OH YES!

For the first time in my life I have found ***real*** smoked salmon around here.

See, back when I was in Alaska for a while, Kate’s dad would smoke salmon almost once a week. Well, the resulting product was a deep pink/red color, dry, and extremely flavorful. Not this crap pink slime you see at most stores.

Well, tonight when I was at Nino Salvaggios I managed to find some salmon that looked similar. It’s Alaskan salmon (read: not farmed), nice and dry, and with flavor. I happened to get the cajun variety, so it’s got a bit of a spicy bite, but it’s absolutely amazing!

I might finally eat smoked salmon again!