Day Sixty-eight--Summer Rolls and Sushi

Hello. Second post in a row. I'm taking advantage of the short window of opportunity with the computer. Thankfully, my laptop should be home tomorrow or Tuesday. Ok, on to last night's dinner. This one almost didn't happen. I almost got lazy and ordered subs from Wegmans, but we muscled through our exhaustion and pulled it off. I did half ass part of it. We bought sushi to go with our summer rolls.

Sushi and Summer rolls

Last week, on a whim, I picked up a copy of Everyday Foods. I used to have a subscription to this magazine and I might have to subscribe to it again. In this issue there was an article on how to make summer rolls. I have had rice paper wrappers in my cupboard for probably over a year so I decided to finally use them.

This was fairly easy to do, but it made quite the mess in my kitchen. In all honesty, Tim wrapped them all up. I sliced the shrimp and made the peanut sauce, but he had the messy part of wrapping them. Connor got into the action too. He mounded the rice vermicelli noodles up on a board and then topped the noodles with a squirt of fish sauce. Then he put two halves of a shrimp on top and then on top of the shrimp he put either a peppermint leaf or a basil leaf. Then Tim would soak the wrapper and grab a little mound from Connor and wrap it up. It was a little time consuming and like I said it was messy, but it was tasty. It was a nice light cool dinner after a hot day.

There you have it. Last night's dinner. Now I have to go wash my kitchen floor so it doesn't smell like fish sauce out there. I hope everyone has a great day!

Day Twenty-nine--Shrimp Stir Fry

Wahoo. This was a great meal tonight. I had a couple of bumps but I was able to ride the bumps and I landed a great meal on the table. Tonight's dinner:

Shrimp Stir Fry

This recipe was in one of Connor's new cookbooks. It was insanely easy to throw together. As you know, I was out of rice as of yesterday, but with some digging around in my pantry I found a bag of brown rice. Score. Then I had a problem. The recipe called for an onion. I had to scrounge through the refrigerator to get enough onion for last night's dinner. I remembered though that I had a couple of green onions left from earlier this week. I had to peel a couple of layers of green off, but then they were fine. I chopped them up and fried them up with a chopped red pepper. Then I tossed in some snow peas and some shrimp that had been marinating in garlic and tamari sauce. This meal came together in about 15 minutes. The brown rice was the thing that took the longest to cook.

Three out of four of us liked this meal. Aidan ate the rice and shrimp but said the peas were too crunchy. Connor was mad because there wasn't any left over. This will be a definite do over for us in the future. The only gross part of this meal was the peeling of the shrimp. Last time we had shrimp Tim peeled them for me. Tonight he was with Connor at karate so I had to do it. Gross. If I have shrimp in a menu again, I need to make sure it's a night that Tim will be here to peel them.

That is all for now. I'm going to have to start thinking about menus for next week pretty soon. Fun. Until tomorrow, Happy cooking!

Day One--Shrimp Linguini

This was our dinner last night. I am going to have to figure out posting. Some days I might post dinner right after we eat it, and then some days I might just post the next morning. Obviously I'm posting last nights dinner now.

This recipe came from an app that I have on my iTouch. It's Jamie Oliver 20 Minute Meals. I love this app and I've used it a LOT. It can flip between serving 2 or 4. It has step by step procedures and it has pictures with each step.

Shrimp Linguine

This did take only 2o minutes to do. I used my fresh pasta. It had garlic, basil, a green chili, cherry tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper. The cherry tomatoes were organic and were so sweet. The basil was off our one of our many basil plants. Tim and I loved it. Connor liked the pasta and the shrimp but does not like the texture of the tomatoes. He ended up mixing a little pesto in with the noodles. Aidan, my tough to please little guy, liked the noodles and ate a shrimp and some basil. He liked the noodles but was not fond of much else. Not surprising. I will say that he is much more adventurous with his "no thank you bites" these days. As for the cost of this meal, I'm not sure. I will probably start tracking cost next week when I'm more organized. I don't have my receipt from this weeks shopping. I know I spent roughly 4o dollars at the dairy for milk, eggs and ice cream. That cost includes my bottle deposit because I forgot to take my empty bottles back. I think Wegmans was 140 dollars. Not too bad considering it included fresh flowers. Next week I'll keep my receipts and track what each meal costs.

Organic food. There is a lot of angst when I buy organic. Obviously there is the cost issue. We all know that buying organic foods is more expensive. There are weeks when I buy exclusively organic and then I have shell shock when I check out. Then there are weeks that I pick and choose what I buy organic. There are some things like carrots and celery that I buy organic all the time because they are top offenders for use of pesticides. For now, I'm going to put what I use that is organic. If I can get to the point of using exclusively organic then I'll let you know and won't feel the need to say it. I have a lot of thoughts about buying organic that I will share through the year. I must pace myself now though. =)

Well, I suppose that was day 1 of 365. I wasn't sure when to start this but I might as well just start it now. I'm a classic procrastinator and my fear holds me back sometimes, but not this time. I'm hoping I'll be able to post day 2 tonight. If not, I'll post it tomorrow morning.