Olive and Egg Salad

Don't let the picture fool you, this is an awesome salad!  It's a great way to use hard boiled eggs.  The recipe can be halved to use this salad as an appetizer or the full recipe makes an excellent entree.  The dressing is simple; it's just lemon, garlic, and olive oil.  It adds a nice tang to the salty olives, slightly sharp red onions, and toasty pine nuts.  Even though there is a good bit of chopping, this salad is relatively quick if you're using left over hard boiled eggs.

The recipe is from my new Lebanese and Syrian cookbooks, Saha, by Greg and Lucy Malouf. I've had another of their books, Turquoise, for many years and I learned that they published Saha first.  Of course the last thing I need is another Middle Eastern cookbook, but I couldn't help myself!  I'm very glad I bought it.  It has fewer recipes than Turquoise, but so far all of them that I've tried have been fabulous. 

Ginger Carrot Soup

I'm a bit of a computer game addict, and Diablo III came out last Tuesday.  As a result, most of my meals have been either take out sushi or something I can make really fast so I can spend more time sitting in my dimly lit computer room punching demons in the face.  The meals I make when I'm in game addict mode don't make very good blog fodder since most of my fastest recipes are old ones that I've been making forever.  But, I managed to try a few new things, including this ginger carrot soup.  It's healthy, quick, and very tasty! If you make this soup, I definitely recommend an immersion blender, it makes it a lot easier. It's a creamy, slightly sweet soup with a small kick of ginger. It's vegetarian and vegan. It's also a pretty color and tastes like it takes a lot more work to make than it really does.

Definitely break up the orange with something green like a mint sprig and serve with a side salad.

Paper-Wrapped Chicken

This dish is probably in my top five list of most labor intensive dishes.  It looks cool, but it took a long time to assemble the packets, and I had help!  But, it was a fun step outside of my comfort zone.  Wait, what?  I'm supposed to wrap chicken in wax paper and then deep fry it in my wok?!  Uh...

Having never attempted anything like this before, I suspected that my neat little packets of chicken and veggies would turn into a peanut oil flavored mess wrapped in soggy wax paper. While some of the packets did get some oil in, most of them were fine! The marinated chicken was tender, the vegetables were flavorful and still had a little crunch to them, and the addition of some prosciutto to the packets was a nice way to add some saltiness.

Here they are before I fried them.  Packets filled with chicken, prosciutto, red chili, ginger, and cilantro.