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.

Hubby's 29th Birthday Dinner

Hubby turned 29 on Saturday....I feel so bad for him.  I've managed to celebrate my 25th birthday three times so far, yet he keeps moving on up in age.

Deciding what to do for his birthday in means of gifting and celebratory dinner has been a constant battle ever since I've known him.  He never knows where he wants to go to eat and never can name anything he wants to get.

I can't imagine living in such a world.

I can rattle off ten different restaurants I've been wanting to try and create a four-page list of things I want at a moment's notice all while my birthday is still months away.   

Hubby is a special case, I suppose.  Even more so because this year after I had already prepared myself to have to make all his choices for him, he decided to be extremely decisive.  He told me affirmatively that he wanted to go clothes shopping for his birthday present from me.

Such words make a wife's heart jump for joy.

1. Because that meant I didn't need to stress over what gift to get him.

2. Because he wanted to go clothes shopping.

3. Because, brilliant genius that I am, I recognized that if he was going clothes shopping, that meant I was going clothes shopping.

The birthday boy donning his new facial hair, a look that made him fit in quite well with the Gordon's frozen fish guy.

But this post is not about the uncontrolled shopping that hubby and I both did.  It is about the food we ate in the midst of trying to hit every single store we wanted to go to within a five-hour time period.

Hubby made this experience rather interesting for me because he picked to go shopping at the Tanger Outlets in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.  His birthday fell on Saturday, a day I have commitments that keep me at home until 1:30 pm.  This meant we didn't reach Rehoboth until 4:00 in the afternoon.

My prior experience of outlet shopping dictates that it occurs in the early morning and lasts until late at night.  How was this trip going to turn out successful with out shopping starting at 4:00?

But again, this post is about the food we ate.  I'll just tell you that the shopping, in the end, turned out to be a success.  I know this to be true because I bought just about as much as hubby did.  I felt bad for a minute, then when I realized he didn't care, I was at complete inner peace.

While Hubby had been gracious enough to pick out the location where he wanted to go shopping, he was not as helpful in picking our place to dine.  After I narrowed the search for him, he chose Big Fish Grill.

I love places that don't take reservations, don't you?  Their website warned that they did not take reservations and that on Memorial Day weekend they suggested getting there early.  Considering we had only reached Rehoboth at 4:00 pm, we planned to shop until at least 5:30.

5:30 quickly turned into 6:00, then 6:15, and we ended up at the restaurant around 6:30.  The parking lot was packed and I began having a mini panic attack that we would find ourselves waiting all night to eat dinner rather than finishing up our shopping.

We were quoted 45 minutes to an hour wait, which all things considered, wasn't too bad.  Hubby came up with the brilliant idea that if the wait was long we would head back to the outlets (which were five minutes down the road) and keep shopping.  We figured there wasn't a chance that the packed restaurant would under quote the time, especially on Memorial Day weekend, so we headed back shopping.

While standing in the checkout line at Nike, Hubby received a text from the restaurant telling us that our table was ready.  (Can I just take this moment to say that I'm loving that restaurants are starting to use texting instead of those buzzy things to let you know your table is ready?  It's brilliant.  Simply brilliant).

I shouted curses at the restaurant for being so time efficient, rushed to pay for a pair of sneakers for Hubby, then we flew into our car to zoom down the road hoping to still be able to claim our table.

Fortunately, the restaurant didn't cling too tightly to their printed two minute warning for coming in when notified that your table is ready.

This made me wonder if they also didn't cling as tightly to the "no reservations" warning.

This is something I will not think about at this moment.

What seemed when we first entered to be a tiny fish restaurant turned out to be a very large one as we were escorted to the left side which held even more seating.  The restaurant was decked ceiling to ceiling and wall to wall with fish which I needed Hubby to explain to me that they were not real fish because real fish would not be so flawless.

I had assumed that, I just wanted to be sure.

Hubby ordered the Maryland Crab soup because he thought for a second we were in Maryland.

I'm not sure what that detail has to do with anything, I just thought I'd share.

He wasn't too impressed.  Then we had and appetizer of hand breaded tilapia fingers.  Hubby found them to be much better as he defined the soup as tasting as it "could have come from the can" but the tilapia fingers he said clearly had a breading that was created in house.

Although the tilapia was good, at this point I was a little worried.  Did I pick a stinker?  How could I have done that?  And on his birthday?

Then our entrees came and the angels in heaven danced for joy.

Yes, it was that good.

When it comes to picking my meal, I do not tend to be daring, at all.  I want to be daring, but I will typically go with a safe choice because I don't want to be disappointed with my meal.  It will ruin my entire night.  It's really that important.

Yet tonight I left my fate up to the waitress.  Something I also do not tend to do.  I knew I wanted scallops, so I gave her the option of their hand breaded fried scallops (an item that had a little blue fish symbol indicating that it was a popular item there) and a special of the day: scallops, shrimp, and lobster with asparagus in a tomato cream sauce.

She chose the latter.

While I feared what was to come, the instant I sunk my teeth into the soft scallops I knew she had made a good choice.  I've always said that scallops are the filet minon of the sea.  These were the type of scallops that made me make such a claim.  I'm not usually a shrimp gal, and I typically go for crab over lobster but even those aspects of this dish were superb.  The cream sauce blended all the flavors together beautifully and made me want to give our waitress an I-love-you-so-much hug.  Yet I refrained.

Now, Hubby's meal.

I have to say, I was jealous.  Hubby's meal was my very first choice, yet I avoided it because I order a similar meal in Cape May at Oyster Bay.  Their meal is filet minon topped with jumbo lump crab and it makes me reconsider my thoughts about not really wanting to ever live at the shore.

Don't judge a book by it's cover.  I know this is not the classiest picture, and I deeply apologize.  I had already dug into my meal when I realized, duh, I needed to take some pictures.  Neither of our dishes were really picturesque at that point, yet Hubby had done less damage to his.

Let's start with the cream colored peaks to the right of the broccoli.  Hubby gave me a bite of this and in the first instant I seriously thought he had just given me a scoop of the lobster sauce that is adorning most of the plate.  As I let it sink in, I realized the creaminess I was tasting was the most delicious mashed potatoes I have ever eaten in my entire life.  They were beyond creamy, with a slightly peppery flavor.  In that moment I was ready to send my plate back and ask for just a bowl of the mashers.  Then I looked back at my scallops and decided I was really okay.

Hubby's meal doesn't end there.  His filet minon was topped with lobster which was absolutely divine, but the true winner was the steak itself.  It was so moist I'm pretty sure a butter knife would have sliced through.

The food being outstanding would have been enough, but the other point I must mention is the price.  We ended up paying $76 (not including tip) for our entire meal.  All things considered (soup, appetizer, seafood pasta, steak and seafood entree, and drinks) that price is fantastic.

After dinner, we still had an hour left to finish up our shopping.  We then drove around searching for ice cream and wound up at Gelato Gal.  Despite the confusing smell of smoked salmon (which we learned was another one of their delicacies) and the older hipsters who were in front of us in line, we left delighted by their award winning Chocolate Zen flavor of gelato.

Somehow that wasn't enough.  I had been mesmorized by the Candy Kitchen as we passed it coming in.  We simply had to stop in on our way home.

We chose our chocoalte sparingly.  M&M bark, a chocolate covered oreo, milk chocolate champagne truffles, and tirimisu truffles filled our bag and were quickly emptied from our bag as we drove home.