Delaney’s spiced chicken thighs with a roast broccoli salad
This wonderful pair of recipes came out in the April 2014 issue of FishHead magazine under Delaney Mes‘ My Kitchen column. She creates recipes, I cook and shoot for her. She lives in Auckland and I live in Wellington but in this day and age of email and DropBox, distance doesn’t matter.
Roasted pumpkin, feta and orzo salad
Another recipe adapted from Donna Hay. I promised myself to use her recipes instead of just drool over the beautiful photos in the online magazine. This one is my version of her roasted pumpkin, feta and quinoa salad.
Joshua Dodd’s heritage tomato, wild herb and goat’s cheese salad.
DISCLAIMER: There is no way I can arrange salad on a plate this good! Head chef Joshua Dodd of FoxGlove Bar and Kitchen prepared this for our photo shoot for FishHead magazine.
It’s the love month so here’s a Valentine-themed recipe. If you’re a guy and you want to impress your girl other than with a bouquet of flowers, why not make this special salad with wild flowers in it? Or if you’re a girl and you want to impress your guy other than with the scent of flowers in your hair, why not make this special salad with wild flowers in it? Makes sense?
Christmas tuna macaroni salad
Back home in the Philippines, tuna macaroni salad has always been part of my family’s Noche Buena (Christmas Eve) feast. How come you may ask, since this is not a traditional Filipino recipe? But we make it because it is SO easy to do: no cooking, not a lot of chopping, just put everything together and chill in the fridge. We normally use mayonnaise but in the spirit of healthy feasting, I used homemade vinaigrette as dressing. The result is absolutely better, taste-wise and health-wise!
The Food Network Channel can be addictive. It’s a good thing I don’t have a television set! I never knew who Ina Garten was until I saw The Barefoot Contessa on TV while housesitting for friends in Portland, Oregon.
Ina’s potato-fennel gratin stuck to mind because it was so easy to make. You can prepare it ahead of time, keep it in the fridge then bake it when you’re ready. Which was exactly what I did on several occasions. I adapted her recipe and used what was available: parsnip instead of fennel and for this recipe, sweet potato instead of plain boring potato. The result is that extra sweetness that makes this an ideal companion to the roast turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. Not that we celebrate Thanksgiving here in Kiwiland. But there is a lot to be thankful for. Every day that we are alive should be Thanksgiving Day.
One of the joys of grocery-shopping in America was finding the prices of commodities to be so low compared to New Zealand’s. Take mushrooms for example. It is twice as much here (NZ) if not more. So imagine my delight whenever I saw my favorite mushrooms in the fresh produce section of supermarkets in Portland (seems like ages ago now!)
Following last week’s survival kit disaster, I found a good use for one of the rusty cans of chickpeas. If you’ve been following my blog back from the time I made a scandalous confession, you know that I drool over Katie Quinn Davies‘ food photography. I also drool over her recipes. She is a rockstar both as a food photographer and as a recipe developer.
Living in Wellington is like living life dangerously. We are prone to earthquakes. They said the BIG ONE is bound to happen anytime. Every home has a survival kit. Mine is assembled by my loving partner-in-crime as a going-away present two years ago.
Have you ever cooked those green vegetables with yellow flowers? They are called Yu Choy or Chinese spinach. I dream of deep frying those flowers into crunchy crispiness. In the meantime, I have left-over chicken Adobo sauce from last week. A 15-minute recipe is in the works!
Canon G11, ISO 200, 1/10 sec, f/4
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, I challenged Seana from Cottage Grove House and Sandra from Please Pass The Recipe to come up with a recipe based on left-overs and anything we could find in the fridge that need to be thrown out soon. We called this “Clean-out-the-fridge challenge”. I like to avoid the term “cook off challenge” because it would make it a competition which it is not. This is mainly a fun way to share recipes based on a theme. I picked up a lot of tips from Sandra’s blog because she’s a master in the kitchen and Seana always uses the freshest ingredients that makes me jealous! Well, this time we used almost stale ingredients so check out their blogs to see what they have come up with.
The kitchen is my playground. 