Carrot soup with ginger

* five little carrots, shredded

* butter

* chicken broth, this was my preference over water

* white pepper

* ginger

* sea salt

Blended with stick blender. No straining. Tasted. The pepper seemed to be throwing it off. It wasn't bad but it needed something. Added 

*sour cream for creaminess and for tang, and added 

*brown sugar for sweetness.

Those two things, a little bit of sour cream and a tiny amount of brown sugar made this soup perfect. I should probably add that I did not have any sour cream so I made it by adding acid (drops of lemon and rice vinegar) to a small amount of heavy cream.

Butternut squash cheesecake

This is a 6.5" spring form pan because I don't want excess sweets around for longer than a few days. This is a good size pan even for a party because people usually act all, "oh-just-a-little-piece-for-me" about dessert anyway, then I end up with half a gigantic cheesecake, or even a regular cake for that matter I really don't want it around no matter how good it is because then I must take it around and beg it off on people then go around again to retrieve my plates or feel compelled to eat it and I don't want that. How else do you imagine I maintain my slender boyish figure?

I intended to halve a successful recipe based on chocolate and apply that halved recipe to butternut squash. That didn't work out as I first visualized. I could tell I needed more than half the amount of cream cheese and it wasn't possible to halve three eggs. Well it is possible, but I didn't want to. So it's possible this mixture turns out a little bit eggy. Maybe not.

The mixture is made more interesting with sour cream, 1/2 cup in the original recipe, a few tablespoons for this one. The original has a chocolate ganache topping, this one has a topping of sour cream (+ sugar +vanilla).

I didn't want spices to discolor the mixture so I left them out, although I did like the ginger and orange from the previous pie so I put those things in -- grated fresh ginger and grated orange peel, so-called zest because it's definitely zesty. Pinch of salt. I started out with 1/4 cup sugar, tasted, deemed insufficiently sweet, then increased by a few tablespoons. Vanilla in the mixture, because everything's better with vanilla. Woot!

The crust is standard graham cracker crust except with ginger snaps comprising 50% of the biscuits used. Melted butter added to the crumbs and pressed into the pan to form a new cookie-type crust, just like normal, mindful that the ginger snaps had a little too much butter to begin with. Baked in a water bath on low heat (325℉) for 45 minutes. Allowed to cool down inside the oven with the oven door open, then chilled to set.

Salmon fillets

Late night snack. 12:30 in the morning and I'm overcome with the strangest urge. Should have known that bowl of popcorn for dinner wouldn't hold me.

Seared in butter and olive oil. Rasped ginger, lime, and garlic. Finished with white wine and lime juice. Capers. S/P

Smooch smooch smooch smooch * kisses back of hands * Hit the spot.

Canned tuna

Canned tuna. Can you imagine that? Every now and then I get an unmanageable craving for something utterly déclassé and familiar only to dark recesses and abandoned fragments of fading memory as if originating in another lifetime, and I don't even know where this comes from, day school cafeterias or what. It's pathetic really. The original idea that propelled me was to open a can of tuna and mix in some finely diced onion and eat it straight from the can like an alley cat. But then I noticed pickle relish in the refrigerator door, homemade mayonnaise that was heated so the egg was still passable, a perfectly ripened avocado on a lower shelf, and a couple English cucumbers along with fresh ginger. In the end, the only cause for scorn would be abject absence of fresh herbs. Well, that and tuna from a can. The stupid thing is, I've got all kinds of real seafood just waiting to go. Tuna even. Which goes grey when you cook it from lovely luscious voluptuous lustrous opaque red, so it's raw or it's nothing. Or this. Thank you commercial fisherman for this here canned tuna, sorry there, Dolphins who didn't have the good sense to keep a cautious distance, it's all about Darwin, you know. Whatzit, you're supposed to be smart, aren't you?

I tell you, I can't get enough of this crap. I could start right over and make another batch.

Salmon with honey and ginger sauce

It's actually a lime sauce, but it's heavily flavored with honey and ginger and mustard. The oil is unsalted butter in which the salmon was gently sautéd. The salmon was cut into strips and lightly dusted with seasoned floured. Flour that was seasoned with S/P and some kind of Spice Boys proprietary hot mixture of powders. At least it says HOT on the little can. The pan retains some of the seasoning from having fried the salmon. The butter never got hot enough to burn so it was still in good shape to serve as the basis for the dressing. The same seasoned flour mixture that dusted the salmon is used for thin roux to form a sauce, or a gravy if you prefer, which is sufficiently interesting to also serve as a dressing for salad. It has everything it needs and more: oil (butter), acid (lime), sweetener (honey), umami (ginger and mustard), seasonings (S/P some kind of mysterious hot combination powder), in this case, it also has thickener (flour) which could easily have been corn starch or some such.

I didn't pour the sauce over everything, I just kept dipping the vegetables and salmon sticks into it to varying degrees of thoroughness so each forkful was a little bit different in sweetness, mustardy heat, and KAPOW!, ginger.

Salad
* orange bell pepper
* cucumber
* tomato
* half a Romaine heart
* slice of purple onion.

Fish
* Pacific salmon sliced into stick shapes
* dusted with flour, S/P, hot powder
* fried in unsalted butter that doesn't burn on moderate heat

Dressing for both salmon and salad
* same seasoned flour that dusted the salmon
* grated fresh ginger
* teaspoon mustard
* 1 whole big juicy lime, or possibly two discouraging scrawny not so juicy limes.