Peter's Cooking Diary #20

well it was another week, and I made a few new recipes this week, one of them was very versatile, and they were all things that I grew up eating, so they are a bit of family recipes, although just my take on them more than anything.

Starting the recipe with some finely chopped green onions, I used most of the green and just about all of it but the white, which can be a bit too oniony for what I was using it for.

I am making some tzatziki, and when it comes to cucumbers that I was using I will almost always choose English cucumbers, or seedless cucumbers. They are a bit more expensive than normal cucumbers but I always feel the need to remove the seeds from them.

I chopped the cucumbers finely, and then squeezed some of the liquid out of them. I didn't want to have too much of the liquid in the mix to make everything too loose.

I actually saved the cucumber water/juice or whatever it is called. I drank it with some water and it was very refreshing.

I just used plain unsweetened yogurt. I bet some people would buy Greek yogurt for added thickness, or nonfat to lower the calories a little, but I have no problem with the regular fat plain yogurt.

So this is 2 chopped and squeezed cucumbers, chopped green onions, 2 cloves of garlic chopped as finely as I could, one 32 oz container of plan yogurt, and some salt and pepper.

I mixed all of the ingredients together, and placed it in the fridge overnight, it takes some time for all of the flavors to seep into the yogurt.

To go along with the tzatziki I bought some gyro meat, which is really easy to get in grocery stores these days.

I heated up the gyro meat in some butter, and let some of the liquid and fat in it cook out so it got a little bit more texture to it.

I chopped up some olives and added to the pan as well as a few eggs and scrambled it all together, and cooked it through.

The finished product was a gyro omelet that was amazingly delicious when topped with the tzatziki. My mouth just started watering seeing the picture and thinking about how delicious it was.

I also used my tzatziki as a salad dressing on a salad with some tuna and some olives in it and it was a great and also light dressing that was quite refreshing as well.

So the next recipe starts with some chicken breast that I marinated in some chili garlic sauce, soy sauce, and stir fry sauce that I bought from the store, mixed well and then I let it sit for just a few hours.

I added the chicken to a pan on medium high heat with a little oil and allowed it to cook all the way though, stirring occasionally. When I dumped the chicken in, I made sure to get all of the drops out of the container with it.

Once the chicken was done I removed it from the pan and set it aside and then added in my aromatics to the pan.

The aromatics I used were garlic, ginger and 3 shallots, I used shallots because the green onions I probably would have used did not look very good at the store, but I still wanted some subtle onion flavor.

After chopping all of them and adding them to a bowl together.

I added the aromatics to the pan to cook, and also scrape up and bits that were left in the pan by the chicken.

I cooked the aromatics down until everything was cooked through.

The main veggies I used in my stir fry were broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. I cut all of them to reasonably small size pieces that were about even.

The other veggie I added was some fresh green beans which I removed the ends from.

I added the large veggies to the pan before adding my sauce ingredients.

To create my sauce I added some chili garlic sauce.

One can of pineapple chunks in juice.

and a bottle of stir fry sauce, as well as some water used to rinse all of the sauce out of the bottle.

Once everything was added to the pan, it was a bit hard to stir together, but slowly I was able to combine everything and cooked the stir fry with its lid on over medium heat for about 20 minutes.

Once the stir fry was done this is what it looked like. I actually removed all of the solids from the pan and cooked the juices/sauce down a little bit. I was not serving this with rice so the sauce being thicker would be even better for just straight up eating.

Well I will say that the way I made the stir fry was delicious, it will be a bit too spicy for some, but the pineapple and the sauce all mixed together as a sweet and sour as well as salty and spicy combination that I really liked.