Black & White and Green & Red (and Yellow)

I know it's been awhile since my last post, but I'm back! So, the main reason I'm posting this dish is that it looks neat, it's all colorful and fun looking. This is a really easy dish to make, it's not overly complicated and you can impresse all your friends and trick them into thinking you can actually cook by making a fancy looking dish, when in reality it's just a breakfast dish with some fancy tweaks.

Yam and Quinoa Fritters with Walnut Cream Sauce

This recipe is for the fritters not I'll admit it everything on the side salad was store bought. It's just mixed greens, tomatoes, almonds, and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing.

Yam and Quinoa Fritters

• 2 medium Yams peeled and grated
• 1/2 red onion grated
• 1/4 cup grated gruyere cheese
• 1/3 cup cooked quinoa
• 2 teaspoons of diced garlic
• 2 eggs
• 2 table spoons flour
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
• salt and pepper to taste
• Olive oil (or any kind of oil vegetable, peanut, whale fat)

1. First I would start cooking the quinoa. If you don't know how to cook quinoa, I'd recommend checking out Pinterest, like 90% of the recipes on that site have quinoa in them.
2. Heat the oil in a large pan to medium high heat.
3. Peel the yams and grate them. Grate the onions. Place the grated vegetables on paper towels and squeeze the juice out. Once you've juiced the yams and onions place them in a large mixing bowl with the gruyere cheese, garlic, eggs, flour, and garlic salt. Mix together with your hands, yes your hands. Before you mix in the quinoa make sure it's cooled, because if you put hot quinoa into the mix you'll cook the eggs.
4. Make small patties of the mixture and place into the pan of oil. Brown each side of the fritters, usually about 5 minutes per side.

Walnut Cream Sauce

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 cup crushed walnuts
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1/4 cup grated gruyere cheese
• 2 tablespoons honey
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Melt the butter on medium heat. Toast the walnuts in the butter, just brown them a bit. Add the heavy cream, cheese, honey and seasoning.
2. Once the cheese has melted reduce the cream on low heat for 15 minutes.

Serve the cream sauce over the fritters and topped with basil or some other sort of garnish, I'll admit to not eating the basil, it just looks nice. In my opinion having a nice side salad with the fritters counteracts the oil the fritters were fried in. Enjoy!

The Menu

This post is only slightly food based, so I'm sorry if your evening plans included food porn from my blog. If your evening plans do include sexy food images, then I don't want to know what happens in the privacy of your own home.

Panko Beer Battered Asparagus

This is the first in my new line of recipes in which I make healthy foods into unhealthy dishes. Even though the asparagus is fried, it makes for a great summer lunch or appetizer. Now, I sort of just winged this recipe, so if you feel like there's something missing then I encourage you to add it.

French Onion Soup

It's been kind of cloudy and grey the past couple of days in Portland, even though it's terrible June weather it does make for great soup weather. French onion soup is filling and warm, so it's a nice contrast to the cold and wet weather outside.

I'm a terrible food blogger, because when I went to the store I forgot to buy a loaf of French bread. As a replacement I used the whole grain sourdough bread that was sitting in the bread box. The sourdough was a good replacement, I recommend using sourdough if you don't have any French bread.

This is a very simple dish with only a few ingredients. The hardest part about preparing this dish is cutting the onions, it's going to make you cry, so it's a good time to work through some emotions and think about that childhood pet that's now, "living at a farm upstate." If the onions make you cry too much don't worry, eating the finished soup is like a warm hug.