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...

30-23 Glamorous salmon and its stir-fry

Ingredients.

Squeezing the honey.

Honey successfully squeezed.

Table eye view of the honey going into the bowl, to start the marinade.

Soy sauce goes into the pool next!

Then the juice of one lemon.

And then sesame oil.

Finally red chili flakes.

WHISK!

Salmon marinating (kind of)

Veggies!

I stirred in a little of the sesame oil and threw in the veggies.

"To the pan with you!!"

Salmon and sauce/marinade

VEGGIES! AGAIN! COOKING THIS TIME!

Final product.

As you may have noticed, I did not have a Tuesday post this week. I was very busy this week. My little sister graduated high school!!! They held the ceremony on Wednesday night, a fact that I feel is very weird. Also it is disruptive of my weekly routine. I got over it though, I mean, how often does your sister graduate high school? Answer: Hopefully once. To state the obvious, the ceremony being held on a Wednesday night meant that I could not cook dinner that night. So, I cooked dinner on Thursday night.

I made "Glamor Salmon", from the "I ♥ Trader Joe's®" cookbook. I did this for two reasons: 1) to go back to a cookbook that has served up some really great recipes, and 2) to redeem salmon in my eyes. It worked. I did do a little bit of improv though, the book insisted that I use the broiler to cook the fish, on a 90+ day, that was not going to happen. It also wanted me to to marinate the fish for about 20 minutes. Listen book, you may be awesome and all, but I just don't have that kind of time! Instead of marinating and broiling, I put both in a skillet with a lid (not SKILLET WOOT, that is a specific pan) and put them to simmer for about 10 minutes, flipping the fish half way through. It turned out great! The boy gave me a 10 for this meal, I personally thought that the rice was a little bland (I didn't add anything to the rice), and that a 9 would be my vote. The rice worked with the meal though, if I had gone crazy with it, I think the whole meal would have been over flavored. That would not have been good. As it stands, the prep and cooking for the entire meal only took about half an hour. There you go, a simple, yet delicious meal, that took less than an hour and could easily be prepared any might of the week.

Next week: I have no clue, I am concentrating on my little sister's graduation party on Saturday, and what I have to bring to it.