I always seem to blog about beef

And I don't even enjoy beef that much.  But here we go again.  I guess the reason is that I don't remember to write about food that often and when I have a beef dish that I really like, I tend to remember to blog about it.

Anyway, at curling the other night a couple of people were talking about this great dinner they had made from this great cookbook.  I asked what the cookbook was thinking that there is at least a 75% chance that I have it and ... I do!  And I haven't cooked from it forever, need a bit of a kickstart in the cooking department because lately I've not been that inspired so pulled it off the shelf yesterday morning.  Before I went grocery shopping so could pick up the ingredients.  This may be part of my uninspired problem.  I have been randomly buying things at the grocery store and then trying to figure out what to make.  It's hard to get excited about cooking something when you don't have half of the ingredients.  So lately, I've just been throwing things together.  Still tasty but not inspiring.

The cookbook is A Matter of Taste by Lucy Waverman and James Chatto.  Lucy writes the recipes and James provides drink ideas to go with them.  Unfortunately, I tend to drink something different from what James recommends because I never remember to add his recommendation to the grocery list, get home and find I don't have a California Pinot Noir (in this case) or any other country's Pinot Noir for that matter.  Fortunately it tasted pretty good with a red Zinfandel as recommended by my beverage and food matching encyclopedia.

This book is set up in menus and it is my goal to actually make one of the full menus at some point but I don't think I have yet.  This one is called Japanese Influences and the beef part was Steak with Mushroom Miso Sauce.  Yummy.  The mushroom sauce smelled a lot like Miso soup (surprise) in the pan but when poured on the steak which had been marinated for 1/2 hour in soy sauce and other stuff, the flavours blended very nicely together so that you couldn't pick out any one element of flavour.  As I said earlier, yummy.

I also made the Soba Noodles with Spicy Greens.  This was also very good and contained a lot of veggies.  The spicy came from Wasabi paste, ginger and hot pepper flakes, although again, I didn't really notice the spiciness and thought that the flavours blended together really well.

Tonight it's Roasted Halibut Tagine from A Dinner of Lemons.  Considering that I'm likely only making the Halibut  and possibly the Israeli Couscous, if I have some in the back of my cupboard and it hasn't gone stale, it isn't really going to be a dinner of lemons.  More like lemons and some other stuff.  I'll try to remember to blog about it later.