Delicious Dinner

Last night my sister Sarah and her boyfriend joined us for dinner and a night of Pinochle. We have this type of get together every so often, just infrequently enough to make Matt have to reexplain the rules of Pinochle every time. But we had a good time last night. We also had good food :)

I've made a recent attempt to refocus my creative energy from piano playing to cooking. Mostly this is due to the fact that it's hard for me to spend any amount of time at the piano. I'm hoping it's just a temporary hiatus and once Dylan is a little older I'll be able to get back into it. But in the meantime I decided that since I enjoy cooking, and it's something I have to do every night anyway, I may as well put a little more effort into it. I've been trying to challenge myself to use a brand new ingredient as well as a brand new recipe once a month. It's a pretty easy goal to accomplish, but it helps me push myself outside what I'm used to. Some of the new to me (to cook myself, I've eaten them before) ingredients I've tried include tomatillos, Anaheim chiles, lamb chops, swordfish. New recipes: french style lentils, roast chicken, biscuits from scratch, and various ways of preparing fish. So far everything has been fairly successful. I think my least favorite was actually the lamb chops, I'm just not a big fan of lamb.

Last night I made a new first: gazpacho. I've never even had gazpacho before so I really had no idea what to expect in terms of how it should taste, or what the texture should be. But I think it turned out pretty good. Sarah also helped me make salmon burgers with honey mustard sauce, those were really good too :) And as a nice after dinner treat, sarah brought over a coconut-rum cake, which was AWESOME. She left us two pieces and it took all my will power not to eat a piece for breakfast.

Here are some pics:


Coconut rum cake


Gazpacho


Salmon burgers

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