chicken tortilla soup

after figuring out why my camera was giving yellowish tints to all my previous pictures, i decided to become adventurous and present to you a MOVIE rather than pictures of the chicken tortilla soup. the recipe is simple enough:

• boiled shredded chicken
• chicken stock
• diced tomatoes
• onions
• garlic
• jalapeno pepper
  
• garnishes

the secret to success in this dish is making your own chicken stock in advance. that, my friends, is why the chicken tortilla soup is as delicious as it is.

now for the movie...my apologies for the random movements and comments, i haven't yet learned how to keep the camera steady and i have a habit of saying whatever pops into my brain first...

meuniere sauce a la h

so remember that post that huitzl did about the meuniere sauce? well, we recreated it superbly the other day, and here's an example of how we used it in our dish. let me try to describe it to max out it's potential...

pan seared salmon topped with brown butter sauce with notes of cilantro and lemon, accompanied with asparagus steamed in a salt bath and whole-wheat angelhair pasta delicately tossed with butter.

yum...

shrimp scampi with mushrooms

what a lovely dish i created on the fly. i got a pound of frozen peeled shrimp and thawed them. i sauteed garlic in olive oil, and then added the shrimp and cooked them for 2-3 minutes (until they just got pink) and then removed them from the pan. then i added about 1/2 stick of butter (that is a lot for my cooking style, but you could use more), chopped green onion, and mushrooms. i sauteed the mushrooms until they were yummy, and then added worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, pepper, cayenne pepper, salt, and BEER! (i used amber bock tonight.) i simmered all of that for 4-5 minutes, and then added the shrimp back in and made sure they were well covered in the sauce. then i served it over wheat penne pasta and BAM! wonderful goodness!

eggplant dip

many people are fascinated with eggplant because of references to it in the novel don quijote, because of its position as trickster in one thousand and one nights, and because of the impressiveness of its dark purple in a summertime garden patch.

its strange culinary properties only escalate (augment, if you will) its mystique. there are seemingly billions of recipes for preparing eggplant, each different.

i have breaded and fried, sauteed, boiled and baked, and baked eggplant but havent found that one way of preparing it that i would not tire of. my latest method:

cubed the eggplant, boiled the cubes in salted water for 10 minutes, drained, sauteed in olive oil, then blended in a blender with the same ingredients as i would for hummus (sub eggplant for chick peas). the result was a really nice dip but from an entire, albeit small, eggplant, the yield was maybe just under 2 cups of dip. and i basically ate it all in a half hour.

the moral of the story is: maybe this isnt the best way to do eggplant since i think a lot of the eggplant got boiled away into the water. back to the old drawing board.