Dinner and Top Chef

So tomorrow is Wheat Day (see Elimination-Challenge diet).  I wish I could punctuate that with an exclamation point, but wheat…just sounds so boring.  And besides, I had another frustrating trip through the grocery store trying to find products that were 100% whole wheat but that didn’t have any of the other eliminated ingredients.  Fat chance.  I wanted to at least vary it a bit instead of eating cereal all day.  Har.  I’ll have to go to the co-op tomorrow.

For tonight’s dinner, I just couldn’t resist making this salad.  I know mangoes are totally not in season now but this salad is a shot of brightness on a cold winter day.  Makes me think of the tropics, especially whist wrapped in a heated blanket.

I turned a Giada De Laurentiis recipe into this salad.  She served it in little wonton cups.  I make my own dressing with avocado oil, EVOO, a few drops of toasted sesame oil, white balsamic vinegar and a bit of rice vinegar.  The salad itself is arugula, avocado, mango, and tilapia.  I topped it with toasted almonds and a few hemp seeds.

Off to watch Top Chef!

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No sophomore slump here!

Of course, because I am eliminating certain foods at the moment I am craving meals with those very ingredients.  So I challenged myself to make another quiche.  I call it an alterna-quiche.  It took some work to find a good crust recipe.  The hilarious bit is that I had never made a crust before my first alterna-crust made a couple weeks ago.  This crust turned out nicely as did the first.  My issue is that I need to learn how to roll dough.  I sort of suck at it.  This crust is a delicate thing and I fear that I am manhandling it!

The second time around gave me a chance to tweak some ingredients.  Last time, my filling was asparagus, goat cheese, and hemp milk.  It was good but the hemp milk, when cooked, took on a weird greenish-brown.  This time I used almond milk, which really made all the difference; it was a great base along with eggs.  I also used butternut squash and herbed goat cheese.  Goat cheese, btw, is allowed on the Elimination-Challenge diet, and I’m taking full advantage of that.

Oh, and I asked AJ to bring over bacon, to accompany the quiche.  Only as he can, he managed to buy something called English bacon which was remarkably like Canadian bacon.  It was okay but did not quite whet my taste for the crispy bacon I dreamed about as he made his way over from the store.  Ah, AJ wouldn’t be AJ without doing something just a little mindless.  And I love him just the same.

Prelude to Cheese

Tomorrow is cheese day.  I handled dairy day fairly well.  I would be very disappointed if it turned out that I had a sensitivity to cheese.  I love cheese.  It’s part of why I’m so excited for tomorrow.  Before I started the Elimination-Challenge diet, I was developing quite a close and personal relationship with a cheese called Boschetto Al Tartufo.  Here’s the description:

A mild sweet mix of cow’s and sheep’s milk. Mixed throughout are rare white truffles giving this cheese a rustic, mushroomy, and earthy undertone.

Gotta go and get some of that tomorrow!

As for tonight, I made a faux Spanish Tortilla.  A Tortilla is a Spanish dish that is like an omelet but with thin slices of potato.  This particular recipe calls for kettle chips.  Given that potatoes are nixed on the “diet” I left them out.  It didn’t have the body that it usually does but was still very good.  Obviously, it is now just a shrimp omelet.

Had arugula and avocado on the side.