Daily Foodie Eats: 16/04/12

So, I’m a bad bad girl. I forgot to take pictures of my food today until dinner time! So to make it up to you my devoted readers lonely, singular reader, I busted out the good camera to take some pics!

Breakfast: Coffee and cream. Yum. Some call it intermittent fasting, I call it laziness and a busy morning at work.

Lunch: Two hardboiled eggs (breakfast!), cucumber slices, another taco salad (just like yesterday’s breakfast, go look at the pic and it will be like deja-vu. I promise). I also had a mini chorizo meatloaf. I’m going to include the pic from the author because mine are decidedly less photogenic, but incredibly flavourful. This recipe is a winner! Yes Virgina, there really is a meatloaf that doesn’t taste like cat food. This is it.

Dinner: Cocoa toasted cauliflower and pork tenderloin. For the pork, I used the rest of the delicious rub I had remaining from the other day when I made The Best Chicken You Will Ever Eat. Seared it up in the cast iron pan and finished in the oven. A tip about pork. Pork tastes nasty when it is overcooked. Invest in a good instant read meat thermometer. I cook a pork tenderloin to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. It is okay if your pork is still a wee bit pink in the middle. Once you take it out of the oven, let it rest under some foil for 5-10 minutes. The temp will creep up to about 145. Trust me on this. And if you don’t want to trust me, trust the FDA. While I can be “anti establishment” when it comes to public policy – especially food policy (we’ll save that rant for another post, perhaps on a rainy day when I’ve had enough of procrasti-cooking), go with this recommendation for cooking the pork!

Yummy. I added some sliced tomatoes because I felt my plate was too brown. Kiddo happily scarfed the tomatoes down along with his leftover lemon parmesan risotto from the other night. The best part about this dinner is that it is all very simple ingredients that were turned into a flavourful and delicious meal just by adding spices. Spices are your friend. They can turn something mundane into something magical. This dinner took me about 30 minutes to prepare. 20 of that was spent sitting on the couch…

Snack: I dunno. But I’m sure I will munch on something later. ETA: I had an ataulfo mango. So good.

Kitchen gripe of the day: So I have this reasonably fancy-ish Venmar hoodfan. It’s great and all, but the stupid electronic control panel keeps falling into the fan housing! After a trip to my friendly Venmar dealer (read: some hole in the wall appliance repair centre in a basement of a building in backwoods Hull where I made a colleague come with me in case I got murdered and/or I was too chicken shit to speak french) the nice guy there showed me the piece and I figured out that all I had to do was open it up and slide a little lever. Great, but now I seemingly have to do it every 2 months or so. The last time I did it I didn’t turn the breaker off. Momentary lapse of reason. Whoopsie. Yes, my hand was vibrating for an hour. ha!