27-26 before vacation dinner!

Ingredients

Pre-seasoned Garlic Chili Tilapia

Introduction: This is my herb pot that is living in my kitchen, I hope that it will make more appearances in this blog in the future.

Choppin' the basil

Well... slicein' the basil really.

Fish is cooked!

Corn? Basil? This is looking familiar..

Cooking up the frozen veggies! Look at the steamy mist... ooooo!

Rice and butter.

And corn?

AND Basil?!

cookin' the veggies more

Mix, and they are delicious!

Finished meal!

All right. I am super late with this update, so I am sorry about that. I have been busy this week because.... wait for it..... wait for it.... WE ARE GOING ON VACATION!!! I am so excited about this, that all week I have been sitting at my desk at work, trying not to explode. Seriously. Okay well, what does all that mean in regards to this weeks dinner? I will tell you what it means! It means I copped out and bought pre-made things, because I was just too busy preparing for the trip. Okay, so maybe not a total cop out. The boy and I have been seeing the pre-seasoned fish at TJ's for weeks now, thinking that they would make a good Wednesday Night Dinner®. We were right. It made a very yummy and quick dinner. I paired it with things that I have already used in earlier meals. Things that I knew the boy had really liked, such as the corn and basil rice, and the "Beans so green". This proved a good thing for me because the boy gave me a 10 this week. Though in all honesty I give myself an 8. This was not super challenging and I had already made two of the components for other meals... But hey, he is giving me a 10 and I will happily except it. I did cook the fish differently than they suggested. They recommended that you should use the broiler. F that. I am not cleaning the broiler the week before I leave on vacation. Not happening. So, as you can see from the pictures, I just put a cooling rack on a cookie sheet and put the fish one top. Easy pea-zee, lemon squeezy. Cookie sheets and baking racks are way easier to clean than broilers.  Okay well I am going to be off next week, but I will still be cooking. Don't worry, I will inundate you with boring vacation pictures in a couple of weeks. Promise! Have a fun and completely unsafe 4th! The favorite holiday of pyromaniacs! (:

Ingredients

ORZO!

Sad butter is sad.

Garlic.

This is what sad butter and garlic look like when mixed.

And this is what they look like when you add Haricots Verts

(Fancy french green beans)

Mirepoix added.

Draining the Orzo of all information water.

Langoustine tails.

Look at them simmer... MwAHHAHAHAHA!

Orzo added to the sad butter, garlic, mirepoix, and green bean mix.

GOAT CHEESE!



Melted Goat Cheese!!!



Add The Langoustine

Finished Meal!!!

Oh man. So. Langoustine. It is real good.  I know it sounds fancy, but it really isn’t.  It is like some weird hybrid of shrimp, crawfish, and lobster. It is meatier than shrimp, not as sweet as lobster, and kind of looks like a crawfish. The boy had never had it before, so I figured that I would broaden his horizons with this one. That, and the whole meal was a FBTSOMP meal (fly by the seat of my pants). I did not want to do another “I ♥ Trader Joe’s®” recipe. Though they are delicious, I had been relying on that book a bit too much for my liking lately. So when we went grocery shopping last weekend, I just pulled things off the shelves that looked good, and that I thought would go well together. I was right. This meal got me a 10 and made my kitchen an awful mess. A mess that I have yet to really clean up from. Say, is there anyone out there that would like to donate any of the following:

• A dishwashing machine
• A person who likes to wash dishes
• A new set of pans every week, so that I can just throw the dirty ones away
• A nice apartment in Belmont or Waltham that has a dishwashing machine

Anyone? Anyone at all? The boy finds it amusing that, for the amount of love I have for cooking, I have the equal amount of animosity for doing dishes. Least. Favorite. Chore. EVER! I can understand now, why, when growing up with my single mom, we rarely used anything but paper plates and cups and such. We used real silverware, but everything else was easily tossed in the trash. My mom, the genius. *sigh* Okay, so if anyone has anything off that list for me, just leave a mention in the comments!

29-24 Farm fresh quiche... and bacon.

Rolling out...

The mysterious pie crust dough ghost of the pie dish.
Okay that one was a stretch... (get it? Stretch...)

Well, gosh darn it, if that doesn't look like a nom worthy pie crust!

Ingredients.

They know what they did. They also know that they will be beaten for it.

Just have to add the milk first.

Okay, and salt&pepper.

Beating time.

Avec le fromage ( ← fancy)

No, this is not an octopus, it is an onion.



SEE....



Assemblage is about to take place.

Spinach. Check!

Even more spinach? Check!

Egg and cheese? CHECK!

Octopus parts Onion?? Check!!

So pretty.

Just look at it, it is just so.....

BACON?!!

OMG BACON!

Also... Fancy bread. It had potato in it.

Finished and cooling down.

His finished meal.

And mine.

Just a few tings off the top:

1. OMG
2. WTF
3. BBQ
4. I MADE QUICHE
5. AND BACON
6. I DID NOT MAKE THE BREAD

All right, first off OMG. The boy and I live about a mile away from a stretch of road that is littered is shopping plazas. It is like a shopping plaza truck drove that road and didn't know that the back was open, so all the plazas fell out and have now taken root. In the plethora of shopping-ness there is, of course, a Target. Now this Target has been there for as long as I have lived where I live (5-ish years), and for some reason, in the last couple of weeks they have been sending us "Welcome to the neighborhood!" coupons. These coupons are for a free dozen eggs. Long story short: I had two dozen eggs in my fridge this week.

Secondly, WTF. What the f**k am I going to do with 24 eggs?! Certainly not BBQ. This is where my darling comes in, with a great idea...Quiche! So that is what I did. I MADE QUICHE.

Before I got down to the nitty-gritty though, I needed stuff to put in the quiche. Therefore, I took full advantage of the local farmers markets that are finally open again. I picked up some fresh spinach, red onion, BACON (for the boy, clearly), a rosemary plant, and a loaf of fancy potato-garlic-onion-y bread. He was very happy about the bacon. I think most of you out there would be very happy about the bacon. I mean it is bacon, just because I don't eat it, doesn't mean I don't understand it. Anyway, the point is, I MADE BACON.

There was also bread. I DID NOT MAKE THE BREAD, but I picked it out, so there are point for me in there. This bread was fancy. It had a ton of fancy things on top and it was real nom. I did decide against toasting it when I put it on the plate. I don't really know why I decided against this course of action; in all reality it may have made the bread, that much more nom worthy. Not that it wasn't delicious, as a matter of fact, the whole meal was delicious. The boy gave me a 9 for this week. I think he was super impressed by the fact that I was really winging it this time. I had no recipe that I was following, none at all. Just me, wandering around the hot kitchen, trying to figure out if I want one more egg in the mixture (of course I did!).

Next Week: Nothing with eggs, I hope anyway, but I wouldn't put it past us. I only used up 6 eggs, that still leaves 18 in my fridge...