Eating with your eyes!

I used to take food pictures all the time back when I had a cooking blog, and I find that it's a hard habit to shake. When my food looks really pretty, I can't resist the urge to document it. And now that I have a fancy new camera, the pictures look so appetizing without any real effort. I made this simple, yet beautiful, dinner on Friday night, and just had to share it with the blog world (I HATE the word blogosphere, and you'll never find me saying that on here!). 

Friday Night Dinner for Two

Miso Glazed Salmon

Whole Grain Rice Salad with Cherries

The Rice Salad came from Super Natural Everyday, my newest vegetarian cookbook. What a beautiful cookbook it is! The recipes are fresh and gourmet, but reasonablely simple. I loved the combination of spinach, walnuts, and cherries. You should buy the cookbook, but you could also google and find this recipe here.

The light flavor is perfect for this time of year,

and this is a great way to use a bunch of in season cherries.

The salmon recipe was Miso-Glazed Salmon from Food & Wine.

Simple and flavorful.

He bakes, too!

I love that Joe is a bit of a secret renaissance man. He's a smart professional businessman, who works hard from 8-5 (or 6, or 7...), but when he's not at work, he's keeping busy with so many hobbies. He's learning to play guitar, enjoys riding his bike and working out, and, obviously, loves brewing beer. He is also a great pizza maker, thanks to a college job at the best pizza place in Columbia!  And when he has any extra free time, he likes to play around with baking projects. He doesn't bake all that often, but when he gets the urge, it's always for a big project. This week's baking experiment... cherry pie!

The recipe was Deb's Sweet Cherry Pie, from Smitten Kitchen. 

Buttery, flaky crust, and lots of sweet cherries. Basically summer in a pie dish.

Obviously, this pie NEEDS ice cream. A nice big scoop, to complement a nice big slice of pie.

I hope he gets a baking urge again soon! I could get used to this!

Life Off the Web

This post is for my sister. She pointed out today that since I've broken up with facebook, I've been pretty quiet on the internet. I needed a break from status updates from a hundred random high school classmates that I could care less about, so I decided to deactivate my profile for a while. Most likely not forever, but for the moment it's a really nice break! I am pretty weak with things like that, so I knew the only way I could curb my addition to checking facebook every few hours was to cut it out altogether. I already know that when I do get back on, I'm going to unfriend a lot of the random people that I don't actually care for. It's very liberating!

I don't have any beef with blogging, though, and my slow posting rate lately is only due to one major issue... laziness! Oh, and I've been pretty busy, too. I'm running a 10k tomorrow, so I've been running and working out a lot to get ready for that. I've been doing some acupuncture, too, which ate up one night a week for the last three weeks. Add to that a haircut, book club, volunteering, and a little social life... not too much time left to sit on the computer! But life is good, whether I'm documenting it on this blog or not :)

I do have a few pictures to share, from our visit to the Morton Arboretum a couple weeks ago. We met Joe's parents for a little wilderness adventure just outside the city, and spent a few relaxing hours "hiking" through the beautiful forests. It was beautiful, but also made me long for the true wilderness that was right at my back door growing up in Colorado. The weather was perfect, and it was a fun activity that was really different from our usual weekend to dos. It was also a great excuse to pull out my new camera!

 

Foodie Projects

I used to have a food blog, and cooking was something I considered a hobby. I did a lot of experimenting with interesting recipes, trying new techniques and creating beautiful meals for Joe and I to enjoy. I’ve made fresh pasta, homemade sushi, paella, crème brulee, and many more memorable dishes. But cooking exciting dishes became a chore after a couple years of recording my kitchen exploits in a food blog, and I stopped the blog in an effort to just enjoy cooking for myself again. I still miss the cooking blog occasionally, though, and Joe and I like to challenge ourselves to little cooking “projects” every once in a while.

These pictures are from our most recent cooking trials. I can take very little credit, though, because Joe cooked pretty much everything while I was at work! What a treat to come home to braised pork shoulder in a beer and bacon sauce. Pork shoulder is one of our favorite meats to cook, and this recipe was so tender and flavorful. I’ll take a little credit for the polenta, though, which was my contribution. The combination was to die for, and I had to stop and document the beautiful plate before we started eating. I’m lucky to have such a kick-ass husband!

Braised Pork Shoulder

Basic Polenta

(I added butter and Parmesan cheese)

Also, these are some of the first pictures I took on my new camera, a Nikon D3100. It’s a digital SLR, and once I get comfortable with it, I’m going to take a few classes to get the camera off automatic mode. I took a summer school photography class back when I was in college, but I’ve forgotten everything I once knew about aperture, shutter speed, and all those other fancy photo terms. Even on the automatic setting, these pictures turn out way better than our old point and shoot. Do you like the action shot of pouring the vodka into our lemoncello? 

Limoncello

Gone Fishin'

Last Friday I had a totally out of character experience… I went fishing! I joined a couple of my coworkers for a little road trip up to Wisconsin, to visit Rushing Waters, the trout farm where Whole Foods stores in my area source trout. We all planned to have the same day off work, and went up to tour the farm and learn more about the whole process of raising trout. I was surprised by how beautiful the place was… I had pictured lots of huge plastic pools of fish, and a much more industrial vibe. In actuality, it was a lot of small ponds full of trout, on a farm surrounded on three sides by national forest. It was so interesting to hear about the process of raising fish, and to see the in-site facilities where they process and smoke the fish.

We got a guided tour of the farm, and then had the chance to try to catch some fish for ourselves. The demo pond, where people are allowed to fish, was full to the brim with trout, making it really simple to catch them. The harder part was getting some of the fish off of the hooks; they must have been hungry! While the guys in back processed the fish into nice clean fillets, we sat outside enjoying the spring weather and some awesome trout spread and smoked fish. It was a relaxing and interesting day out of the city, and I left feeling good enough about the whole experience to consider suggesting a fishing trip idea to Joe. The pan fried trout we made for dinner the next night sealed the deal—there just might be another fishing trip in my future! 

The harvest pond. So pretty, and not at all what I expected for a fish farm!

They start out in the hatchery, when they're little baby fish.

Look what I caught!

Rushing Waters processes and smokes all the fish on site, so it's incredibly fresh.

We got to sample smoked trout whole and in a spread and two kinds of smoked salmon.
It was delicious!

At home, we pan fried the trout, and made a simple lemon and caper sauce.
Simple and so fresh tasting.

Mile High Adventures

So the title of this post might be deceiving, because the only thing we did in Denver was fly in, sleep at my sister's adorable (!) new house, and have brunch with some good friends. There aren't even any pictures of the Mile High City part of this adventure... but it was a nice place to start our Colorado visit. Deep down, it's always the place I consider "home" if someone asks me that complicated question, and it's always nice to visit. Joe and I agreed in the future we'll have to plan a Colorado visit when there's not any specific events going on, since we always end up back there for a busy weekend of wedding or graduation type activities. 

Thursday we took the scenic route to Fort Collins, driving up through Boulder and Estes Park.
Here's the view as we're driving in to Estes Park. The white building in the distance is the
famous Stanley Hotel, a beautiful historic hotel that is said to be Steven King's inspiration
 to write The Shining.

We had to stop more than once to enjoy the scenery!
We weren't dressed to actually hike, though,
so we stayed towards the beginning of the trails we stopped at.

We couldn't resist stopping at the original Oskar Blues brewery in Lyons.

We had some time Friday to explore around Fort Collins, and split our time between the great outdoors and the beer tasting indoors. First, we drove up Poudre Canyon. It was incredible! So beautiful, with the river running down the canyon. It was cold, though, and it actually started to snow while we were up there! Then, we went back down to Fort Collins, and met my dad and brother at O'Dell Brewery. We did a tasting, then a tour, then a little more tasting. It was fantastic beer-- really some of the best that I've had recently. The guys there were really cool, too, and traded us some Chicago beer we'd brought with us for a bunch of their brews. We were well saturated that night ;)  The rest of the weekend was full of graduation celebrations, and lots of laughing and crazy antics with my family. It's always fun when our whole group gets together! 

Cheers!

Graduation Celebration!

Last weekend I went "home" to Colorado to see my family and celebrate a big accomplishment... my little brother graduated from Colorado State University! We spent a couple days playing around at the foot of the mountains, driving through scenic canyons and forest areas. We got to have brunch with our good friends who recently moved to Denver, and of course found time to visit a couple breweries. We also did some major celebrating as a family, eating and drinking in honor of my brother's graduation and birthday, with a sprinkle of mother's day at the end of the weekend. It was a busy weekend, but so wonderful! I love living in Chicago, but it does bum me out that it's far from the rest of my family. At least they're all pretty spread out at this point. If they all lived there and I was the only one out here in the Midwest, I would feel a lot more distant. But at this point my parents are in South Dakota, and us four siblings live in four different cities... so we're all pretty much experts at staying close and keeping in touch no matter where we are!

Congratulations little brother! We're all SO proud of you!

The Dean of the Education School giving the intro at the cording ceremony.

I got to cord Brendan myself. He worked so hard in school, and got
not only a history degree, but is also certified to teach. They wore the
cords at the College of Liberal Arts graduation.

Joe and I with the graduate.

It was an excellent weekend, and spending it with my family was just what I needed. We're a pretty close bunch, despite our distance in miles, and it is always so much fun to eat, drink, and laugh together! Congrats again, Brendan! We're all so proud of your accomplishments!

More pictures from the Colorado trip to come in another post... stay tuned!