Mango, avocado salad

Mint in the middle and top right.

A week ago I was scrounging and this is what came up by chance with poor specimens of each thing and the whole thing together was great and I could not keep off it until it was gone, hit, hit, hit, gone, and I thought, man, this would be even better if the ingredients are fresh, and it is. 

Mango, vanilla ice cream

Well have you ever heard of oatmeal that is toasted then used as a topping instead of being boiled? I do not know what came upon me but suddenly it seemed like a good idea, especially if it is mixed with something unexpected like cayenne powder or chile flakes. The pecans are superfluous, there is a three pound bag of them sitting there. 

The oatmeal is toasted in a small pan until it turns color then the pecans are added to the same pan. The pecans begin to smoke much faster than the oatmeal. Cayenne and a little sea salt added to finish. 

The fresh mango is acidified with fresh lime juice. 

ARTS !

Mango arts. These things are fun. They each have a large pit positioned in the center that is shaped like a disc. The disc runs in agreement to an apparent seam discernible by regarding the stem as a bellybutton. 

Almost all these fruits are helped with lime, but you know what? I debated here internally with myself it seems because the image of aged balsamic kept appearing over and over but not at the critical moment of getting out a lime. Plus, I have a new lime squeezer which is turning out to be too small. 

*  rolled oats

*  broken pecans

*  cayenne powder

*  sea salt

Ordinarily I would make my own ice cream but right now I do not feel like it. The components of the ice cream maker must all be pre-frozen to hasten the process of churning the flavored cream mixture. The freezer is full so there isn't enough room for all of that. When I looked in the store for the type of ice cream that I wanted I was surprised that the simplest flavors are the more difficult to locate. 

Here is something unrelated to food. 

I've been working on a pop-up card, here and there off and on, for a week. I produced four versions of the same idea. Each version has its problems, has its faults, each is salvageable and serviceable, and each contributed to understanding a mechanism and its limitations. I suppose I could take pictures of those three trials, I still have them under a chair. They do something very interesting when the standing up grid inside the card is trimmed because it is too big to fit when the card is closed, even though the paper grid inside is gobbling up the maximum amount of available background pages that are oriented so that the grid fits best. 

Here is a page that describes the pop-up card. 

I feel a little bad because time ran out for this project. I have ideas to fill out the background and to build out the edges by adding content directly to the outer edges of the grid, hedges, gates, flowerbeds, characters. 

Mango with cantaloupe and cucumber, bacon & eggs

This is basically about a combination of mango and cantaloupe with cucumber and then heated up with a single fresh jalapeño, and boy, this particular pepper sure is hot. This intrigues me. It was burning my face off unpleasantly and I ended up cutting off the outer flesh from the inner membrane of individual slices there on my plate to lessen its beastly fire, and even then it was still quite hot. There was no unifying dressing, glop, or glue, say yogurt, to hold it together, just a pile of fruit and melon and gourd, Anacardiaceae and Cucurbitaceae to be a nerd about it. 

Cilantro, which life wouldn't be the same without. Americans call the leafy portion of the plant cilantro and the seeds of the same plant coriander. Other English-speaking nations refer to both portions as coriander and then specify either leaf or seed. 

It is a scientific FACT that some unfortunate people are genetically predisposed to be absolutely cilantrophobic, and that makes me feel pity. It is commonly understood that you either love it or you hate it, but I do not comport with that belief. I myself hated cilantro in the past and I wondered why anyone would ever use it, much less understood why anyone would ever use a lot of it, and now I love it wholeheartedly and I am rarely without a bunch of cilantro held in refrigeration as a growing plant in a cup of water even when I have no immediate use for it. So in my own case cilantro, leafy coriander, was an acquired taste, and that means there is hope for you, if you are a h8r, if you would just keep giving it a chance. Even the Beatles agree, "Give Leaves a Chance".

Thick-slab deli bacon is baked at 425℉ for 12 minutes, turned and retuned to the oven for another 4 minutes. A crude aluminum foil pan is fashioned to facilitate cleanup. This was done in a tabletop microwave/convection combination oven, handy little thing. 

ARTS !

Shrimp, mango, orange

I invented this, I sure did.

The original idea was to make use of a can of coconut milk that I thought was in the pantry but I could not find it. Strange because I don't recall using it but do recall seeing it over and over and over. Here's another example of the goons at the CIA sneaking in when I'm sleeping and stealing my ingredients. I know these midnight thefts originate from the culinary institute because they ignore my cameras, electronics, art and pop-up supplies, and my aquariums. If I ever catch one I'm going to hit 'im on 'is head with a frying pan like in the cartoons.

* Six gigantic shrimp. I know, I know, contradiction of terms.

* Frozen mango. This is actually quite tasty and beats fresh mango because fresh is always such a gamble, it's tricky to de-seed and to peel, and it must be used within a window of optimum opportunity or wasted. Frozen, you just grab as much as you want, although freezing does rupture the cell structure, so does cooking.

* Fresh oranges, because they're there and I want to make use of the excellent oranges Joe brought me from his yard in Arizona.

* About a cup of heavy cream

* Scant teaspoon prepared Madras Curry from a jar and kept frozen

* Scant 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

* Scantly scant 1/8 teaspoon salt

* One tablespoon Splenda. I don't know why I did that. This is probably a bad ingredient so sue me.

* Heat through.

* Diced tomato, added at end, not cooked.

I wanted loose sauce in abundance but not soup. I got soup. It's utterly delicious but I'm wasting it because I don't care to consume a cup of flavored cream. Tomorrow, maybe I would want to, but not today and now it's gone. It would also be great sopped with bread but I've copped a temporary attitude about bread right now. Shame to waste it, but that's the breaks.

Hang on.

* measures *

Okay fine! I was wrong. One third of a cup of delicious curry cream soup wasted. It was in a bowl ah'ite, it looked like a cup.



Now I don't feel so bad. Except now I have to clean another cup.

Flounder with mango coulis

* Mangos. I used frozen. Fresh fruit is preferred, but the cellular structure of frozen fruit is damaged by having been frozen which makes processing easier on the machine.
* lime
* Grand Marnier, purely as an extravagance.

I have a lot left. I think I'll just eat it like a smoothie.


My original intention was to broil sole filets but that effort floundered.

What?

The thing is, these filets are so small you have to eat a dozen of them to get the minimum nutritional requirement of an infant Aye Aye ... born prematurely ... to a family of genetically midget Aye Ayes ... who have become inactive in captivity. They're small, I'm telling you.

Beef sausages

Beef sausages? Sounds weird.

These were pressure cooked for speed. I put enough water in the pressure pot to drown a narwhal, if that narwhal had breathing problems to begin with and was small enough to fit into an eight quart pressure cooker -- and where are you going to find one of those? -- but the water evaporated which isn't supposed to happen in a pressure pot, or possibly absorbed, so fat from the sausages formed the crustiest, burniest, most repugnant smelling fond on the bottom of the pot. Shirley, they're ruined! I removed the sausages and added more water and boldly turned the burner to high because that's the way I roll in my lab kitchen. The fond lifted off nearly instantly and dissolved immediately into the water, diffusing the whole stench and forming what appeared to be a salvagable liquid. For a minute there I thought I was in for a Brillo® pad scrapy-scrape afternoon.

I used that burned-sausage-bits pot-cleaning water to cook chickpeas. Is that daring or what? The chickkpeas were only partially hydrated. I relied on the pressure cooker to shove that flavored water into the beans fully hydrating them as they cooked. That was the idea, anyway. It's all pure guessing. Who knows, they might be awful. Dried chickpeas are fun. I like watching them swell.  

Doesn't it ↓ make you want to eat 'em right out of the package? They're already cooked, you know.

Pressure cooked ↓

See? They got plumpier. How they managed not to explode open is beyond me. I've been eating these chunks throughout the afternoon like dog treats. In fact, if I had a dog, I'd give 'em some because I'm nice that way when it comes to dogs.

* beef sausages pressure cooked on a steam table over too little water. That is all.

* chickpeas cooked in the water used to lift off the burnt oil and residue from steaming the sausages. + yellow bell pepper, onion, garlic with a trace of vindaloo curry in olive oil / butter

* carrots and tiny mixed fingerling potatoes also pressure cooked together in orange juice, buttter, maple syrup, and cinnamon with mango added at the end, and dayumn are they ever delicious.

Bouillabaisse with mango and pineapple on brown rice

Bouillabaisse held over from yesterday, reheated with mango and pineapple served with steamed brown rice.

Brown rice is a little bit weird. It's chewier than white rice. Here's what I learned; steam a little longer, use less water, holds up well under pressure.

35 minutes steam under pressure, up to 45 minutes without. Leave covered throughout while cooling before releasing pressure, or for 10 minutes off heat without pressure