May 19, 2010

Wonderful Wednesday

In response to a comment from last post: Thank you for your comment! Sorry about the picture, if it helps at all here are links to the components of the spice rack from IKEA: the magnetic bar and the spice canisters.

On to today. Why was today wonderful? Well after a unfortunate bout of food poisoning yesterday (which forced me to leave work after only being their for 40 minutes) and wasting the day away on the couch when I got home, I feel much better today. I was able to get my weekly cleaning (dusting, vacuuming, mopping) done in time for my yoga show at 11:30 which was promptly followed by more exercising while watching TV. After lunch and a shower, I picked up some great deals at a Ross near my house followed by even better deals at Aldis. Upon retuning home I was able to get quite a few more chores done that had been neglected due to work and I was even able to make dinner and dessert!

Grandma had sent Mike and I home last week with a bunch of food which included a plethora of frozen fish. Tonight's dinner was a baked haddock dish based on this recipe.
Right out of the oven:
This whole recipe called for fresh ingredients which I did not have. Instead I used frozen haddock (and one grouper) fillets, canned whole tomatoes (sliced), mozzarella cheese (I just didn't like the sound of cheddar cheese and fish), prepared bread crumbs, canned marinated artichoke hearts, and canned spinach (leftover from last weeks pizza and used in place of the crab meat). It smelled so amazing while it was cooking! Here is it with some steamed sweet peas:
First off, I never knew what a difference steaming frozen peas (in our new rice cooker!) made compared to heating them up in the microwave...wow! They weren't dry or hard or tasteless. It was quite amazing! As for the fish, excellent! It tasted as good as it smelled! It was such a good combination and I wouldn't mind eating fish this way again. Note: the grouper came out sort of dry but that was probably because it was a much thinner fillet than the haddock; it also had a much different taste than the haddock that did not go with the flavors as well.

While the fish was cooking I stumbled across this recipe while I was looking for a slow cooker recipe. I never thought to try dessert in a crock pot....genius! It said it only took about 2 hours to cook and I had all the ingredients so I figured having dessert a couple hours after our dinner had settled wouldn't be that bad. The finished product (while cooling before removing for serving):
It was quite funny to watch while it was cooking because as the steam built up in the chocolate below the cake and started the escape it made the cake pulse in weird spots sort of making it look like some alien creature brain. It also smelled heavenly. Now it didn't exactly come out of the pot pretty:
But it was delicious! A warm, moist, spongy peanut butter cake swirled with chocolate and topped (well while it was cooking the chocolate was below) with molten chocolate. Mmmmmmm.....so good! I need to find more desserts to make in the crock pot!

Since I used tomatoes in tonight's dinner I thought I should check on our tomatoes outside:
Remember my post from last Thursday with my lone baby tomato? Well check these bad boys out now:
If you click on the photo is should bring up a larger version where you can see all the tomatoes I pointed out. And there are even more growing larger that are out of frame. Heck yea! I can't wait for tomatoes!

Until next time, please enjoy this photo that a student working with me a few years ago took of one of my research tokay geckos:

No comments:

Post a Comment