The idea of making our own cheesecake was actually planted a week ago. At some point in the evening I had turned on the TV and flipped through our half-dozen channels to see if there was anything interesting on. Ling had me stop at a show that was demonstrating how to make a cheescake. It looked simple, Ling loves cheescake and wants to learn how to bake, so she immediately decided to try.
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It turns out that all the advice I received is true – portobello mushrooms do make a decent substitute for steak on a barbeque.
Marinate for a couple of hours in a mixture of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Grill for 10 minutes (yes that is longer than it takes to do a steak to medium rare).
Ling and I ate them – Tim insisted he was having steak.
Vegetarian or not, Tim’s eating that way until I’m done!Three bean chilli:
Mix it all together in the crock pot, and let sit for a day. With about an hour left, add 1 cup of frozen corn. Next time I think we’re going to try a pound of ground beef in there too, and maybe some extra water (it was really, really, thick). Another variation to attempt will be using dry beans instead of canned, soaked overnight.
Saturday’s dinner: Cheese Quesadillas cooked on the George Foreman grill. Last night Tim got the pergoies that he had asked for the night before.
I made an interesting observation today: you can tell I am doing a lot of cooking if the kitchen is really clean. If I’m eating out or doing frozen food, the kitchen is a mess.
The reason is: I can’t stand to work in a messy kitchen, so before I do any significant cooking I clean it. However if the kitchen is a mess, and I’m feeling lazy, that can lead into quite a downward spiral!
Tonight is a Tae Kwon Do night for Tim, so that means a simple dinner, because I find it hard to put together a complete meal when we’re doing the running around (Ling, on the other hand, manages to get three dishes on the table; I don’t know how she does it). So I gave Tim a choice – what did he want for dinner – perogies or tortellini in tomato sauce? He chose the perogies.
I had some time to kill before taking him to the lessons, so I started to clean the kitchen. As I was washing, Tim asked if we had time to eat dinner before, because he was really hungry. So was I, so I agreed, threw the water on and started things boiling.
As I was chopping the onions it dawned on me that something was wrong. I looked around and declared what had now become obvious. Apparently we were having tortellini for dinner tonight.
You see I had actually expected Tim to choose the tortellini over the perogies, and when he chose the wrong food I don’t think it really sank into my mind. So when I got pulled out of my expected routine (make dinner later), my mind functioned on autopilot and did what it had expected to do all along.
By the time I realized it, the tortellini was almost cooked, the onions were chopped up to put into the sauce, and the pan was already heating up.
I guess we’ll have perogies tomorrow night.
I decided tonight to try and replicate the tofu dish that Ling makes. Although I’ve never formally been told how to do it, I’ve watched her enough times that I figured I had a chance to replicate it (I even remembered the salt)! Tim’s comment was that if mom had put it on the table he could have thought she made it; I’ll take that compliment!
We’ve made a couple of changes to how things work, to try and work around my inherent laziness. I have noticed a temptation to throw out items that really should be recycled because I don’t want to go to the garage. So I washed the blue box, and put it in the kitchen at the end of the counter – now it is just as easy as the garbage.
The city has started collecting food waste that is compostable, so we are now keeping a bucket on the counter to throw all food into (old rice, banana peels, vegetable ends, etc). Every night I dump them in the “green can”.
This, coupled with having one less person in the house, seems to have really reduced our garbage – last week we only used one garbage bag in the kitchen, and it’s really looking like this week will be the same.
Although I had better be careful that I don’t pretend to enjoy cooking too much – Ling may not take it back over when she returns!
Tim has survived a whole week of my cooking now! In return, I have managed to come up with vegetarian options for a week straight. I think I have about 4 days of ideas left in me, after that who knows…
Thursday
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Start with a bed of lettuce, place a pile of spinach in the middle. Sprinkle liberally with dried blueberries, then ring with croutons and cashews. Carefully place two chunks of goat cheese on top, and two slices of french bread on the side. Top with a honey-mustard dressing. Although it seems strange to have a “salad” for dinner that made it quite filling!
Should I enroll in Iron Chef yet?
One aspect of Ling being overseas is I take over all the meal cooking duties. Now that’s not necessarily a disaster – those who’ve known me for a long time know I wasn’t too bad at taking care of myself – but in all honesty I’m really rusty. It’s been seven years since I’ve put together meals with any kind of regularity and, aside from inviting family over once every three months, I’ve only ever cooked for myself.
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Ling and I went our for a dinner by ourselves last night. It was really nice to get a chance to have a quiet, romantic, dinner, and take all that time lingering over food that Tim would hate.
Once again, we were in Yaletown, this time in a French restaurant called Elixir. This week is “Dine Out Vancouver” week, where hundreds of restaurants around town offer a set menu, along with a wine pairing for each course, if you choose to partake. We chose to partake.
The menu went like this:
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