Since Erin is back in town we decided to make ourselves a nice Valentine’s meal.
We started early and made a marinade sauce for the chicken and got the potatoes cooked. While the chicken was marinating we went to find some saffron at bulk barn. We got lucky and there was one box left for us. After getting the saffron we went to the liquor store that my coworker is at and he helped us a pick out a wine that went great with our meal.
We cooked
Chicken Biryani – (rice and chicken and spices)
Cauliflower with ginger and cilantro
Yogurt with potatoes – (Indian potato salad)
Everything turned out great! We learned to not put in nearly as much salt and oil as the recipe asks for. Each dish complimented the other dishes. The potatoes would cool down your mouth when it was hot. The cauliflower had an immediate spice to it and the chicken had a different spice that built up. The wine was not too sweet or sour and the spice helped the flavour out.
I got a new lens! I had some money from Christmas and decided this would be a nice way to use it. It is a 35mm prime lens. It should be good for lower light pictures and pictures with a fast shutter speed. It can also do neat blurring on unfocussed parts of the picture. I bought it from futureshop (I had a gift card) and price matched the lens and a filter to make it a good price!
Yesterday I took some practice pictures with it inside. Today I went for a nice walk and took some outdoor ones. Click the link to see the pictures. Continue reading New camera lens!→
These photos are a little late going up but better late than never.
I spent the time being busy mostly. For these photos I learned to to remove some green cat eye (instead of red eye) from one of the photos. I also wasn’t always sure with some of the photos when I adjusted them what I liked better for looks.
Today was a beautiful fall day here in Edmonton. It got over 30! So I decided to go outside for a bit and enjoy the outdoors. There must have been some sort of police type ceremony at the legislature grounds because there was lots of various police, rcmp, etc all dressed up fancy leaving the grounds.
Yesterday I decided to try and make an Indian dish from the cookbook that Erin got me.
I saw a roasted chicken one stuffed with rice that sounds good. Instead of getting a whole chicken I used boneless skinless chicken strips and marinated them with the sauce. I then baked the chicken and started to prepare the rice and sauce for the rice. When the chicken was mostly cooked, I added the rice and baked it for a bit longer.
I only had some mini disasters as I was making it!
It turned out pretty well. Next time I make it I think I would add some cayenne pepper or something as it wasn’t spicy hot.
I have put a new theme up on the website. Not sure if I like it or not. I may try to find another or go back to the old one. Let me know what you think.
For our one year anniversary on Thursday, Erin gave me an Indian cookbook and some spices in jars. The book is called “An invitation to Indian cooking” by Madhur Jaffrey. According to the cover it is “perhaps the best Indian cookbook available in English.” Erin came up with some recipes that sounded good for us to try:
Shrimp pullao
Potato patties (aloo-ki-tikiya)
Kheer
and Naan (We didn’t bake naan just bought it)
It took awhile to make everything, the potato pancakes took a while. Everything turned out quite good, the potato patties were quite salty. We think we can use way less salt next time! As part of our cooking we made sure to break in the cookbook by spilling milk on it.
I bought a new audio stand to replace my existing “stand”[smugmug url=”http://pfink.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=14736529_Lr3gS&format=rss200″ title=”New%20Audio%20Stand” description=”November%2020%2C%202010″ imagecount=”100″ start=”1″ num=”100″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”smugmug” captions=”true” sort=”true” window=”false” smugmug=”false” size=”M”]
Edmonton finally had a beautiful spring day. I took a nice walk by the river and saw a Pileated Woodpecker, it is a giant sized woodpecker. It is around the size of a crow. I heard a weird flying noise and it sat in a tree close to me for a second and I got a couple of pics.[smugmug url=”http://gallery.pfink.ca/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=11869267_ptmjy&format=rss200″ title=”River%20Valley%20Apr.17%202010%20plus%20a%20cat” description=”River%20valley%20in%20Edmonton” imagecount=”100″ start=”1″ num=”100″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”smugmug” captions=”false” sort=”true” window=”false” smugmug=”false” size=”M”]
