Last Night's Dinner

One of my favorite blogs is Last Night's Dinner. Reading this blog (along with living in the same house as Megan and watching Good Eats) has significantly improved my cooking. What's amazing is that the author gives no recipes. It's really more of a log of their (her and her husband's) cooking and eating. She will say that she had something in the fridge that needed to be used and she felt like something or other and decided to throw stuff together into her own creations. Then there are the photos, which are usually very good and make my mouth water. I've become much better at using leftovers and partial ingredients and turning them into really quite good meals.

I started taking pictures of the food 1. because sometimes they look really beautiful, and 2. because I want to remember what I've cooked in the past so I'll have something to look at when I have no idea what to cook.

So, I've decided to blog about these meals. It's mostly to remind myself what I did but maybe it will inspire meals of your own from time to time.

Here are some of the meals I've made in the last month or so.



Broiled salmon with a mustard vinaigrette (olive oil, pomegranate vinegar, mustard), roasted russian banana potatoes with thyme over baby greens. I think that this may have been the first time I'd ever had Russian Banana potatoes. They are now by far my favorite potatoes. They're expensive so I've buried a few in my garden, hopefully they grow. I've also recently mastered perfectly roasted potatoes. I coat them in oil oil or duck fat and put them in the oven for 30-45 minutes until the skins look perfect. Also, I almost always make my own dressing since it's so easy and I always forget to buy it. My stuff is better anyways.



This is mostly a recipe from a book about southern cooking that I have but I changed it a lot. It's braised lamb shanks with blanched carrots, roasted red potatoes, and an amazing sauce. It's the first time I had ever blanched vegetables and I really liked the way the carrots tasted and felt in my mouth. I normally hate cooked carrots, but these still had a crunch. I'm definitely going to continue blanching my carrots. Also, the sauce was out of this world. I braised the lamb in duck stock and wine, so it's a reduced mixture of that and whatever seeped out of the lamb bones.



This was the first time I had ever cooked rabbit. It showed up in my southern cooking book but when it came time to cook the rabbit I got annoyed at the complicated recipe and instead found something on the internet. It was rabbit with honey/chili sauce and of course my normal bread pan fried in butter and arugula. I didn't really like the recipe. Too much chili pepper and I think that maybe braised rabbit with lots of other flavors would be a much better way to be introduced to the rabbit flavors. I'm still not sure I like it.



This was trout broiled over russian banana potatoes topped with a vinaigrette made from sherry vinegar over arugula. I got the inspiration from Last Night's Dinner. But I couldn't find mackerel or fresh wild sardines so I went with trout which the fish monger butterflied for me. The sherry vinegar was great.



The same trout from the night before grilled outside with red potatoes over romaine. Not as tasty. I tried to get my alderwood smoke going but I forgot about it and thus didn't have enough time to get it going.



I made this meal for lunch today. It's week-old day-old stale bread from Macrina's (that is, I bought it from Macrina's as day old bread, 50% off, a week ago) pan fried in butter with arugula and canned tuna. I buy the cook albacore canned tuna. It's about a dollar a can, which is expensive for canned tuna but when compared to other ingredients it's amazingly cheap.