Dinner: Spiced Chicken with Blackberry Sauce

I picked up some absolutely gigantic blackberries at the Farmer's Market yesterday. I feel like I've been in a food rut the last couple of weeks, so I wanted to do something different. For some reason, something with a blackberry sauce seemed like a good idea, so I searched the innertubes for a decent place to start. Lots of the recipes were for grilled foods, which appearing delicious, are not something I can cook at my current place. I ended up finding this recipe for a blackberry sauce. My modifications:

• Left out the OJ and substituted water and the juice of a whole lime
• Added maybe 2tbsp of fresh mint
• Added maybe 2tsp of freshly ground black pepper
• Added 2tbsp red wine vinegar
  
• Reduced the sugar by 1/4 cup
  

Since most of the recipes called either for grilling, or some sort of lamb, I decided to wing it with my protein. All I had on hand was chicken. After decided that the blackberry sauce was wicked sweet, something spicy seemed in order. Thus was born Lothian's Crazy Chicken:

(All quantities are made up, I don't measure when I'm creating! :))

Ingredients:

1. 6 tbsp Garam Masala powder
2. 1lb sliced chicken breast
3. 1 anaheim pepper, sliced thin
4. 1 red bell pepper, sliced
5. salt and black pepper to taste
6. 1 dried red chili
   

• Heat 4tbsp of olive in a skillet
• Add chili pepper
  
• Add 2tbsp of garam masala power to the pan
• Saute until it smokes a little
• Add sliced chicken, along with rest of the garam masala and the anaheim pepper
• When chicken is cooked through, add bell pepper
• Saute for another 1-2 minutes, or until the bell pepper is warmed through

Serve with blackberry sauce drizzled over the top, thusly:

From Food

From Food

The little circular red peppers are the anaheims, and the longer strips are the bell peppers, both from my little garden.

I'd make some changes were I to do this again. There is way too much butter for my taste in the sauce. I'd rather cut the butter at least in half, and probably cut down on the corn starch while I was at it. Reducing it for longer should have the same effect without making it quite so rich. It was by no means horrible, but I'm simply not used to that much butter in anything!

Still really need to get some lighter colored plates. Dark red/purple sauce doesn't show up against black

Bike Ride

Managed to get out for a bike ride this morning, despite the ridiculous heat. It was freaking 87 degrees by the time we got done, before 11AM! It was a pretty nice ride along Third Creek Greenway, all the way to Morningside Park at the end of Neyland Greenway.

GPS Link

Sorry, no photos. I opted not to bring along the backpack. I don't think there were any good opportunities anyway.

Adventures with the macro lens

An assortment of shots from the last two days.

These are some aphids or something on one of my peppers. They turn out to be a lot more frightening to look at close up.

From Random Junk

I call this one "Fruit Fly on a Habanero":

From Random Junk

Random bumblebee. It never really moved until the flash went off, and then just flapped its tiny little wings a bit. Very weird.

From Random Junk

Stupid ant got into this photo, I was really just aiming for the flower. This is on the anaheim pepper.

From Random Junk

Different fruit fly on a different pepper (I forget which one).

From Random Junk

Some dude on the Kindle:

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"Artsy" bumblebee with the highlights and shadows both blown out. This one has been picasa'ed.

From Random Junk

Epic Awesome

If you know me and squirrels, you realize how freaking amazing this is:

http://www.asylum.com/2010/07/22/its-the-worlds-strongest-most-expensive-beer-inside-a-squi/?sms_ss=reddit

A tale of 3 salsas

Made 3 batches of salsa tonight. No recipes yet, want to do a taste test tomorrow maybe. Anyway, salsa #1:

From Food

salsa #2:

From Food

salsa #3:

From Food

All 3:

From Food

Rain, dinner

Long week, don't really feel like writing a lot. The rain tonight was cool:

From Random Junk

From Random Junk

From Random Junk

From Random Junk

Dinner tonight was Rouxbarb. Here's the Sunlit Don:

From Random Junk

And Sideways Steven:

From Random Junk

And Watermelon Gazpacho:

From Random Junk

that is all.

Recipe - Crock Pot Chicken

Dinner yesterday was crock pot chicken based on the recipe here. Changes I made:

• Used a lot of fresh thyme from my garden, probably 1-2Tbsp
• Used more pepper than was called for, and no white pepper
  
• Roughly cut up a granny smith apple and stuck it in the middle of the bird

I also rubbed the spice mixture under the skin of the chicken. I figure that's a better way to get the flavor. It's kind of gross to work the skin off the bird with your fingers, but hey, it's in the name of gastronomical excellence! I did end up tearing the skin above the breast though :(

I really liked the way it turned out. I think I cooked it for a total of 8 hours in my crock pot. That might have been a bit too long. The breast meat was ever-so-slightly dry, and the internal temp was somewhere around 190F (done for poultry is 165F). The dryness could also have been a result of the torn skin.

Once dinner was over, I got ambitious. After cleaning the rest of the meat off the carcass, I threw all the remains, minus some giant gobbets of fat, back into the crock pot. After adding enough water to come to just under the top of the bones, I let the whole thing cook on low overnight. This made some really terrific chicken stock that I'll use in a soup or something soon. Next time I might add a couple of carrots and some celery to make the stock even heartier. After straining through some cheese cloth, the stock was quite clear and a nice dark color. No pictures though, it's not that interesting.

ttfn.

Garden update!

Inspired by the farmer's market this morning, I decided it was high time for another harvest from the 'ole container garden out on the balcony. The results:

• 2 Jalapenos
• 1 Poblano
• 1 Habanero (the first one!)
• 1 Anaheim
• 1 Banana (pepper, not fruit)
  

I'm pretty pleased with this harvest. Combined with some tomatoes, garlic, and extra peppers I picked up at the farmer's market, it should make for a great salsa. Sadly the jalapenos aren't producing quite quickly enough to use all of my own peppers, so I must supplement. Anyway, pictures:

From Food

From Food

So, that was the harvest. Coming soon, I should have a red bell pepper:

From Food

This next one is confusing. I bought only one red bell pepper plant that I know of, and two green bell. One of the green bells is definitely producing green. The other, well, judge for yourself:

From Food

I can't decide if I let it go too long before I harvested, or if it somehow cross-pollinated with the red bell that's directly next to it. I'm going to wait a few days and see what develops.

Lastly, I have a resident stinkbug in the garden. He's just the cutest little thing, I had to snap some pictures. I was mildly surprised that he (or she) really didn't like it, and made an effort to avoid the camera. Anyway, here are a selected few:

From Random Junk

From Random Junk

The second one is cropped, but I like it anyway. I'm fascinated by the eye structure of bugs. So cool.

A couple of photos of yours truly

Playing around with the camera a bit:

From Self

From Self

From Self

Finally, my attempt to spell, in cursive, backwards, with a light:

From Self

Not too bad, neh?

Food - PANCAKES!

Posting has been light. I make no excuses, nor any apologies. Suck it up. :)

Anyway, I made breakfast last weekend. It was amazing. First, the Benton's Bacon went into the over @ 450F for 20 minutes or so. Next I hauled out the Bisquik and made some yumtacular pancakes with the unfrozen remains of the blueberries I'd harvested earlier in the week. Check it out:

From Food

I really need to get some lighter colored plates if I want to continue taking pictures of food. Also need to work on my focus a little, but hey, I was still hungry! I actually waited until the second plate of food.... and still couldn't wait too long to consume. Oh well.

Photos - Me

I hate here the first part of the likely-growing collection of goofy photos of myself. For example, pre-bicycle-helment-removal:

From Pictures of Yours Truly

I'm strong and love cameras:

From Pictures of Yours Truly

And after removal of the helmet. This one is epic. I'm going to make you scroll down to see it.

From Pictures of Yours Truly

More pictures of me here.

Food - Mixed Berry Salad

Yesterday I made some wicked tasty mixed berry fruit salad. Here's the "recipe":

- Half a container of strawberries, quartered
- Half a pint of raspberries
- Pint of black raspberries
- About a cup of blueberries
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- Dash of cinnamon
- 2-4 drops of vanilla

Combine everything in some sort of container. Refrigerate for maybe an hour or three, mixing it every so often to encourage the juices to mingle. Eat. Enjoy.

This is basically a recipe I found on the interwebs. The cinnamon and vanilla really give it a slightly different taste and cut the sweetness of the sugar a little. I picked the blueberries myself on Thursday, and left them unrefrigerated to let them ripen a bit more. The black raspberries were from last week's farmer's market that I had frozen. Fresh would work just as well, of course.

I also tried my hand at photographing this concoction today. Not sure if I like the pictures yet though - you be the judge.

From Food

From Food

From Food

From Food

These were all with my macro lens. I'm not sure if it was really the correct choice in this case. Oh well. It still tasted great!

Rainbow Falls Hike

As part of my seemingly-endless vacation, I went up to Rainbow Falls on Monday with a friend. It's a fairly popular trail in the Smokies. The drive out wasn't too bad, maybe an 75 minutes from my place.

The hike up to the Falls was pretty challenging compared to the other hikes I've done recently. The trail was full of rocks and roots. I was definitely glad to have my hiking boots on - I would have rolled my ankle at least 4 or 5 different times if I didn't have them on. Other than being rough, the hike up was pretty awesome. A lot of the trail follows the stream/river pretty closely, and the running water sounds were very peaceful. Even though though there were a fair number of other hikers, it wasn't terrible; we managed to outpace most of them.

The forest itself seems like it had more old-growth trees than places like Frozen Head. Not certain that's actually true, but it sure felt that way. There were also a lot of large boulders and rocks, both along the stream as well as out into the woods. Again, not something I have seen a ton of recently.

All in all, the hike took us almost exactly an hour and a half from the parking area up to the falls. Not bad. Another 2 miles (I think) would have gotten us up to Mt. Leconte.

I'm not very pleased with the photos from the trip. There's a lot of noise in most of them, probably because it was relatively dark out and so the camera picked a high ISO for a lot of the shots. That said, I still got a few I liked, and I have the RAW images this time, so I may go back and fix up what I can at a later date. So, consider these a preliminary pass :)

So, photos...

A really nice Turk's Cap Lily (or maybe a Carolina Lily):

From Rainbow Falls

The rare Homo Moosehandicus:

From Rainbow Falls

Is this sign unclear? There were a ton of people (young and old) frolicking on the slippery rocks right beneath the falls:

From Rainbow Falls

Crimson Bee Balm near the Falls:

From Rainbow Falls

Bottom of the falls, long exposure:

From Rainbow Falls

Top of the falls, long exposure:

From Rainbow Falls

Almost the entire falls:

From Rainbow Falls

I'm unable to identify this one:

From Rainbow Falls

Chillin' on a log:

From Rainbow Falls

I believe this is a tiger swallowtail caterpillar that is close to pupating:

From Rainbow Falls

I'm going to do a bit more looking to verify that though. Regardless, it was the second coolest critter we saw.

That's it for photos I'm going to post. More in the album.

Critter count:
Cool caterpillars: 1
Awesome red-headed woodpeckers: 1, on the drive out. Very cool.
Bears: 0

Just wasn't a great hike for seeing animals. Not surprising, it's a pretty well trafficked trail.

Speaking of traffic - crikey! I made the mistake of not heading for Wears Valley Road when leaving, and we spent (I think) upwards of 2 hours getting back to I-40. I will not be doing that again. I think it was holiday traffic combined with afternoon traffic, but whatever it was, was ridiculous.

Other than traffic and lack of critters, the hike was very enjoyable, and certainly wore me out. I think it's worth doing again, possibly even earlier in the morning (got there around 09:00 this time). It might also make sense to hike to Leconte and stay over an evening, and then get up early to get some early morning pictures of the falls. We'll see.

For those who have just been dying to see, here's the GPS data. There's a ~120 minute gap where I hit the stop/start button instead of the lap button. Oh well!

Bald River Falls

Before hitting the Lost Sea yesterday, I took a detour out to Bald River Falls. It was maybe 15 miles away, but more like a 30-45 minute drive due to speed limits and safety. The Falls is a little bit of the way inside the Cherokee National Forest, off of the Cherohala Skyway. It's a really nice little drive, and the Falls are some of the best I have seen recently.

While at the Falls, I played around with my new circular polarizer lens filter. Basically, this doodad filters out certain beams of light, mostly making colors a little more saturated, and getting rid of some reflections. Here's an example. The first photo was taken with the polarizer not really doing anything; the second with the polarizer in full force:

From Bald River Falls

From Bald River Falls

The effect is particular noticeable in the pool below the falls. The first has lots of reflections, and in the second, you can see a lot more of the water.

Almost every picture from here was off the falls, so I won't bother describing them. No tripod for anything. Here's my favorite:

From Bald River Falls

Here are some others:

From Bald River Falls

From Bald River Falls

From Bald River Falls

From Bald River Falls

From Bald River Falls

From Bald River Falls

Then there's this one. I'm really not sure what happened - it almost looks like the shutter caught half of the photo during the flash, and half not. Oh well.

From Bald River Falls

Here's the rest of the album. Most of the photos look better full size rather than the rinkydink 400 pixel wide things I can put in here.