Sometimes, a product you’ve bought with a specific purpose in mind, doesn’t match your expectations, becomes useless for that specific purpose even, and you might find yourself at a loss at how to salvage the whole deal. Just a few weeks ago, I had to deal with a major annoyance like that. A beautiful bunch of grapes I had bought with a spritzy Champagne jelly dessert in mind, turned out to be blessed – or cursed…? – with the thickest skins I have ever encountered around a grape.
Continue reading “Mustard-Grape Salad with Goat’s Cheese Bites and Parma Ham”
Roaming around off Tyria’s beaten paths for the shere fun of it still is one of my favorite things to do to wind down after a long day – soaking up the beautiful scenery while helping with tasks and events around the areas I’m visiting has never lost that strangely relaxing and refueling effect on me. Sometimes, things I see, do or find on these merry trips even end up tickling the snoozing kitchen-related areas of my mind to full awareness in the middle of the night.
It’s Hubby-Special-Day today~! If you’re cooking for more hungry tummies than just your own on a regular basis, you might find yourself cooking up two different dishes for a meal every once in a while. While hubby and I generally enjoy the same things when it comes to kitchen-related goodies, there are, of course, a couple of things one of us likes while the other one wouldn’t touch it with a pitchfork.
In Tyrian recipes, my beloved Omnom- a.k.a. Cranberries are mostly used in a sweet’ish kind of way. Ever since I’ve settled on using Cranberries in place of Tyria’s Omnomberries, and by doing so, inadvertently opened the door for myself to twist, tweak and turn around the related recipes in all directions, I’ve been running haywire in my kitchen whenever I pick an Omnomberry recipe to play with. Let’s hear it for snap decisions opening up endless possibilities!
Taking a look out of my window today made me realize why theres a statistical increase in happy-pill prescriptions during the post glittery-december-decorations winter months. Since I don’t believe in bogus, synthetic alterations of my moods and/or behavior I decided on making a lively and summery dessert instead. There’s just something about lemony sweets that instantly makes me smile, so I absolutely had to use lemons today.
Dear Chef’s Guild of Tyria,
Every once in a while, I take some time to browse the menus of some Michellin-starred restaurants in the area – without any delusions of grandeur or urges to pay more for a dinner than a week’s vacation in a nice hotel on a remote island involved. The reason for this peek into these world-class kitchens is relatively simple: in recent years, a lot of those restaurants have made a habit of ditching the usual, descriptive menu in favor of a list of 2-3 main ingredients per course. An absolutely fabulous habit in my book, scrambling my neurons in exactly the right way!
Thanks to an idea the Tyrian Menu planted into my head, I recently decided to exorcise a childhood demon, a dark and stomach-curdling culinary specter straight from my personal nightmarish depths of badly-made-desserts-hell. Chocolate-Bananas. Whenever I skim over that one while browsing the recipe list at my Chef’s Station in Lion’s Arch, I can’t decide whether to shiver in delight or disgust. On some level I never forgot that chocolates and bananas are a wonderful match – the instinct to shy away from it used to have far more punch to it, flooring the flickering desire to give it a chance after all these years within a heartbeat.
Have you ever had that moment where you wish you could just share one of your favorite comfort dishes in a sophisticated, stylish manner, fit to wow a dinner crowd? I usually get that kind of If-only-I-could idea when I’m rotating around the kitchen, juggling three or more dishes, wishing I had remembered to pick at least one dish I can breeze through on auto-pilot. Well, during this past New Year’s Dinner prep-work, my tummy did a wonderful job of nudging me into the right direction~
The Tyrian Chef’s Guild strikes again! Once more, the delicious library at my cooking station in Lion’s Arch compelled me to tackle a dish along the “Classic” lines~ I suppose this one sounds very familiar to… well everyone, the term “Meatball Spaghetti“ buzzing around in heads around the world on autopilot. Classic italian dish… right? Wait, what’s that… that rattling noise… Oh, yes, that’s a horde of Risen, italian chefs no less, aiming to hit you over the head with rusty frying pans without further ado.
Nahdala's Kitchen 