Roasted chicken soup

Soup with stuff piled up out of the bowl with a little broth on the bottom.

Free-range chickens picked up at Whole Foods. They  looked kind of scrawny so I got two.  Brined for a few hours, didn't make a noticeable difference. Roasted in oven bags. The dark meat was perfect, the white meat was over cooked, which was fine with me. Picked the carcasses and froze the bits separately so they didn't form one huge frozen chicken clump, then put in freezer bags.

Broke the large bones with pliers to expose the marrow. Cooked out every last molecule of chickeny goodness in a pressure cooker for an hour and a half in two quarts of water. No vegetables, no herbs, no salt, no pepper, no nuthin'. Strained and chilled the broth. Removed the layer of fat. Chicken gelatin, aspic,  remained.  

*  chicken broth + water

*  two small waxy potatoes

*  handful of chicken bits

*  onion

*  crushed and diced garlic

*  few tablespoons of pre-cooked brown rice

*  1 tablespoon miso

*  Aerogarden-grown basil, window-grown sage, store-bought cilantro, in quantity added as a veritable salad to the liquid at the end.

*  sour cream on a whim. 

*  sea salt to finish

Lox, heirloom tomato sandwich

I think this exemplifies the beauty of a simple well-made sandwich.

Once a friend's mother made this. We were in high school. I didn't like it but her's didn't have tomato. That was an impressive disconnect. The son was an archetypical Western cowboy but his mother was an elegant divorcée who served us elegant sandwiches in their elegant home. It didn't fit. 

The thing that makes this sandwich different is the tomato and the bread. It is an heirloom tomato and they taste different than regular grocery store tomatoes, and the bread is my own sourdough bread. 

This is what the crumb looks like.

 Norwegian lox, Happy Cow cream cheese. 

Pacific salmon, orange sauce

This is the Pacific salmon a friend gave me that his boss caught. Caught and killed. Killed and cleaned. Cleaned and deboned. Deboned and cut up into segments. Cut into segments and packaged. Packaged and passed around as the most splendid gifts. I'm going to miss this when it's gone. *sads* A large segment was cut into four slices. Covered with a dry rub made from

Powdered ginger
Dry mustard
Garlic powder
Ground coriander
Salt / Pepper

Then compressed in one of those bags with the air sucked out and left in the refrigerator all day.

The sauce was made with orange juice, lemon rind, juice of lemon, corn starch, touch of mustard and salt and whipped with immersion blender and heated. The immersion blender was on high and splashed a whole bunch of the sauce on the floor. Quite a mess, that.

Frozen pineapple chunks added on a whim. Basil from the AeroGarden.

The four salmon segments coated in the rub were steamed for about 7 minutes over one of those folding steamer things with flaps that fit to various sized pots. Checked, and steamed a few minutes more. (I prefer my salmon cooked all the way through, but just barely.)

Plus another Newcastle. That's the second one today and now I run the risk of turning into a sot.

Chicken miso soup

Pasta and homegrown tomatoes

Rape! Help. No, please, Mister. No! Help!

Rape Rape Rape Oh, nooooooooes.

Help! Help! Help!

*pluck*

Noooooo! Help! Oh, no. Please please. Noooooo

*pluck*

Stop! No don't do it! Rape! Rape1 Rape! Help!

*pluck*

Help me! Please! Please! Please! Noooooooo. Nooooooo!

Noooooooo. Nooooooooo. Please. Oh, noooooooooooes.

Help! Rape! Rape! Rape! Nooooooooooooes..

*twist, twisty-twist, pluck*

Help Help Help. Oh noooooooo!

*pluck*

All that up there, plus a couple of breakfast sausage discs and a handful of pine nuts toasted with the sausage. Olive oil and butter melted into a bowl. Ingredients tumbled together.