Saturday, July 24, 2010

Fun Food Day

Today I am making two new recipes! We are having tuna salad finger sandwiches for lunch and cold cucumber soup for lunch, and then we are making a tofu stir fry with scallion pancakes for dinner. Yay! I have been wanting to make the scallion pancakes for awhile now, but the cucumber soup just sounded great for a hot day. I did change the recipe a bit. The recipe came from the Good Housekeeping Light and Healthy cookbook.

This was their Cucumber Soup recipe:
2 medium cucumbers, peeled and chopped
16 ounces of plain yogurt
1/2 cup cold water
1 Tablespoon of lemon juice
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 cup of ice cubes
1/4 cup of freshly chopped mint

Combine all and puree until smooth in a blender. Easy peasy!

However, I have a problem with this recipe. I hate mint in anything other than desserts! I found this out when I made pea soup that called for mint, and ended up throwing a lot of it out. So now I usually substitute with something else. My spice of choice is usually garlic. So for this recipe I ended up using non-fat yogurt, and approximately 2 teaspoons of garlic salt (instead of the regular salt and mint). It tastes good, although the flavor is very light. I have a feeling I will be adding a few dashes of hot sauce to mine to spice it up a bit. The other good thing is this is a very low calorie soup! It only has 82 calories for 1/4 of the recipe! I have a feeling I will be making this as a snack whenever it gets too hot out. I hope to add a few pictures later, as well as more recipes! I'll update on the scallion pancakes later!

Soooo...the scallion pancakes didn't turn out so well. The entire recipe went well until it got to frying them in oil. I got the oil too hot and burned most of them. D'oh! The result was a charred outside and an almost raw center. Sadness. I have had several bad kitchen experiences lately. I made some brownies last week, and in trying to be creative I made them terribly average. I did find a good recipe for chewy chili brownies which I plan to post eventually. Yay!!! The stir fry we made tonight was luckily, a huge success! It was salty, sweet, and delicious. Not bad for an off the cuff recipe. So I guess the cooking scene for me right now is a bit dubious, but I suppose that is true for all "chefs" at some point or other. Anyways, hopefully future culinary endeavors will be more successful.

One more thing that went well today was exercise! Not only did I make it through Turbo Jam without stopping, but Max and I went on a long walk after dinner, boosting my burn. Yay! Now I just need to be good tomorrow and I will hopefully of lost a pound this week!

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