March 24 2012

A Portuguese recipe in preparation for our trip to Portugal!

This week we had Lombo de Porco Com Ameijoas (prok with calms). I have to admit that I did not prepare much of this meal as my job was to find a salad to go with it.

The clams were purchased at the Farmers Market and were amazing! I haven’t had clams that tasty in awhile (the ones in Croatia were a close second though).

Overall, this meal was a 7/10 as the pork was a bit tough and the difficulty of the meal wasn’t that high. Tasty meal post run.

March 19 2012

Dinner tonight included:

Three Grain Bread – Cook Great Food Canada

Cilantro Vinaigrette for the salad – Nordstrom Flavours

BBQ Lentils with Eggplant – Whole Foods Market Cookbook

It was my first time using the Whole Foods Market Cookbook thanks to my supervisor to lending it to me! Although there aren’t any pictures, every single recipe looked so tasty. The conditions for this week were it had to take under 3 hours of cooking and I wanted it to be vegetarian. I am now officially purchasing the Whole Foods Market Cookbook.

It was also my first time cooking bread by myself and I didn’t realize how easy it actually was. This is something that I will definitely try making again. Everybody really enjoyed it and were going back for seconds and thirds (maybe even fourths but I shouldn’t mention that).

The meal today was delicious. It was very hearty and the whole combination went very well together. Overall we rated this meal an 8/10.

With the amount of time spent from start to finish (over 3 hours) I wish it would have scored higher!

March 10 2012

This was supposed to be our Moroccan inspired meal since we’ll be heading there in June. I’m pretty sure anybody who is from there would think that this dish needed some help.

The Moroccan chicken recipe was very flavourful and spiced quite nicely. I still felt there just just a little something missing from this one component. I believe that this would make a great during the week meal just didn’t really make the cut for our meal of the week!

The other dish was an asparagus and tomato couscous salad which in my opinion was a flop. The flavouring was minimal on this salad and I could have thought of a few different ways to give it some spice.

Overall, this meal got a 6.5/10.

March 2 2012

No pictures this week!

We prepared the meal for three hours and got a little a excited to eat. Today we made veggies burgers from turnips, beets, zucchini, hazelnuts, mashed potatoes, and rice. Pretty tough work but the burgers turned out really well.

We rated this a 8/10!

February 23 2012

Spinach, Orzo salad, and baked yams!

We gave this meal a 7.5/10 it really was delicious! We made up the recipe for every component of this meal and could tweak them a bit to get a higher score. Pretty delicious considering!

91– go dog sledding

So today Justin and I went dog sledding. This has been something that I’ve wanted to do for awhile but wasn’t really sure if the dogs were treated humanely (especially after what happened in Whistler).

Justin booked a trip and I started researching the company and asked around for advice. We had to switch the initial company we booked through because of their poor treatment of animals. Later we found out that the guy who owns the company we initially went through is associated with the company in Whistler. Not cool..

We finally booked through Snowy Owl based out of Canmore. They offered information on how they take care of their animals, what they are being fed, where they sleep, and how often they receive veterinary care. They also have the Canadian Inuit Husky, the original sled dog and now considered the rarest dog breed! Did I mention we had one pulling our dog sled?!

Before we had our instructional on how to use the dog sled we had an opportunity to meet the dogs. There were 14 sleds each sled had 6 dogs, so you could imagine how noisy it would be when they got excited to go for a ride.

Key learning for our instructional:

Go – Hike, Easy – slow down, Whoa – stop, you have to be doing something really wrong to flip your sled, and keep the ropes tight.

The silly looking one on the bottom left is the Canadian Inuit Husky named Baby Hudson. He was the goofiest dog and had quite the personality. I’m glad we had him on our team!

So we ended up getting our dogs tangled at first because our sled was going faster than the dogs. Mistake number one. We also flipped our sled coming off of one of the bumps. Luckily our dogs really liked us and waited for us to figure things out. When we flipped the sled they were looking back at us trying to figure out how we managed that.

We made it to the half way point with our dogs and sled in tack. Justin was officially retiring from driving and it was now my chance to take over. The dogs had a quick break and it was time for some pictures.

 

 

 

After the photo opportunity we switched places but while we were doing this our guide ended up losing his team of dogs. They pulled out the ice pick and started running. It was pretty funny to see him chase down his dogs for 300m. It’s a good thing he caught them or else he would have had to buy everyone that worked there beers. It sure made for a good day though.

 

The dogs getting ready to go home for the night and enjoy their well earned supper. Overall it was a really fun experience and wouldn’t mind doing it again. Great item to cross off on my list.

February 19 2012

So we tried out the Indian recipe again today and this time it worked out really well! The sauce definitely didn’t have as much tomato in it and I spiced like crazy.

Here is the final product. We decided against making all of the recipes that we learnt in class because of time constraints but it was delicious and filling. The Indian cuisine really lacks veggies so next time I’m going to have to think about ways to incorporate some in to the meal.

Overall, we gave this meal an 8.5/10.