Roasted tomatillo salsa

Good as expected.

With the little blender jar attachment for the immersion blender, the preparation is really easy.

The recipe says that the quality of the preparation starts to degrade within a few hours of completion. I'm not sure if I'm convinced of that, but I did notice that the spiciness level tends to fall off after day or so.

Roasted red Pepper soup

I decided to take a stab at improvising this recipe. For fun, I threw in the constraint of not using any dairy or animal products (except for some chicken stock). To thicken it, I puréed a soppy mixture of left over brown rice.

The outcome was more than satisfactory, but not quite rich enough for my liking.

Chipotle shrimp

Fantastic and easy. Worked well with Mexican-style Rice served on the side. The sauce really picks up the seafood flavor.

I looked for the best quality canned chipotle chiles that I could find. Still, I believe the ingredient list on the bottle was not so authentic. It seemed to use tomatoes instead of other chilies like anchos for the adobo sauce.

Grilled fish in tangy Yucatecan Achiote

This dish was super easy and very satisfying. You just have to make sure that it served very hot -- especially once you add the salsa it's going to cool down quickly.

I used the Mexicana brand achiote paste, which regrettably had red food coloring. It was the only variety of the paste that Mi Rancha had on its shelf.

Also, instead of using a outdoor grill, I seared the fish on a skillets and finished in the oven. I think one problem with this technique is that the paste covering the fish tends to pull off when you flip it in the skillet.

Creamless cream of mushroom soup

See the recipe in the images here. From the book CookSmart. The intent of the recipe is to find a good variation on cream of mushroom soup that uses some other thickener besides cream.

Review:
- Taste: 75%
-worktime: one hour

Analysis:
- Replaced the "minute Rice" with short grain white rice (sushi rice). The mixture after puréeing the cooked rice, was incredibly thick and tasted almost gluey. And it only added about half of that mixture in with the other broth/mushroom mixture and it was still plenty thick. I postulated that perhaps minute Rice does not expand as much when cooked since it has hardly been partially cooked. However, both a 1/4 cup of minute Rice and white rice have essentially the same calorie and carbohydrate amount -- arguing against the hypothesis.

Kung Pao Shrimp

Check out the recipe in the images here. Comes from a famous recipe collection that has a name similar to "Sports Illustrated".

Analysis:
- We used plain rice vinegar instead of black rice vinegar (I've had some trouble finding the black stuff in the store)
- replaced the schezuan (spelling?) peppercorns with white peppercorns. I think this was a mistake as it appears that the two are very different in taste. I felt that the white peppercorns dominated the final flavor.
- Replaced the oyster sauce with soy sauce since we didn't have any. Not sure how valid this is. The final product actually tasted under-salted, amazingly. Perhaps because we used reduced sodium soy sauce.

Spanakopita

Well, the fillo dough had been sitting in the fridge for a few weeks and I needed to get rid of the spinach in the freezer, so spanakopita seemed like the logical concoction.

I improvised the recipe and it went something like this:
- sauté half an onion, chopped in olive oil, lightly salted until softened
- stir in a 16 ounce bag of frozen spinach, which has been thawed and drained of any excess water
- Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg
- stir in about two thirds of a cup of cottage cheese and about two thirds of a cup of grated Gruyere cheese (note that I'm deviating widely from the more traditional feta and ricotta cheeses)
- Layout 3 sheets of the dough on top of each other, with a layer of olive oil sprayed between each
- cut the dough into 2.5 inch strips
- Put a blob of the spinach, cheese mixture at the end of each strip and start folding into the triangle shape; brush/spray the top of each triangle with olive oil
- bake at about 375°F for 10 or 12 minutes or until lightly browned

Review:
I think our dough was a bit stale. Otherwise, delicious!