Day 1 (retrospective post): slightly questionable beginnings

Menu:

• Brunch: Omelet (with a bunch of stuff in it)
• Time spent: ~1 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Most of the prep time was spent dicing things for the omelet
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $10.50
• Dinner: Baked salmon, stir fried vegetables-that-tend-to-be-sweeter, sweet potato
• Time spent: ~1.5 hour prep, 30 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $15.77
• That salmon was expensive, at $12.20 per pound

Key lessons of the day:

• If you put more stuff into your omelet, you need more egg.  This may seem obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to forget.
• A little touch of aromatics can go a very long way, but the only way to make it work is to lay off a bit on the stuff that's easy to indulge in, like chilis, or pepper.

Open questions:

• How do you deal with the layer of fat on a salmon?
• When salmon is cooked with the skin on, the layer of fat between the skin and the meat expands as it cooks and oozes out in a way that is visually unattractive.  Additionally, that fatty stuff has a bitter taste that I would not immediately describe as tasty.
• Is there such a thing salmon that is too well-done?
• The texture of the salmon was relatively flak-y, but parts of the salmon were tougher than I would expected.  Is this specific to the type of salmon I used, or is it a matter of technique?
• Short of using a food processor, is there a way to make dicing less of a bitch?
• Because dicing was a bitch, and I expect it will be a bitch in future preps too

Meal breakdowns

Brunch - Omelet with onions, tomatoes, bacon bits, and mushrooms / a bunch of berries

The result: the omelet is pretty fucking ugly, and it tasted pretty much like it looked.  The problem, I theorize, was that I used 3 eggs for what was really a 5 egg omelet's worth of stuff.  As a result, when the egg as added to the pan, it was very hard to work with, and as evidenced by the picture, very easy to burn.  The berries were good though.

General prep scheme:

• Cooked the bacon in a cast iron skillet with the layer of evaporating water method, 
• Transfer the bacon oil to a non-stick pan already brought up to temperature and then throwing in, in order, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes and bacon bits
• Turn the heat down to about 4 on the electric stove setting and add in the whisked egg
• As the egg settles, add salt and pepper, and some cut up fresh thyme
• At some point, fold the omelet, and cook through

Other notes:

• The way the thyme was added was a mistake - it would have been much better to pluck off the leaves of it rather than throw it in with the stems, since the stems turned out to be very irritating when eating the omelet.  
• Added an amazing fragrance to the dish though, so it worked from a flavor perspective

Dinner - Baked salmon, stir fried vegetables, sweet potato

The result: it may not look it, but the stir fried vegetables were my favorite part of the meal.  There's something about the mixture of sweet and spicy that just really hits the spot for me.  Other than what was said at the top, the salmon was really quite meh without sauce, not really worth commenting on.

General prep scheme - salmon:

• Pre-heat oven to 170 degrees Celcius
• Brought a pan up to temperature, drizzled in a light touch of avocado oil
• Put the salmon in skin size down and pressed the flesh into the pan to get more even temperature transfer on the skin
• Removed from pan, put into oven skin side up for 20 minutes
• Squeezed lemon juice onto salmon skin, garnished with skin of lemon from that wedge I juice

General prep scheme - vegetables:

• Brought a pan up to temperature, drizzled in olive oil
• Threw onions and garlic into the pan, let them sizzle in there for a bit until fragrant
• Threw in the peppers next, and for the shits of it added some red chili flakes too, and sizzled that for a bit
• Threw in the vegetables in approximately 1 minute intervals in this order: red peppers, carrots, celery, mushrooms, bak choy stems, bak choy leaves
• Salt, pepper, some paprika
• Tossed it around the pan for a bit till the bak choy leaves started to turn colour
• Added ~6oz of water, covered the pan with a lid, cooked for ~8 mins

General prep scheme - sweet potato:

• Threw into the steamer for 2 hours.  Nothing much else to it.

Other notes:

• The vegetables turned out a relatively unattractive color, suggesting they might be overcooked.  Next time, worth trying with a shorter cooking period with lid on.
• 1.1 pounds of sweet potato took much longer to steam than I would have expected.  I checked in at the 40 minute mark, and it was way far from done.  Even at the hour and a half mark, it wasn't quite there it i.e. I could not spear a chopstick through the centre easily.  2 hours seemed to have done the trick.

That worked out better than expected!  Let's see how day 2 goes.

Cheers,

Hanchen