Shorter than usual

We did some cooking experimentation this week. I combined a recipe for roasted bell peppers from Publix and one for chicken with tomatillo sauce from cooking light, then added some southwestern corn to make the meal. The peppers were super simple and good, but was definitely overshadowed by how frickin' amazing the tomatillo sauce was. It was my first time using them and I was definitely super pleased with the results.

If you clicked on the roasted pepper link, you were taken to a new site that my sister found that MC and I are trying out for recipe organization. It is called WeGottaEat. It has a pretty nice interface, though automatic import and automatic recipe division would be handy features. We are going to try it for a little while and see how it goes.

Well, off to run a couple errands before seeing a movie and working on this To Do list that seems ever growing! I can't believe school starts back up tomorrow! All the babies are back in town. ;-)

Salmon Burgers!

It has been a while since I had a cooking post. They will start back up, though, as Top Chef starts back up soon so MC and I are reinstating our cooking for Top Chef night. I mean, it is HARD to watch them make all that yummy food without eating something yummy ourselves! :-) As you can see from the title, this exploration was salmon burgers! As one should begin all good cooking endeavors, we laid out all the ingredients and the recipe before starting.
We didn't think about asking the Publix people if they could remove the skin, so MC decided to brave it and fix up my salmon for me.After I prepared the wasabi sauce, I just had to mix the remaining ingredients and form them into patties.MC had cut up the salmon for me and the recipe asked for 1/4 inch cubes. As you can imagine, trying to pack cubes of fish into a patty is a bit tricky. It said they wouldn't hold together very well until we started cooking them. They were right, but it was still pretty tricky to keep them together. Two turned into "loose" patties, but I think cook times that were a little low were definitely a contributing factor.We paired it with some some steamed asparagus, and I must say it turned out to be a pretty scrumptious meal!This was also a cool night for cooking because we got to try out the kitchen computer that I set up for MC for the first time! I just got a new monitor for my computer not that long ago, so I had a 19" LCD available and I had an old computer that I had fairly recently gotten from home. The only thing I had to get was a keyboard/mouse (actually found a completely washable/waterproof one online that was an open box item and on sale) and a new wireless adapter (old one wasn't WPA-capable) and we were set! Since the first recipe we tried was actually from a book, I scanned it first and put it on the computer. I haven't figured out the best way to keep things organized as of yet. Right now we'll just have bookmarks for online sites and images for the scanned recipes, but I would like to set it up where it would be easy to include notes about how it was, things we need to do differently next time, etc. I'm thinking there's probably an open source recipe program that I could find. Any suggestions? Either way, it should be handy!

Things just keep a kickin'!

Man, we have been staying crazy busy as of late. I am going to be SOOO glad when this class is over and I get to relax a little bit and don't have constant deadlines to keep up with. Anyhoo...

So friday in my house growing up was always pizza night. It still is whenever I'm home, but I haven't really kept the trend going when I've been off at school. Sometimes Friday is rolling around and I just get the urge for pizza, though, so I give in. Sometimes I order, sometimes we make our own. The former is easiest, but we've gotten some pretty darn good pizzas with the latter! I got a yummy sourdough crust and started concocting a veggie pizza friday night.

All veggied up!	Add some cheese
Bake and serve!	MC dressed up plate up a bit more

If I remember correctly, the pizza had yellow squash, broccoli, spinach, green pepper, yellow pepper, red pepper, and onion. Especially on a sourdough crust it was super duper ultra yummy!! MC added some sides to hers, but I stuck with beer as an accompaniment ;-)

Food post

Food! I mentioned in my last post that I found pics of our last few culinary expeditions so let's see how much about them I can remember. :-)

Definitely not going to try to remember the date of these meals, but I think I have the order intact this time ;-)


The first is a Jerk Turkey Burger. Jerk seasoning plus some red pepper, salt, black pepper and a couple of other things were mixed into the ground turkey. Then the salsa to top was made with mango, papaya, red onion, green peppers, (maybe) lime juice, and a leafy veggie that I can't remember right now. It was definitely super scrumptious, though I couldn't find jerk seasoning and used jerk marinade. It wasn't nearly as strong so you didn't get much jerk flavor, but next time I'll be prepared!


The next meal I decided to show a before and after of the prep (I think we were so hungry we forgot to take pics post cooking!). I don't remember the spices, but it was tilapia **EDIT** Doh!, no it wasn't it was Red Snapper! **END EDIT** with I think mango, cucumber, and cherry tomatoes. Loads of veggies piled on there as you can see. The cooking time was noticeably longer than the recipe called for, but after a second baking it turned out great.

MC's plate

My plate

This meal MC and I kinda prepared together, but a little differently than normal. Usually one person is main cook and the other helps with little tasks, but for this one I did the fish and brussel sprouts, and MC did the sweet potato/pineapple and the rice. She had only had catfish once so she was a little weary. So I used the same blackened catfish recipe and substituted tilapia for her. The sweet potato/pineapple concoction was ridiculously awesome. Two of my favorites foods all mixed together! I ate a ton of it and it was awesome. The brussel sprouts were the easy frozen kind, but still yummy. Fun fact: MC had never had them before! Always cool to try something new. Rice cooking has been an ongoing project for MC, and while they almost always turn out different, they have all been very yummy. Afterwards, we made dessert by layering bananas and strawberries in banana pudding. Since I LOVE bananas, I thoroughly enjoyed this, even if there was something kinda funky going on with the strawberries.

Hopefully I'll be better at remembering meals we've documented in the future. :-) And for some of our more complicated meals, I want to get some more prep shots to really document the whole process. I'm sure our culinary adventures will continue to amuse us!

Actually a fairly short post!

Wednesday we decided to cook dinner so we hit the weight watchers site to look for recipes. I found one for chicken fajitas that sounded scrumptious, but we were trying to save money and use as much as possible from what we had. I had purchased some pre-cubed firm tofu so we decided to substitute that for the chicken. After marinating a little it soaked up all sorts of yummy flavors and turned out pretty darn good!

I am going to have to start posting more often

Pretty normal week as far as school goes. I wanted to cook for MC and me on wednesday so we looked through her healthy recipes and found a curry that sounded scrumptious.

It was supposed to be a chicken curry, but I wasn't paying attention when I bought the chicken and bought thighs and there wasn't that much chicken left after I de-fatted it. Luckily I had some tofu in the fridge so I added that to the mix, which was perfect for a recipe like this since tofu absorbs all the strong flavors in the mix. MC wasn't as keen on the whole apartment smelling like curry, but I think it was worth it. It was super yummy AND healthy!

Top Chef Night... with guests!

So, as has been the case, we cooked for Top Chef night. Usually it has been MC's night (and I'm still trying to get her to start a blog to at least log her cooking too) but she had a lot going on so I volunteered to take care of it. This was a little different too because we had guests!! Ian and Caitie are avid Top Chef watchers as well, so we invited them over to join in dinner and watch the show. It was a lot of fun!

I tried a recipe from the Biggest Loser cookbook called Southwestern Pileup or something. Usually I am very rigid about following every direction and measurement, but I just sorta winged it through most of this one. It was pretty simple so it wasn't hard. It called for a pita, but I liked the look of the flatbread better. I seasoned some chicken with mexican spices and garlic and grilled it, then toasted the pita a bit in the oven. I spread a layer of roasted red pepper hummus, then added the chicken, red peppers, cilantro, tomato, black beans, and cheese. Bake for like 7 minutes and voila! It was pretty darn scrumptious, especially for being so simple. I also had some guacamole and sour cream for people to add to taste and paired it with some chips and salsa.

At the time I actually forgot to take pictures, but luckily the flatbread pack had 5 in it, so there was one left over for me to recreate the meal for my lunch today. I had to get a snapshot somehow! :-) I'll probably be a little more adventurous when friend's lives aren't on the line ;-) and will have some more complicated recipes in the future. For now, this'll do though!!

Quick Valentine's Blurb

MC and I decided to go pretty low-key for valentines. It WAS our first valentine's, but cash is kinda tight so we thought we'd just keep it simple. We had a wonderful day of just hanging out and enjoying each others company. We were going to start the day off with a 5k, but it got canceled due to rain (weenies!). So we came back to the apartment complex and did a short jog on the treadmill. After the jog I fixed us up some breakfast and made MC a special plate. Notice the hearts on the toast on the left as well! She saw this recipe and it looked absolutely perfect for a little valentines meal. :-)

Top Chef Wednesday!

Usually this would be MC's day to cook and I would get tomorrow, but with Valentine's day being this weekend we modified our schedule a little bit. Also, MC had a little dinner shindig to attend in the evening and we wanted to get a run in before Top Chef/dinner so it made sense for me to make something quick and easy. I decided I would make some soft tacos since it would be easy for MC to just grab one or two since she didn't need a whole meal.

It wasn't anything fancy, but the twist was that instead of ground beef, I tried a tofu crumble meant to resemble it. I cut up green and red peppers, tomatoes, and onions and tossed it all in a skillet for a while. I heated up some black beans and chopped up some spinach and wrapped each up in a wheat tortilla. It was very scrumptious! I have been intrigued by meat alternatives, but haven't really tried that many. It was healthier (the 10 oz package had like 220 calories and very little fat) and it had a different flavor, but a good one. A simple, but successful, meal indeed! It was a great recovery meal too since MC and I got a little lost on our run and what was supposed to be like a light 1.5 miles, turned into about 2.9 miles. Fun!!

Taking after my sis

So MC and I have decided that we are both going to work on developing our culinary skills. Since we watch Top Chef every wednesday, we thought that would be a good cooking night since that show always makes us super hungry anyways. I don't know if I will keep track of MC's cooking or just log what I am doing, but we shall see how it develops. Since we were having a cold spell, we thought that during our dinner and show on wednesday would be a good time to christen our fireplace!

We just made a simple little fire, but it was fun doing it for the first time in our new place and the spinach stuffed chicken MC made was super scrumptious!! And this picture is a bit of a prelude to the apartment post I swear I will make sometime soon. We hope to clean stuff up this weekend and take some good pictures so I can show everyone our new snazzy living quarters.

So thursday it was my turn to do some cooking. We have several cookbooks that we have been perusing a lot lately and two of them I have been looking at especially. The Biggest Loser and Quick & Healthy. Both are really nice because they not only have recipes that are pretty good for you, but they have the nutritional information, which makes keeping the fitday journal up-to-date through our culinary exploration much easier. I decided to cook pecan-crusted chicken from the Biggest Loser book and I paired it with german red cabbage with apples from the Quick & Healthy book.

The chicken was very good and flavorful, though the recommended serving size was a little small (1/4 pound of chicken). The cabbage was definitely on the experimental side. I think I could have used a larger skillet and I think I "simmered" at a little bit too high of a heat. In the book the apple slices looked intact, but in mine they started becoming more like applesauce than apple slices. Overall, it was still pretty good! VERY flavorful, almost too much so. I think having larger pieces of chicken so it would need less of the cabbage as a side would have been about perfect. All-in-all it was a pretty successful meal and pretty good on the health side as well!

Maybe having a set day with something specific to post (like back when I did weigh-in posts) will help me keep this thing a little more up-to-date as well. We shall see!