Underwhelmed

I didn't intend to make a Dorie recipe for lunch today, but I realized I had all the ingredients for Goat Cheese and Strawberry Tartine (pg 44) in the fridge, so I might as well. I hesitate to even call this a recipe. All you do is smear goat cheese on crusty bread, add strawberries, black pepper, and a few drops of balsamic vinegar (or, in my case, a great splash of balsamic vinegar, because it came out of the bottle much faster than expected). All those ingredients are good on their own, but I hoped that they'd come together to create a flavor more complex than their individual parts (like the first time I ate kiwi jam on salty slabs of Romano cheese in Venice. Cue the choir.) They didn't. It was a nice lunch, and a good way to use up leftover bits of food in your fridge, but I wouldn't go out of my way to buy the ingredients to make this.

Conclusion: Indifferent. Unmemorable, but a fine way to use up scraps.

For dinner I made Coconut Lemongrass Braised Pork (pg 274). Maybe it was the title, or maybe it was that the recipe required me to go through the expense of buying a number of whole-pod/seed spices that I already had in ground form, but I expected more flavor from this. It was a little better after I added a hit of cinnamon and squeezed a lemon on top, but it needed something else. Beats me, I couldn't fix it.

Conclusion: Enh. Indifferent. Wouldn't make it again. Didn't dislike it, but it was really bland.