In Praise Of Marinades

I love to eat and enjoy cooking. If nothing more, it can make for delicious foreplay.

This will never evolve into a blog that foodies will flock to, but I thought it would be fun to start running some posts on cooking.

I've never had any sort of formal training to learn how to cook. I expect now that I'm sharing this I'll find terms I use are wrong and there are better techniques I can utilize to accomplish things. Selah.

So, let's get started...

I'm a big fan of marinades from Made In Napa Valley. One of my favorites is Shanghai Tangerine Sesame.

The ingredients in Shanghai Tangerine Sesame marinade include soy sauce, sugar, rice wine vinegar, tangerine juice, sesame oil and ginger.


One thing that I like to use the Made In Napa Valley marinades for is baked vegetables.

When I marinate vegetables what I typically do is put them in a freezer bag with what I think is enough marinade to give them a good coating, seal the bag and give them a shake. Then I let it sit for two or three hours.

For this bake I used red bell peppers, yellow squash, yams, carrots, broccoli and gold pearl onions


I put them in to bake for about 45 minutes and flip things over half way through.

When I put this batch in the oven I started smoking bong hits of BC Bud. Suffice to say, I had a world class case of the munchies by the time the vegetables came out of the oven.

I forgot to take a photograph of the finished product...which came out just as I hoped.


I also use Made In Napa Valley's Shanghai Tangerine Sesame marinade to make burgers. This time I managed to photograph the entire process.

Ground chuck is what I use for burgers and I like to let them marinate overnight.

They start like this...


Then look like this when they're ready to go in the skillet...


I don't know off hand how long I cooked the burgers to get them medium-well, but they came out great.



I didn't get a photograph of the final dish with wild rice on the side. After this I was more than ready to eat.