Warm Creamy Peanut Chicken Salad

This isn’t the prettiest chicken salad out there, but really what chicken salad is? This salad is really easy to throw together after a long day and is great warm or cold. You can go as gourmet or as instant as you like by using fresh chicken, fresh grated ginger and garlic, or canned chicken and dried spices, respectively. No matter how you do it (I’ve whipped up dozens of variations myself), this chicken salad packs a satisfyingly flavorful punch.

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Iron Chef: Lemon!

At the beginning of the month, my workplace hosted a large event. The centerpieces at event contained lemons. After the event, lo and behold, my entire office was awash with lemons. At first, everyone smuggled home pursefuls of fresh yellow fruits. After a week of that, however, there were still far too many lemons around. Someone had the brilliant idea to hold a friendly office-wide competition: Iron Chef Lemon!

I knew that with the stress of this week, launching a big project at work and taking care of things at home on the weekend, I wouldn’t have time to come up with anything new or incredibly complicated. I did try one new lemon recipe, but it isn’t ready yet (don’t worry, I’ll post as soon as it is, success or failure!). Instead, I decided to “submit” my Syrian Lemon and Olive Chicken. While I was excited to share my own dish, I was most looking forward to seeing what everyone else would come up with.

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Food Boredom, I turn to Jumbo Shrimp

In case you were worried my lack of posting meant that I’d stopped cooking or, heaven forbid, eating, the above photo should quell your fears. A few days ago I noticed a great sale on jumbo shrimp and couldn’t stop myself from stocking up. I sauteed several with some fresh red bell pepper and some frozen peas, along with a few tabs of habanero compound butter. This piquant stirfry went on top of some leftover pasta with lemon velvet sauce. This last week at least I’ve been eating very well.

You see, I’ve not been posting due to a food block. Over the last few weeks it seems everything I made was a disaster. Some things were so bad, in fact, that I think I somehow made myself sick. Or I caught the flu. Either way, last week, my food boredom/disgust hit the fan and once my appetite came back after I started feeling better, I hauled out and got some gorgeous fresh produce. If there’s one way I know to boost an appetite it’s by finding the most beautiful foods to stimulate as many senses as possible. I went on a sort of spree, which was absolutely necessary if you saw the food we had in the house the two weeks prior.

The good food seems to have worked because this week everything has been golden. That dish above was so good, I’m about to go out and by another pound of shrimp to have all over again just looking at that picture. If I can bring myself to do it, I might post some of the failures to see if we can figure out what went wrong and how I can do it better next time. Either way, I’ve been cooking again and I feel like I’m almost ready to start posting some new recipes again.

I say almost because another thing has been nagging me that has caused my perfectionist side to shy away from posting. I’m disappointed in my photos here on this site so far. Since I started this blog I’ve learned quite a bit about food photography. I’ve adjusted my lighting, my composition, my colors, even my bowls and backdrops. No matter the changes I make in front of the camera, however, the fact is that the camera I’m using is not very good for what I’m using it for. I’m trying not to let this bother me, and I’m going to do my best with what I’ve got for now, but I’ll just say right now that I must rectify this situation one way or another and SOON.

Tell me though, what do you do when you can’t think of anything to cook? Do you have any tricks you pull when the food you’ve been making has left you uninspired? Do you give up and just eat out, or do you tackle some new exotic and different dish? Do you have a favorite dish that you turn to whenever you’re experiencing food boredom?

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