Yet Another Dinner (Chow)

My parents helped us whip up some stuff for dinner last night. We had seafood enchiladas with a side of undeconstructed taco salad. (See, because normally, we make this kind of separate, layered, deconstructed taco salad, but last night I tossed it all together, so, well... So it's taco salad.) Hopefully I'll feel industrious this week and also put up the enchiladas on the Kitchenarium -- allthough this is a recipe I'll have to pry out of NDM.
I really love taking this things out of the oven. They look so inviting all snug together in their little baking dish!
For desert, we made ad hoc rum balls. Actually I think more butter schnapps was used than rum. Here are my mother's hand posing while sugaring a finished rum ball.

Puttanesca (Chow)

Last night we made some spaghetinni alla puttanesca for dinner, along with some tomato & bocconcini salad and a bit of generic salad. I'll try to put the recipe with additional photos up later this week.

Breakfast Cake (Chow)

Since my parents are visiting, NDM made a raspberry cream cheese coffee cake this morning. This recipe is floating around on the web, so it won't go up on the Kitchenarium, but here are some photos to show how yummy it is.

Cuddly Mag (Pets)

Mag has just recently begun to be a little bit cuddly, shown here sleeping with her stuffed NDM. She still isn't a malleable pillow like 'Dolon, but it is nice that she is exhibiting more and more normal puppy behavior.

She also has emerald laser eyes of death.

Miscellaneous Cooking (Chow)

I've done a particularly poor job of documenting our last week or so of cooking...
Recently, I've been using a family heirloom pressure cooker my parents passed on to me. Does anyone else have one of these things? I love it! It is so incredibly fast and easy to use. Broccoli (2 minutes tops) and cabbage (6 or 7 minutes) have been my victims so far; when I successfully branch out into something other than plain vegetables I'll write it up.
NDM took the serviceberries we harvested and froze in June and made both jam and jelly out of them. Very yummy, although I've got to say they lack any special unique character -- like a sweet generic berry preserve.
Finally, I had a few eggplants and some big green tomatoes from our garden, and just a tiny bit of leftover polpette di ricotta and sauce. I tried an extremely sleazy and fast baking method with these, one that I won't use again -- the outcome was edible but not notable. In brief, put a very thin layer of light mayonnaise on the quarter-inch rounds, then sprinkled with a 50-50 mixture of parmesan and bread crumbs and baked at 375 degrees until they were done. The tomato came out better than the eggplant, which had a rubbery skin I should have removed before cooking.

Molpe 2007 Kill #10 (Pets)

Looks like shrews are really the only thing on Molpe's table this year. As long as she keeps leaving them for us outside, I'm on board. Mag got really excited about this one; I hope she doesn't start stealing them and rolling in them like some dogs I know.

'Dolon At Rest (Pets)

It is easy for me to forget that 'Dolon doesn't really spend all his time biting, jumping, barking, tugging, or wookieing on or at me. Here is 'Dolon in a more peaceful moment, posing for Delacroix's 1824 study for Odalisque Reclining on a Divan.

Dog Refurbishes Laptop

This brings whole new realms of meaning to the term "bad dog". Thankfully, my puppies haven't done anything this spectacular in a while.

If you ever wondered how many hits the "dog pees on laptop" search would get...