eclaire (what's in a) name?

you may have noticed that posts have been a little further apart than usual around here lately, and i sincerely apologize. i’ve been spending most of my computer time obsessing over the new features in apple’s iLife ’09, and to be even more specific, i’ve been consumed with the faces feature in iPhoto. this new feature goes through your iPhoto library (mine dates back to ’01 with a few scanned pics from earlier years) and identifies the faces in all the photos using fancy face detection software. next, you provide a name to go with the faces of your friends and family members (i used my wedding photos for this because they contain just about everyone we know). after that, the program starts to get scary smart and suggests other photos that might contain these people as well. the program isn’t foolproof, though, and this led to me revisiting every single photo on my computer to correctly identify every single face.

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yep, it’s officially fall, dear readers. and with the seasonal change, i decided to attempt to cook my first soup from scratch to keep us warm on the crisp fall nights. soup is a dish that i have had made for me from scratch by my parents, but something i’ve never attempted to make from scratch on my own because the stuff from the can usually fulfills any soup desire i might have

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as a 40 hour per week working stiff, i absolutely love finding quick and easy recipes to make on week nights so mike and i can squeeze in a run or swim and still sit down to eat dinner at a reasonable time. these edamame rice bowls fit right into that category – the prep work involves a little chopping, some nuking of pre-made frozen rice, and the boiling of water for edamame beans – and voila, in 15 minutes or so, you’re enjoying a great one bowl dish. (while we’re on the topic of frozen pre-made rice, have you ever tried the stuff from trader joe’s? it takes only three minutes in the microwave before you have brown rice that tastes like it’s been cooked over a stove slowly for over an hour! you have to try it if you haven’t already – it’s a fantastic way to cut corners and save time on recipes.)

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after a fun and food filled weekend, mike and i decided to make a hearty, healthy, vegetable-laden dinner to start out our week and counterbalance the weekend’s excesses.

we made this recipe for the first time a couple weeks ago (it was in last month’s vegetarian times), and it was printed as a two part recipe – the first being a mango teriyaki sauce on grilled tofu and the second part brown rice. the mango sauce, which is salty and sweet and very bright tasting (unlike the bottled stuff), is the most amazing part of the recipe, and i think it would lend itself well as a topping on all sorts of other concoctions. we LOVED this sauce and its juxtaposition with the aromatic and nutty flavored rice so much that we decided we had to make the whole dish again, but this time add lots of vegetables and make it a stir fry instead of grilled tofu over rice.

so the recipe i’m giving you has three components – rice, sauce, and veggie/tofu stir fry. while typing out the recipe, i became a little worried that you, dear readers, might think that it’s a little daunting. but i assure you, we completed the whole meal in less then 30 minutes of hands on time (we started the brown rice in my trusty rice cooker before heading down the hill to new leaf), and while there are a lot of components, each is pretty simple.

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