UnRecipe: I Hope Hell Has a Salad Bar

The house is almost ninety degrees and it's 10pm at night. Earlier in the afternoon, I looked outside and the tall evergreens looked like they were wilting from the oppressive heat. It's official: the Pacific Northwest is in Hell. I'm not entirely sure what mortal sin the Puget Sound Area committed, but it must have been pretty serious to cast us into the flaming pit of Hades without easy access to air conditioning. All that being said, a girl still needs to eat, so I had another dinner, sans heating element.

It's gettin' hot in herrre... so have a salad - Photo by Wasabi Prime

By the Power of DJ Spinderella, I remixed the Gettin' Figgy With It meal ingredients and made a couple of salads. One featured a roma tomato sliced thinly, sprinkled with goat cheese crumbles, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and some slices of proscuitto on the side. Not quite a caprese salad, but a similar idea. I had already shorn our basil plants down, and figured they needed some time to recover their foliage for another meal.

The other salad was a rerun of what we did on the weekend -- heirloom cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, snowpeas, and feta instead of goat cheese. It was nice to take a moment and enjoy the two cool, fresh salads, and dream of better days ahead. Hello, Autumn? Are you coming anytime soon...?

The salad days of summer - Photos by Wasabi Prime

* Post Script - Thanks to Food Photo Blog for posting the almost-caprese salad photo on their site! Grazie!

* Post-Post Script - Thanks to Foodie View for posting pics of the heirloom to-mah-toes and the split snowpea pic!

UnRecipe: Pad Thai Stir Fry

I discovered two things today: our laundry room makes for a halfway decent photo studio, and Pad Thai is just as delicious without the rice noodles!

From wasabiprime-july photos

The Puget Soundians were given a day of respite from the summer heat, so efforts were quickly mobilized to use the stove and play around with the digital camera to actually take some halfway decent photos of ingredients and the plated food. I notice when it's hot, I tend not to feel the Epic Hunger that I normally do, so maybe that's what allowed me the virtue of patience to make a better effort towards food photography. At the risk of sounding like the star of the I'm Awesome Show, I'm quite pleased with the efforts, and it's encouraged me to put forth more effort in future posts!

The motivation behind this dish was a major jonesin' for pad thai. I have the exact opposite effect with food -- I had Thai food recently and instead of feeling satisfied, I felt like the Audrey II, hungry for seconds. Feed me, Seymour! Sadly, as I write this entry, I just realized I totally forgot to add peanuts into the dish. Crap. And I made the extra trip to the store to make sure I had them! The little Homer Simpson that lives in my head is yelling DOH! right now. What... no one else has a little Homer Simpson living in their head...? No...? Well, moving on...

In lieu of the traditional rice noodles, I was able to use half of the bountiful harvest of snowpeas that are taking over our garden. We went from a small handful of peas to a green pod invasion within the last month. Thankfully the bugs and backyard wildlife have not seen fit to feast upon them, so with any luck, we will be blessed with an abundance of green pea-ness. *giggle*

Along with the snowpeas, I snipped some garlic chives and some of the heartier scallion greens from our veggie garden. A few defrosted chicken breasts sliced thin, stir-fried in a wok with diced tofu, scrambled eggs, and then a healthy dose of the premade Por Kwan pad thai sauce from Uwajimaya, and it was a picture-perfect dinner made for the om-nomming.

From wasabiprime-july photos

* Post Script - Big thanks to Tastespotting for posting the pad thai photo on their site today. Merci Buttercups!!!

** Post-Post Script - Delicious thanks to Photograzing at Serious Eats for posting one of the pad thai photos on their site!

*** Post-Post-Post Script - Third Thanks to Food Photo Blog for posting a closeup shot of the pad thai. Cheers!!

*** Quadruple Post Script - Thanks to the fourth power to Foodie View for the pad thai post!