Dinner Success!!

Made dinner tonight. TOTAL SUCCESS!

Tilapia was on sale so I got 4 fillets. I then marinated it in Publix Honey Dijon Mustard Lite salad dressing for about 20 or so minutes. I sprayed a 9″x13″ pyrex with some cooking spray and sliced a couple lemons to line the bottom. Laid out the fish on top (with the leftover dressing) and squeeze some lemon juice on it. Baked in a 375*F oven for 25 minutes. Totally amazing, especially once you spoon some of the dressing/sauce back onto it.

As side dishes we made some sushi rice in our rice cooker and an Israeli salad. Just some diced grape tomatoes, cucumber, olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

We also opened my birthday wine! It was a bottle of wine we bought for my birthday but hadn’t had yet. It was Casa Rosa Rivata Rosso. So it’s a light red (almost rose but not quite) sparkling wine. Totally meant to be chilled and served with dessert. Oh well. Still good when not following the directions 😉

Time to enjoy some ice cream. Have a good night all! Good luck with your own cooking adventures. Hope they’re just as tasty.

My Birthday continued

So yesterday was my birthday and it was wonderful and adorable.

My boss brought in a cake and balloon for me, and everyone (including our customers) sang happy birthday to me. It was so cute. Thanks everyone!

Then my boyfriend came home and gave me a bunch of stuff for my birthday! He got me this crazy awesome glue gun, not the little crafting one I had been eyeing, but a powerful one that I can use wood glue on too! And he got me an cute origami book, tons of origami paper, and some really pretty alphabet stencils. Now I can do ALL THE CRAFTING!!! SO EXCITED!!!

Finally he made me the most wonderful dinner (complete with a chocolate ganache cake from Publix): Sesame chicken!

The recipe we use came from this blog called serious eats and it’s amazing.

Here’s the link to the full recipe

We’ve made a few small changes, to the recipe, substituting things like rum for vodka when we’re out, using dry sherry instead of Shaoxing wine, some fresh ingredients for dried (only because we just didn’t have them…I’m talking about you minced ginger).

The recipe calls for a lot of prep-work, so if you’re prepared for that, it’s totally worth it. We also just threw some rice in our rice cooker to complement it. We get short grained rice at a local Asian supermarket instead of long grain because it’s easier for us to cook and, personally, we like the taste better. Our rice cooker we bought on Amazon for like $25-$35 I believe. It can make white or brown rice, and has a removable trey above it to steam vegetables in. If you eat a lot of rice (or want to) but aren’t sure how to cook it: invest in a good rice cooker, and it’ll solve a lot of you’re problems (as long as you follow the directions).

Now armed and ready with new crafting tools and some amazing left overs, onto my next task: GILMORE GIRLS ON NETFLIX!

Hamburger Night

My boyfriend and I embarked on an epic HAMBURGER NIGHT! Including making homemade burgers, fries, and cookies.

So here we go!

Hamburger. My boyfriend made these in our skillet/frying pan (we’re not allowed grills and haven’t gotten a grill pan yet). We used either 80/20 or 85/15 ground beef, ground pepper, garlic, salt (or more likely garlic salt), and I think he added onion powder and sriracha sauce (which he puts on everything). And we used buns from the Publix bakery:

I was in charge of the fries and the cookies. I used really big white/yellow potatoes, which probably was a mistake, but they came out really nice anyways. I got to fry (using vegetable oil) them in our awesome new Ikea wok. I added freshly ground salt after using our Mickey salt grider/shaker that I bought my boyfriend in Disney as a housewarming gift (also have the pepper one too).

    

Now to be honest the cookies weren’t homemade. We bought the Publix Greenwise cookies that you break apart and put in the oven. I think we baked them for a little too long but otherwise they came out wonderfully. They weren’t overly sweet but still nice.

Hope you enjoyed and take this as an inspiration to do some home cooking of your own.