Trying out a bunch of new things this week, notably--maple sugar recipes, based on your Facebook posts. Here they are:

Roasted sweet potatoes with crispy sage leaves and maple sugar--see left. 5 minutes of prep time, and in the oven it goes. Worked out very well, and recipe has been added. Definitely Feeding My Ohana-worthy.

Maple ginger spice cake --OK, found, specified, but it was made by the baking expert (aka Todd). One of the maple sugar recipes. I have to say it smells a little weird while it's baking, probably because of the molasses. But with whipped cream, it is also Feeding My Ohana-worthy.

Tofu with mushrooms, snap peas and hoisin sauce. 
Based on a beef stir fry recipe. Ginger, hot garlic sauce, hoisin and five-spice. Tofu was definitely a good swap. I had to use shoyu, vinegar, black bean sauce and honey because I didn't have hoisin sauce. Not bad, but next time, using Chinese peas, actual hoisin sauce, and add green onions. A friend of mine thinks adding water chestnuts would make it good for potsticker filling. Great idea! Family score = 2-1 (I always abstain.)

Maple apple pie with walnut streusel. Another maple sugar recipe--hopefully made tonight!

Curry with sweet potatoes, cauliflower and onions. Hopefully it won't be another Prison Curry.


The rest of the week is go-to comfort food.
Sloppy Joes
Zaru soba (cold buckwheat noodles) & misoyaki salmon
Chicken divan--made this tonight (see left, right about to bake)

We've all had them. What sounded like such a good idea all-too-quickly torpedoes into Complete and Utter Cooking Disaster. Doesn't taste good. Doesn't look good. One substitution too many and bam! Unlike Emeril,  it's an into-the garbage and go-get-the-takeout fast day. 

I've had a bunch of them. While my family is very tolerant and will eat pretty much anything once, my children are merciless, and have made a sport of thinking up entertaining names for kitchen failures. A chicken curry with eggplant, green beans and coconut milk was dubbed  Prison Curry and they asked if it was served in orphanages. Another recipe whose official name is "Savory Lamb Burgers" was endowed with the title Poop Burgers because of aesthetic and aroma shortcomings. 

Finally, there is the outrageous disbelief that two lovely foodstuffs can be combined to ruin each other as in, "How in the world can can you take perfectly good furikake and and perfectly good salmon and have it taste like something weird called furikake salmon?" However, the all-time worst is simply called by its given name, 
Salmon Couscous. This is the meal against which all epic fail meals are judged. 

The most recent fail was Macadamia Nut Eggplant. It was edible, but barely. It sounded like a good idea, scoop out the eggplant meat, dice it upy and stir fry in some olive oil, garlic, Worcestershire, shoyu. Cook in a little ground turkey and chopped onion and top with bread crumbs and macadamia nuts and bake in the eggplant shell. Easy one-dish meal. 

Not. First of all, do you know how hard it is to scoop out raw eggplant meat? Strike one. Second, all I taste is salty. Strike 2. Finally, you get this hash-like brown food that you stuff back into the eggplant that you cored and bake it. Let me just say that long brown, cooked stuffed eggplants just do not look good and really don't look much like food. Strike 3. Out. The children said, "Well, it wasn't as bad as Salmon Couscous, but..."

And it was time for dinner by phone.