Frog and Goat

It was kind of late last night when we started making dinner. I hadn’t felt exactly right all afternoon and, well, we had to swim in the pool for a little while last night. Had to. I drank a bottle of San Pelligrino while paddling around and that seemed to settle my stomach.

Of the recipes we prepared this week, this one took the most time but the resulting broth made the extra time well worth it. We agreed the next time we make this dish we’ll substitute mussels in for the clams in this recipe as we both prefer mussels. For rustic bread, we enjoyed slices of Flour Garden’s baguette (the better-half went to see his friends at the Belmont Butchery yesterday–he brought home some usual suspects and some of the best cured salami–I don’t remember the name but it was sublime).

We’ve been on a try-new-things-for-dinner kick this week, as you may have ascertained. Last night we made Grilled Asian Flank Steak with Sweet Slaw. We served it with soba noodles.

We used two jalapeños from the freezer and I think we can now say our pepper plants were really pissed off last year. I’ve heard that the more hardship a pepper plant faces, the hotter the pepper. Our plants must have suffered mightily and became just short of hellfire.

The slaw was sweet but our peppers sort of overwhelmed the slaw. Not that I wouldn’t make this dish again, oh hell yes I’d make this again. I’ll just use one pepper instead of two. Or hope that our plants this year don’t feel so enraged.

Update: The better-half went out to meet some friends tonight so I had this dish minus the soba noodles for dinner tonight. I didn’t heat anything up, just took it out of the refrigerator, transfered it to a plate, cracked open a beer and dug in. The pepper didn’t catch up to me until the very end…their heat had definitely mellowed overnight. The second time around was quite tasty.

Last night we made a lemon-garlic shrimp dish from Eating Well. The recipe is here.

We served it over a bed of shallot and green bell pepper quinoa.

The recipe was pretty simple with a lot of little things that needed to be done. We take a cue from professionals and set up mis en place whenever possible.

I started getting Eating Well under mysterious circumstances but liked it so much that I paid for the second subscription year. I think, perhaps, the magazine was a reward for purchasing something from somewhere–art.com or posters.com or some such place. At any rate, I really like the magazine and the recipes have been easy to follow and the results have been lovely.