the joy of cooking

last night's dinner was grilled salmon with coconut curry and hanoi vegetables, courtesy of Lemongrass and Lime, which is not at all an authentic Vietnamese cookbook but does contain some exceedingly delicious recipes. this one was no exception, but i came to the conclusion fairly quickly once i started eating that i could reproduce the effect without going to nearly as much trouble as the recipe called for. the green papaya (which they say right in the recipe is there for texture) could be easily replaced with jicama, which is easier to deal with, and the complex curry sauce, after all that work, tasted so much like a Thai massaman curry that next time i'm just going to use massaman curry paste and skip their process.

man, though, it was delicious. and i was surprised and pleased by how well mustard greens went with curry in general -- i adore mustard greens, but their bitter flavor doesn't go with just anything.

tonight's dinner: southwestern corn tart (from Fields of Greens, which is my favorite vegetarian cookbook) and a green salad with oranges and red onions in a light champagne-orange vinaigrette. i'm improvising off a recipe i found online that looked interesting but involved frozen orange juice concentrate and white wine vinegar (honestly, what's so hard about juicing a damn orange?), and called for sliced oranges which would be a pain to eat. i mean, it's nice when you can make food attractive, but not at the expense of edibility. who wants to stick their fingers in salad dressing to pick out slices of orange and remove the peel from them?

the tart dough looks like it's nearly done rising. i must go fondle it now.