Chayote Soup

So I bought some Chayote from T&T as it was on sale.  Usually I'd just stir fry them, but today, I looked in my fridge and saw that I had a bunch of egg tofu that was about to expire.  So instead of stir frying, I decided to make a simple Asian style soup.

Ingredients:
4 Chayote - cut into chunks
1 can of chicken broth
1 equivalent can of water
2 packages of egg tofu
3-4 dried shitake mushroom (rehydrate in water)
salt and white pepper to taste

Add shitake mushroom and chayote in a pot of chicken broth and water.  Simmer until the chayote chunks are soft.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Lastly, add tofu.

Ta-da, a nice, simple, and healthy (at least I think it's healthy..haha) soup.

Baked Salmon Sandwich

What do you do when you have a ton of bread, bacon, onion, apples and salad at home and hubby defrosted salmon fillet for dinner?  You make a sandwich!

I marinated the Salmon with some salt, basil, dill weed and baked with a slather of miracle whip on top.  While the salmon was baking, I fried up the bacon, set it aside, poured out some of the oil from the pan and fried the onion in the remaining bacon fat.  On the toasted bread, I laid out the salad leaves and onion on one slice and laid out the apple slices, bacon and salmon on the other slice.  Viola!  A simple meal to use up my excess ingredients in the fridge :)

lamb...yum!

So we bought this huge lamb shoulder a while back and stuck it in the freezer. We finally dug it out and decided to make it for dinner. Since I had to work, I decided to stick the lamb in the slow cooker (which would help the meat fall of the bone anyways). For the sauce, I made a mango mint yogurt sauce. Found the sauce recipe online and tweaked it a bit

Lamb:
marinated with coarse salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary
slow cooked with onion in broth and white wine

BEFORE AND AFTER

Yogurt sauce:
fresh cilantro, dried crushed mint, mango, garlic, onion, salt, lemon juice and yogurt. For the yogurt, I drained it overnight over a coffee filter so that it would be thicker and less wet. I used very little garlic and onion and used more mango.

Mashed Potato:
lots and lots and lots of potato, cream cheese, water, salt and dried dill weed


All in all, I would say my first attempt was pretty successful. At least hubby liked it :)

Lemon Yogurt Cake

I really need a better loaf pan...you'll know what I mean when you see the picture of my flat loaf.

So I have a huge container of plain yogurt that I bought from Sunopta that's about to expire. I searched all over the web to find a good recipe that I could incorporate some yogurt in. 'Lo and behold I came across this Lemon Yogurt Cake recipe. Looked simple enough!

http://www.squidoo.com/best-lemon-yogurt-cake

I did do some adaptations - used apple sauce instead of oil and added a bit more lemon to the cake. Have yet to try it yet but hopefully it'll taste good! As you can tell by my picture, the cake is super flat b/c my loaf pan is quite wide and not sturdy (it's a silicone pan...so very soft and doesn't really hold it's shape). Oh well.

New Blog Focus....maybe?

Since I have been baking so much as of late, I figure I should start documenting my baking/cooking adventures! :)

Unfortunately I'm not as adventurous yet as to make my own recipe but have been poaching off of other people's recipes and making tweaks here and there depending on what I have at home.

My last few recipes that I made included:

Matcha Mousse Cheesecake:

Gingerbread and cranberry biscotti:

Mint Mocha Mousse:

The funny thing is that I generally don't enjoy eating sweets so I end up having to make other people eat what I bake. If you have any good recipes to pass off to me, let me know! I would love to give it a try :)