Recipe #3: Penne Alla Betsy

Recipe: Penne Alla Betsy
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 45 minutes*
Ease: 4
Taste: 6
Leftover Value: 6
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

*The Food Network recipe says that it will take 1 hr 5 min, however I did not find it took that long.**
**Note: Some of the Food Network measurements differ from the original recipe in the book.

I am going to make a confession to you.

Before the year 2013, I had never cooked any kind of seafood.  Not even fish sticks.

It wasn't just an, "Oh, I've never made that before," type of thing either.

It was a, "Run away from it like the plague!" type thing.

If I wanted salmon, Hubby cooked it.  If I wanted scallops, Hubby cooked them.

And...that was the extent of the seafood we enjoyed here in our home.

I blame the fact that fish sticks were the only kind of seafood my mother ever served my brothers and me during our childhood.

I slowly tried to get myself into cooking seafood.  I started with salmon, and tended to dry the poor suckers out in attempt to make sure I was actually cooking them right.  Then I decided to just grab the bull by the horns, stop making excuses, and start making a better effort to incorporate a seafood meal every so often into my mix.

Thank goodness I did, or I would have had some difficulty with this one.

In all the time I've had my The Pioneer Woman Cooks book, I have avoided this recipe simply because it had shrimp in it.

What a fool I've been.

The recipe is fairly simple, so long as you can dice and don't mind cooking seafood.  

Check, and, finally, check.

I was surprised how quickly shrimp cooks.  It is far shorter than the time it takes to cook chicken.

Once the shrimp are cooked, they are set to the side while the sauce is created.  This is the only thing I hate, because it means I have to dirty another dish.  However, the shrimp are going to be chopped up into medium-sized pieces* so I suppose dirtying a dish was inevitable.

*I loved that the shrimp weren't just thrown back into the pan and were instead chopped up for this meal.

The onions and garlic are fried in oil, then this beautiful portrait is painted:

Oh heavy cream, how I love and hate you at the same time.

Once the tomato and cream mixture is stirred, the chunks of shrimp are tossed in.

Here was the first point in this challenge that I had to pull my pasta substitution.  I thought for certain that I had a few boxes of penne, but apparently, I was wrong.  Instead I used these cool cavatappi noodles that I can never resist buying.  I'm going to assume they didn't change the integrity of this meal one bit.

The sauce was rather thin, and Pioneer Woman didn't recommend this, but after tasting a little I decided to let it simmer for a few minutes to thicken the sauce.  Either way, it's delicious!

The only addition I might make in the future is to add a little more garlic and some Parmesan cheese.

Skinny BBQ Salmon

Recipe: BBQ Salmon

Source: Cook Yourself Thin Faster

Time: 20 minutes

Ease: 1

Taste: 7

Leftover Value: No leftovers!

Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

I don't ordinarily do the seafood cooking in our house.  The closest thing to seafood I ate growing up was fish sticks, so for starters, it is a foreign world to me.  In terms of cooking in general, it took a good year into our marriage for me to finally feel comfortable cooking chicken, something I ate frequently growing up, so you can imagine my fears of cooking seafood.

Those of you laid back, 'what's the problem?', type people, here is the problem.  Raw food.  Raw food smells strange, has a slimy texture, and constant warnings are made of what will happen if you should eat it.  When my hands have to touch and work with something of that nature, my mind goes a little wild.

But those are my problems, not yours.

Lucky for you.

As I've stated before, hubby lost quite a lot of weight.  I have been trailing behind him, and in my trailing I have been  looking for lighter recipes to use for dinner.  I found the "Cook Yourself Thin" and "Cook Yourself Thin Faster" books on a deep discount at Barnes and Noble and decided to buy them both.  This choice was mostly based on zucchini pasta that I saw in one of the books and was obsessively interested in.  It really was nothing based on the titles, because "Cook Yourself Thin Faster" confuses me just a little too much.  If I'm already cooking myself thin, I can't imagine how I could do that any faster.

Perhaps my thoughts are too limited.

The simplicity of the recipe is what gave me the guts to go ahead and try cooking salmon.  I know, it really shouldn't have been that big of an issue for me, but it was. 

All the ingredients, except for the salmon, are heated together in a small saucepan for five minutes.

I thought it made a very artistic picture.  We have the deep brown color of soy sauce and maple syrup in the background, swirled with the bright yellow of mustard, the island in the middle of the pot is non other than ketchup, which is sprinkled with the brown of cumin and the fiery red of chile powder.  A little garlic has made its way onto the island, while yet another clump has decided to try to cool waters of the mustard pool.

Sorry, that was the best way for me to incorporate that picture into this post.

After the mixture cooked, it was set aside to cool.  

The recipe said to either grill or cook the salmon in the oven.  Of course, hubby bought me a grill pan for my stove top after I made this, and I rebelliously didn't want to cook it the way the recipe said to in the oven, so I used my broiling pan instead.

It turned out pretty good.  The recipe says that the syrup "provides a rich sweetness" but it was just a little too rich for this pauper.  Next time I plan to use a little less syrup and just a pinch more of cumin. I served it with white rice (sorry, I still can't bring myself to make the healthy brown rice I have in my pantry) and kale.