Ah, yes. Sometimes I have to choose between the flashed-out photo and the too-dark one. I think I need to improve my food photography skills. Anyway, as I mentioned yesterday, we went to this great new fruit and veggie store the other day. And because a gorgeous salad is always a good excuse to take a photo and post it, here you have it.

Ingredients:

Baby lettuce
Yellow bell pepper
Shredded carrot
Avocado
Raspberries
Cucumber
Homemade gluten free croutons
Cherry tomatoes
Slivered almonds
Sunflower seeds
Mixed sesame seeds

Dressed with the olive oil-balsamic vinaigrette I almost always use.

I love colorful salads like these. Love. Them!

I figured it was about time I acknowledged the fact that this blog has become mostly about food, and give it a new name and look and reflected that. And then update my Twitter profile and Facebook fan page. Once I found the photo I wanted to use, the whole process took less than a half hour, which was great because I was rushing to head out to lunch and didn’t want to leave things half-done.

I decided to go with a salad pic because it’s one of my favorite things to put together, and do eat. Plus, salads are usually loaded with great colors.

So what does everyone else think?

Here’s the info if you want to join in:

Step 1:
Pick one of these prompts and write about it on your blog!  You can:

• Just make a list. List 5 things that made you really happy this week. No matter how bad or boring you think your week was, I bet you can find 5 things.
• Write about something that happened to you this week that really made you smile.  Was it your child, husband, or maybe a complete stranger did to you?

• Write about something that YOU did for someone else that really made them happy or laugh.

• Is there something you treasure so much that every single time you look at it, it brings you happiness?  Post a pic and tell everyone about it.

• Having a hard week and can’t find one good thing about it?  Well then, what is your happy place?  What do you think of that makes you happy? A past vacation?  A childhood memory?  We want to know!

Step 2:
Come back here and link up with Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.  Then go and read at least one other blog and leave them a comment to make their day brighter.

Step 3:
Have fun.  Feel good.  Smile.

Then, start looking for all of the good things you can write about for next week!  Once you start looking for the “good”  you will find it everywhere!

Here are my five happy things this week (there are more, but I limited it to just five!):

• I made my grandma’s biscotti recipe, with a few substitutions. It had been years since I had them, and I always loved this recipe. My grandma used to make them, then my mother. I brought a large container of them to painting class yesterday to share. Have I mentioned that I love feeding people?
• We finally stopped the new-ish fruit and veggie store we’d been driving by for the past couple of months and assumed it was more expensive than our usual place so we never went in. This new store is like a regular grocery store in the sense that it’s self-serve, which most fruit and veggie places here aren’t. I like choosing my own things, to make sure we get quality things. They also had lots of things I hadn’t found at our other place, like escarole, baby lettuce, and yellow bell peppers. Anyway, we found gorgeous veggies, and it didn’t seem to be any more expensive than the place we usually go. Yeah!
• I was chosen in the random lottery to attend TEDx Buenos Aires. Almost 5,400 people pre-registered for only 1,300 tickets, so I’m feeling pretty lucky! Very excited, though I hadn’t heard of most of the speakers. I’ll post about it after the event.
• The first Daring Cooks challenge (for me) was posted this week. I’m a little freaked out about it, but very happy to be participating! It’s a recipe that will definitely force me to try new things. That’s all I can say right now, until I post my results on April 14th. Fun, fun!
• This week, I discovered that trigo sarraceno is actually buckwheat, which made me really happy because I’ve been wanting to try it, and it’s something I can find in most health food stores here. Yeah! I tried it out in two recipes this week, the biscotti, and the muffins I baked last night.

I loved this 2nd Edition of FGF because I spent time during the week thinking about what to put. I was going to make a list throughout the week, but didn’t. I might next week. Ooh, and I just added a FGF category to this blog, so I guess that’s a commitment to do this every week!

Enjoy!

Oh, have you noticed I like this combination? I thought I’d try a new sauce, and well, came up with something similar to what I used in my chicken dish. It’s very loosely based on this recipe.

Ingredients:

1 package Tofu
1 Egg
1/3 cup Sesame and flax seeds
Olive oil

1 cup Coconut milk
1 1/2 t. Coriander
1 1/2 t. Cumin
1 1/2 t. Turmeric
1 1/2 t. Ginger
1 1/2 t. Curry
1/2 t. Salt

Preparation:

Heat a little olive oil in a pan.

Slice the tofu in half. Beat the egg in a shallow bowl and dip the tofu in it, being sure to cover all sides. Then dip in the seed mixture (you can also add some gomasio), using a spoon if needed to fully cover the tofu. Cook over low flame in the pan.

In a separate saucepan, add all remaining ingredients until heated, stirring occasionally.

Once both parts are finished, serve tofu on a small plate and drizzle with the coconut-curry sauce.

Enjoy!

One of this week’s contests on food52 is Your Best Italian Dessert, and the first thing that came to mind was my stepgrandmother’s biscotti, one of my top two favorite things she used to make. (My other favorite was pesto. Every summer we’d give her basil plants, which she would return in the form of pesto.) The whole (Spanish/Italian) side of the family called her Nonni of course, except for me, who as a transplant into the family, just called her Grandma.

I made some changes to the original recipe, which I posted below for you normal eaters. Wheat has been treating me even worse than usual, so I used buckwheat, which I was lamenting my lack of access to until I discovered on Wikipedia this afternoon that it’s the same as trigo sarraceno, which I have in our pantry. Now I have no excuse not to make Buckwheat Apple Pancakes!

I am very excited about this discovery. You have no idea. I see so many buckwheat recipes all over, and have been very upset about not being able to get my hands on it.

Anyway, keep in mind that buckwheat doesn’t taste like wheat. So if you don’t have digestive issues with wheat, go for it.

I also used organic blond sugar instead of white sugar. And despite having searched all the party stores (which down here is where you get baking supplies), I have had no luck finding maple flavoring, or even fake maple syrup (I had no illusions about coming across the real stuff).

I decided to do half of the batch plain, according to the original recipe, and half with cocoa, so I added 1/4 cup of cocoa to half the mixture, which you can see above and below in the photos.

Also, I used about 1/4 cup of almond slivers, which I pressed into the top of the batter.

So here goes…

Ingredients:

1 cup Olive oil
4 cups Flour (again, I used buckwheat)
1 1/3 cups Sugar, part brown & part white (I used part brown and part blond)
5 Eggs, large
1 T Vanilla
1/2 t. Maple flavoring
2 1/2 t. Baking powder

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 400°F/200°C.

Sift dry ingredients. Add moist; stir until well blended.

Grease one 11 x 13″ glass baking dish and one loaf pan with olive oil and spread the mixture inside both (it doesn’t all fit in one pan). Make sure it’s not more than 1/2 ” thick.

Bake for 15 minutes (buckwheat required an extra 5 minutes or so), and remove pans.

Lower heat to 350°F/175°C while you cut biscotti into strips, about a finger’s length and width. Place on buttered baking sheet, or better yet, Silpat.

Bake once more for 15 minutes (buckwheat required an additional 10 minutes) or until the biscotti reach their desired hardness. My grandmother used to leave them a little soft, and so did my mother.

Glaze if desired. I didn’t. I figured I’d used enough sugar for the day. Or month.

Enjoy!

I was working on the computer at my desk at home when I realized that the weather was cool and gorgeous and that I’d be much happier outside on our patio, so I headed outside to our outdoors dining table. I wasn’t out here for long before my legs started getting chewed by mosquitoes and I headed in to get my natural repellent…Just Juniper cream.

No, I’m not a Just distributor. I just know how hard it is to find a natural repellent that actually works, so I wanted to share. This cream is sold to “relieve rheumatic and joint pain, while improving blood circulation. It is known to be refreshing and invigorating with anti-rheumatic, antispasmodic, calming, antiseptic, astringent and diuretic properties.”

Oh, and it’s also a great mosquito repellent. I need to write them about this. Could it be that they don’t know?

I first discovered this cream back when I lived in Tulum, Mexico, where the jungle was full of mosquitoes that had no mercy, and would bite and dash off with a speed that made swatting them nearly impossible. The juniper cream has a strong juniper perfume, which may be unpleasant to some, though I really like it. It’s made with natural essential juniper oil.

The only thing I couldn’t find on their site was a statement that they do not do animal testing, which is a bummer.

Anyone out there know of a natural mosquito repellent that really works and is not tested on animals?

We had lots of leftover potatoes from Saturday’s late-night dinner, and I generally like to recycle leftovers, adding new spices or flavors to change them a little, rather than serving them exactly as we ate them the first time around.

I cut up the potatoes into cubes and put them in a baking dish. I mixed up some goat milk (we can only find powdered here) and added it to the dish. Then I grated some manchego sheep cheese and sprinkled it on top of the potatoes, along with some crushed red pepper. It all went in the oven for about a half hour (these were the largest potatoes that were a bit undercooked), and they came out perfect. We loved them.

Enjoy!

Fun! Fun! The first Daring Cook challenge (for me) goes up on the 17th, and I’ll be posting it on the 14th. Stay tuned!

Anyone is eligible to join, so if you’re interested, check out their website and sign up for one of the two positions (Daring Cooks or Daring Bakers). Enjoy!

Here’s the man getting his fire started:

And the fire once it got roaring:

Then he spread it out under the grill:

We added rosemary to the charcoal so it would add some flavor to the chicken.

While he was occupied with the grill, I worked on the food. I washed down the chicken and rubbed it with olive oil, salt, tandoori spices, salt, and crushed red pepper flakes.

Then The Official Animal Dissecter split it in half so it would cook faster on the grill (it kind of looks like a giant frog this way):

And then it went on the grill!

And then I prepared the foil-wrapped potatoes (this is not an Argentinian thing; I think I’ve seen this at just one asado, and they were plain wrapped potatoes, with nothing else inside them). I halved the potatoes and placed two slices of onion and a pat of butter in the middle of each one. Then I added my ground spice mix of red pepper flakes, black pepper, and sea salt before wrapping them up. They went in the charcoal under the chicken, when it was about halfway through.

And after that, I put the salad together. Lettuce, tomato, manchego sheep cheese, fresh basil from our deck, and sesame seeds.

The finished meal? Oops…we were too busy eating and I forgot to take photos. The chicken was amazing, and so were the potatoes, though they were large and should have gone in the charcoal at the same time the chicken went on the grill. The salad was great! A nice, light addition to the meal.

And soooooooo nice to eat outside on our deck. Now that the weather is cooling off (have I mentioned yet that fall is approaching? ) it’s perfect for eating outside.

Enjoy!

Remember the Feisty Broccoli recipe? Well, I finally got some green beans, which the original recipe from 101 Cookbooks used, and they were spectacular!

Now I’m trying to think of other veggies that might go well with this recipe. Suggestions?