Lupo's Chunky Mash (served raw)

Well, the title pretty much says it all methinks! The context? Well, Lupo's gone on a cooking rampage... kind of. He insisted on planning out each meal for the week over the weekend and then doing a big shop to get all the ingredients. I had to go through the ingredients list and cross out all the items that we already had. The ones that I can still remember include: milk, tinned tomato, fresh tomato, celery, buk choy, onion, lamb cutlets, beef mince and a couple of other items. You see, he's always complaining that we don't have anything in the house that we can cook. But we actually do!!! It's more that, unless he thinks of something very specific to cook, e.g. spaghetti bolognese, he can't look at what we do have and just make something out of it.

Anyway!!! I humoured him. We went to the market and did a big shop. I pretty much followed him around and handed over money to all the stores when he found something that he wanted to buy. Some of the things I really didn't think that we needed, like a 1kg piece of pork belly, 2 big pieces of salmon, a piece of chicken. I mean, unless we hardcore cook every night, we won't be able get through all that meat. So I guess into the freezer it goes! Don't forget the massive loaf of ciabatta on top of the two packs of wraps!!!

I digest. Hahahahahahaha! I mean, I digress.

So, back to the mash. Lupo decided that we would have salmon and mash last night. Which is a nice meal... although it seems that whenever Lupo cooks salmon, it's always the same - some salmon cooked on the pan and a bit of rice. Sometimes with something green as well, if I put it on the plate. Last time Lupo threw the salmon skin side down onto the pan, and burnt it.

This time! He put them flesh side down and kept the heat on medium-low :-) Although, as I walked into the kitchen, Lupo was cooking the salmon and also had the rice cooker going. Lupo did turn around and ask me when I thought the rice would be ready... I said in prob 20 mins. And also mentioned that he probably should've waited until the rice was ready before cooking the salmon! Then I asked where the mash was. And he said that he hadn't made any, which made me sad. Hehe. So he made mash for one.

I made a point of reminding him that I wanted a creamy mash and not a chunky mash. I think he cooked the potatoes for all of 5 minutes before starting to mash them. I tried telling him that they'd still be raw! As a result, they weren't mashed, they were very chunky and had that grainy-not-quite-cooked texture. Ick! I mean, you could see that they weren't being mashed even as he was trying to mash them!

Well, we had our meal. It looked nice enough. Although the salmon was cold by the time everything else was ready... minor issue. We can work on that. In fact, I've been working on the whole timing-logistics thing when cooking with him for awhile... work in progress.

Photos? Here's the chunky mash with the salmon.

Chunky mash

Here's the chunky mash with the spinach and fetta parcels the next day for lunch. I microwaved them and then put them in the sandwich press to crisp the pastry. Yum!

photo to be inserted

Exploding fish

On the topic of fish, not too long ago Lupo decided to surprise me with a fancy dinner. He went to sooooo much effort. I came home to something delicious baking in the oven - fish. He'd crumbed some fish (he tells me he just mixed up some breadcrumbs, pepper and salt), bougth some pre-crumbed prawns from Coles and had it all going in the oven. He even proudly told me that he had the lined our huge glass baking dish with foil, to make cleaning it later easier.

He'd even set the table (we rarely eat at the table, normally on the couch in front of the TV) and lit a couple of tealight candles - aw.

So anyway, dinner time. Yum yum. So Lupo pulled open the oven door, took a hold of one side of the glass baking dish with the not-so-thick oven mit and said "Arghhhhh!" and put it back down. Then he went to pick it up again and this time said "Argh! Hot!" Meanwhile, I'm like, "Don't grab it out before getting a heat mat for the table!!! Just leave it in the oven!" And Lupo's still going, "Hot, hot, hot!" whilst doing this funny lifting up and bobbing about dance with the tray. Then he put the piping hot baking tray on the table - the laminate table.

Realising what he'd done, Lupo then lifts it back up and goes, "Hot, hot, hot!" And I'm like, "Just put it back down on the oven tray!!!!" For some reason he doesn't. Luckily there was a towel hanging over one of the chairs in the kitchen, so I grabbed that to take the baking dish out of Lupo's hands. As I lifted it to put it onto the heat mat, which I'd moved into place by then, the whole thing shattered!!!! Like, just shattered in my hand and fell to the floor. I was able to put some of it onto the table, but there was glass everywhere! Big jagged bits and tiny little flecks that you could only see as you moved around and light got reflected.

It was such a sad sight. Glass, crumbed prawns, fish, more glass... So we just swept it all up, threw it out and then went out for dinner. At least I think we went out for dinner. I can't remember what we did that night! But I do remember Lupo being very sad.

The glass, the fish, the prawns, the towel and Lupo sweeping.

I've got pictures of the table where the laminate has been lifted from the table. Will have to put them up too!

Salmon sausage

So there's gonna be quite a few re-cap blogs tonight. I wanna get this all up-to-date, so then I can blog on a real time basis.

So! The salmon sausage. 'What in the world is that?' you ask! Right, so Lupo loves salmon. And I do too for that matter. I love it in any form - sashimi, pan seared, salmon belly (yum!), in salads, sushi, etc.

Lupo loves putting smoked salmon in sandwiches and wraps.

Not so long ago, Lupo picked me up from work as we were heading out somewhere. He'd made me lunch to eat in the car - the salmon sausage. It was, seriously, about a 2cm dia tube of salmon in a wrap. There was nothing else.

It was like just grabbing all the salmon from a pack and shoving it into my mouth. Now, it's not hard for me to eat that much in one sitting, but I don't normally just grab some salmon, wrap it up in bread and then eat it. It's kinda really dry and bland like that. All it needed was some home grown rocket and a smearing of avocado...