This is a recipe I came up with while in the hospital. I only had a few channels on TV so I spend hours watching those home shopping program selling kitchen appliances(over and over again same product everyday) and watching cook shows. By no means an original recipes but I went with ingredients I like.

Risotto with stuffed chicken

First make a tapenade/pesto you like, I made one of sun dried tomato, fresh basil, garlic and parmesan cheese with extra virgin oil for some moist. Mix all in a food mixer set aside.

Butterfly the chicken breast, cover with plastic wrap and pound the chicken until it’s thin. Spread the tapenade over the chicken, put mozzarella cheese on top and fold the chicken back, hold together with toothpicks. I also wrapped the chicken in Serrano ham but it didn’t add anything to the taste, next time I will use bacon or prosciutto.

Put some olive oil on the chicken and grill it on the grill pan. Due that the chicken is folded it won’t cook completely on the grill pan so I finished in the oven on 200 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. The mozzarella melts better in the oven also.

Make risotto with peas, I didn’t had peas so I used chopped sun dried tomatoes. It made the risotto a bit too salty, so this was a one time only. Next time I’ll do my best to get some peas.

This was a quite tasty meal I must say. I enjoyed it till the last bite. I only wish I had a macro lens for my Nikon D70 so I can take more detailed food photos. Most food photo I take with the Ricoh GR, but I prefer dSLR quality for detailed photos.

Since I’m back home from the hospital and currently not working while recovering I have spend a lot of hours redesigning and rethinking my weblog. I want to write more, add more content and just invest more in it. Mainly because it’s a good outlet for me and it pushes me to keep active on the web -design, -development area. And to keep improving my writing.

Due to switching of CMS more then once in short period the feed redirecting became completely messed up, I went from about 100 subscription to around 30. So one of the goals is too reach 100 again.

Design wise I have had a few complains about the white text being unreadable. So I added a high contrast theme, you can find it the right sidebar under CSS selector. Although I’m pretty sure if you have trouble reading this site your screen brightness is too bright. I have a glossy screen and when I just bought it I had trouble reading lots of websites, when I dimmed the brightness that problem went away. Considering that the brightness is not good for your eyes on the long term I suggest you to try a less bright settings see how that is. But otherwise you can still use the high contrast theme.

Further more I would like to know who visits my weblog. This is so I can have an idea what topics you like reading about here, or what you would like to read about. To figure that out I made a feedback form, I would appreciate it if you would fill it, takes about 2 minutes of your time, and you get a gift if you choose to.

Hopefully this will help my creative juices flowing so I can write at least 2 to 3 entries a week. I have seen many weblogs come and go or just sit there without updates and I don’t want my weblog to end up like that.

Shopping at the supermarket

Taken with: iPhone

Yesterday finally inspiration hit me and in four hours I photoshopped and coded a new design for this website. I was messing already a month ago with a new design but I always want too much and to complicated. Then I thought keep graphics to a minimum, keep it simple.

So I did what usually delivers my best design, I started from a photo. I used the sky color for the background, and other hues of blue for the text. Then I tried a contrasting color, I wanted green first but wasn’t real happy with it and then I decided why not yellow. You don’t see a lot of yellow on websites.

For the bold text I went with Courier New, because it is the same font the text of my tattoo is in. And Helvetica for the smaller text. Because Helvetica is cool. And white was just the logical color to go with.

Considering I was keeping graphics at a minimum I still wanted some nice effects, enter CSS3. Here is where CSS3.info came in handy. I know IE7 and lesser don’t support it but I don’t even care for IE6 in connection with my personal website, I leave that headache for work. And people who have IE7 are way more likely to upgrade to IE8.

For the Twitter status and Flickr preview I’m using Garrett Murray’s js_twitter_flickr. He also uses some CSS3 selectors like text-overflow: ellipsis;

Hopefully now with IE8 being released the likes of Dan Cederholm, Andy Budd and Eric Meyer will release books fully dedicated to CSS3. That’s is if they haven’t already, I have to check Amazon for the latest. Meanwhile I’m anciously waiting for A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web to be delivered.

But summing up, after a year and 4 months I have a fresh new design, in my favorite color blue. The WordPress template is clean and validates. Which I couldn’t say of the previous template.

Since I live in The Hague and in my own apartment I have grown more and more interested in cooking. I am now comfortable with having guest for dinner and cooking something nice for them. But I’m just scratching the surface of the possibilities.

Little by little I buy quality kitchen utensils and cookware, I have a good chef knife(ask my fingers), a Le Creuset iron pan, a double bottom stainless steel skillet and a wooden cutting board.

To be a foodie is not only to like food, but to be interested in it. Just as a good student will have a thirst for knowledge, a foodie wants to learn about food. A foodie will never answer the question “What are you eating” with “I don’t know.”

Also important food ingredients, I’m always looking for stuff you don’t find in the supermarket here. For provolone cheese I go to a little Italian shop(which recently closed). Recently I ordered smoked garlic and Tabasco Chipotle online, I had been looking for that particular Tabasco for months, they don’t even sell it in Aruba. So I was happy when I found a Dutch website that sells it. But the most difficult is finding export cheese like English cheddar, the American Monterey Jack, the Italian provolone, Bel Paese or Fontina. Those are cheese that can make your dish so much better. Imagine a sandwich with chicken in tomato sauce with melted provolone on top…heaven!

Since I’m back home from the hospital I have been cooking everyday, it helps me build up my condition by being busy doing something. And cooking always relaxes me and helps takes my mind of things. With my new diet(no raw food) I had to find a way to make a well done steak without drying out the meat. After online research I went with a rib-eye steak marinated for 30 minutes in fresh lemon juice. It came out very well an not too dry for a well done steak.

Today was a real challenge, I had 2 sea bass fillets with skin still on. I almost never cook any fish, but cod fish or just canned tuna. But I made a point of learning more fish dishes.

Sea bass with risotto

Season sea bass with salt and pepper. And cook it on the skin side till the skin is crunchy. Flip over and cook 2 more minutes. Depends how thick the fillet is.

For the capers sauce I went on taste, in a food mixer add capers, a small garlic clove, lemon juice, extra virgin oil and a teaspoon mustard. The taste was too strong for me thus I added Greek yogurt to soften the taste.

I made a risotto Risi e Bisi(minus the pancetta and parsley) style but instead of peas I used asparagus.

The result was good for a first try at sea bass!