Friday, March 16, 2012

Tuesday dinners!

In addition to Cupcake Sundays, I've been cooking dinner every Tuesday night. I don't really have a clever name for these nights, but a big thanks goes out to pinterest for giving me some great recipes :) You may be wondering why I only cook on Tuesdays, and it the reason is that I'm only home for dinner that night. I work nights and Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my days off. So Wednesdays I play trivia and I spend Tuesdays improving my culinary skills. So far so good!! I'm 3 weeks in to my dinner cooking adventures and its been a lot of fun so far. Check it out:



My first night cooking dinner I made Mexican Stuffed shells, and they were delicious! The recipe I used called for ground beef, but I don't eat red meat so I used ground chicken instead. I also mixed the scallions in with the chicken as well as scattering them on top. I had never made stuffed shells at all before, but it was so much easier then I thought! I'm totally making this again!

Week 2 I decided to make my own Chinese food. I love orange chicken and lo mien, and when I found recipes to make my own I jumped at the chance. It was much more time consuming then I ever thought it would be, but so worth it. I made an orange marinade for the chicken and let it sit for about 45 minutes while I made the sauce to pour over the cooked chicken and the ginger and garlic sauce for the lo mien. The real challenge in finding the right recipe for orange chicken for me, was finding one that didn't have me deep frying chicken. I'm trying to eat healthier and this recipe had me coating the chicken in a bit of corn starch before cooking it on a skillet with a thin coating of vegetable oil. Not to brag, but this chicken was amazing, we could not get enough. Using Soba noodles for the first time was also interesting, even without the sauce I made for it, they were delicious. I can't wait for my sisters to come home in a few weeks to have another Chinese food night, I'm going to add a scallion pancake to the next dinner but take a look at week 2's success:



Yes the noodles look a bit worm like, but trust me, this was an amazing dinner!!

Choosing the right recipe for dinner is becoming just as hard as picking my cupcake recipes. This week while searching, I kept thinking about how much I love pesto. I love it a lot. If I'm at a restaurant and I see a something that has pesto in it, I'm ordering it probably 9 times out of 10. I found a recipe that showed me how to make my own spinach pesto and I was very excited. I toasted walnuts, chopped spinach, minced garlic and blended it all together with some olive oil. As a big pesto fan, I will admit that it was not my favorite pesto, I felt like I could taste the walnuts too much. But my parents have never really tried pesto and they loved it, so again a success!! We couldn't really have just linguine with pesto for dinner so I made some turkey meatballs to go along with it. I'm really into using fresh ingredients so I got to chopping away! I sauteed onions and garlic together, mixed that into the ground turkey with fresh bread crumbs, spinach and feta cheese and baked them for about 20 minutes and voila! Another yummy dinner:




I think next week I'm going to try something with fish. I LOVE seafood, but I've never cooked fish before so it will be quite the adventure. Time to explore pinterest so see what is next!

Happy Cooking!