Cooking: Basic Teriyaki Sauce

This teriyaki sauce is easy to make and makes a great marinade or dipping sauce.

Basic Teriyaki Sauce

• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup dry sherry
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 tbsp vegetable or canola oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tbsp fresh ginger, minced

1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl
2. Use as a marinade or dipping sauce.

Wine: "Fava beans and a nice Chianti..."

I've been meaning to learn about wine and 2011 is going to be the year that I finally do it. (Pause for applause...)

Tonight I tried a Chianti I received as a gift from my friend Louise. It's a Familia Dante Chianti Riserva 2006, which at this time doesn't mean much to me. It was pretty good, although I think I served it a little warm.

According to the bottle, this Chianti Reserva "...reveals great depth of dark chocolate and black cherry. Two years of oak aging and further bottle aging add complex aroma and refined finish". Not sure if I actually tasted any of that, but then again my palette isn't what anyone would call refined.

I'll figure all this out eventually... :)

Cooking: Cool Cucumber Salad

The recipe will be up soon, but for now, here are the pics:

The cucumber salad...

Cooking: Teriyaki Chicken Skewers

The recipe will be up soon, but for now, here are the pics:

Preparing the skewers...

Grilling the skewers...

The End

Photography: STS-132 - The Final Launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis

Blog entry coming soon! For now, photos of the launch can be found here.

Cooking: Steamed Mussels

The CBS Early Show has a spot on the weekends called "Chef on a Shoestring" where famous chefs are given $40 and told to prepare a multi-course meal for 4. A few years ago they put out a cookbook containing many of the recipes.

I've tried a few of the recipes so far and they have been pretty good. One of my favorites is a recipe for steamed mussels. I had never tried to make a dish with mussels before but this was pretty easy. It reminded me of a dish I had in Brussels a few years ago. I guess mussels are very popular there, especially when served with fries and a good beer.

The recipe below is simple and takes 5 minutes to make. Serve over linguine or angel hair pasta to make a complete meal.

Steamed Mussels and Linguine
Adapted from "Chef on a Shoestring"

• 1 lb. mussels
• 1 large onion
• 1 large tomato
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 cup white wine

1. Clean the mussels
2. Dice the onion and garlic. Remove the seeds from the tomato and dice.
3. In a skillet or large pot, heat the oil and add all of the ingredients. Cover and steam for 5 minutes until the mussels open. Discard any unopened mussels.
4. Serve the mussels with the broth over pasta.
5. Enjoy!

Serves 2 as a meal.

Cooking: Creme Caramel

A few weeks ago I needed a French recipe for a French / Julia Childs themed potluck dinner. I've never really done any French cooking before, but a co-worker suggested a recipe for Creme Caramel (aka flan). She recommended a recipe found on the food blog Gratinee. Between the recipe (link) and this YouTube video (link), I was able to pull off a pretty successful Creme Caramel. My first test run ended in some very burnt caramel, but after that things went pretty smoothly.

Since then, I've made it twice more and both times it was a hit. Here are some photos from my last attempt. I make the creme caramel in individual ramekins because it looks better when serving it.


To server the creme caramel, you cut it out of the ramekin and flip it over onto a plate.