Kale sausage again

I did it again. This time with Nugget's country breakfast sausage (the version that came without the casing) and dino kale. Just as good as it was before, but different. I think I prefer the ginger/soy/pineapple sausage, but they're both tasty :-)

Sausage and Kale

A friend of mine posted a kielbasa and kale pasta recipe on Facebook the other day. Since I'm supposed to be feeding the chinchillas high calcium, relatively low phosphorus greens (for which kale qualifies), I figured I should try actually cooking the stuff for myself.

I bought a bunch of regular kale. About 1/3 - 1/2 of it went to the chins. The remainder got chopped coarsely. Cooked up a couple strips of bacon, sliced up two sausages (I got an Italian sausage and a ginger-garlic-soy sauce-something else sausage at Whole Foods), fried those, added a touch of duck fat (left from the confit a few weeks ago). Added the kale. Added some fresh basil (recipe says julienned, but I just chopped it) and a bit of dried thyme (recipe called for fresh... but I have already learned that I do not have the patience for fresh thyme). Cooked all that up for a few minutes, then added rigatoni pasta. Top with a bit of Parmesan cheese.

Tasty. I think I like Dino kale better - maybe next time do half a bunch of each? For two sausages, I did not use enough kale anyway - could easily double, and probably triple, the amount of greens. The ginger/soy sauce/whatever sausage is really tasty - don't bother with the Italian next time. Overall a quite satisfying meal.

Salmon

So I decided to try this recipe.

I went to Whole Foods and lost my mind and bought really expensive wild-caught king salmon. Like, more than twice the price of the other salmon. It like, doubled my grocery bill for the evening. So I thought I'd better cook the salmon before I forgot about it and it went bad. But in case the recipe wasn't any good, I decided to halve the recipe and freeze the other half of the really expensive salmon.

It's actually really good. I used the Nugget brand clover honey, cos that's what I could find. It could actually use a stronger honey (it's a moderately flavored honey - not super strong, but it's not bland either). And flatter pieces of salmon (to increase the amount of honey sauce). And more sauce (I used most of the whole-recipe's amount of sauce on the salmon). The salmon is tender and flavorful. The spinach and bell pepper concoction is actually really good. I had my reservations, especially because of the chunks of ginger, but mostly the ginger isn't overwhelming, and the spinach tastes good and the bell peppers are cooked enough and stuff.

Overall, I approve of this recipe. Look at me getting my Ω-3 FA :-)

Stuffed chicken artichoke with tomato

So tonight I decided to actually cook actual food. I followed this recipe. Came out ok. Didn't add bread, cos I didn't have any (and decided not to buy any when I went to the store).

Not enough cheese and spices for the stuffing. The chicken breasts I got were not cooked after 7 minutes per side - needed quite a bit longer to cook through. The shallots with the tomatoes were a bit strong - maybe saute first next time? And it turns out thyme has teeny tiny little leaves on stems - stripping the leaves off the stems took too long. Other than that, it was easy to make - just took longer than the 20 minutes claimed in the instructions.

However, it worked. It tastes fine. Not exactly a 5-star recipe, but nothing particularly wrong with it.

Chicken bean surprise

Crockpotted today. A random mashup of ingredients.

Chicken thighs. A leek. A can of cardoza beans. A few carrots. A large can of diced tomatoes. Garlic. Napa cabbage. Salt, rosemary, thyme, sage.

It's a little bland (not quite enough salt or herbs) but otherwise seems to be quite edible. At least it's got lots of fiber!

And it's a good thing I resisted the temptation to add water or broth to the pot, since when I got home, there was plenty of liquid in the concoction.