This is my first time making shrimp fajitas and they turned out really well. I cooked the peppers and onions first with half of the spice blend and then John cooked the shrimp with the other half. Then we mixed them together and served it with corn tortillas that John had seared over the stove.
I got the recipe from healthyfitnessmeals.com. Here’s a link.
I have not been writing my blog this week due to not really cooking. It has been so hot, over 100F!, all week. We have been eating take-out and leftovers from lunches out all week. Last night we waited until after it was almost dark to grill the steak and potatoes. It is unfair to ask John to stand over a hot grill in the blazing sun. We still have three more days of extremely hot temperatures but I think we are just going to turn on the air conditioning and cook, electric bill be damned.
Anyway we had the flank steak on Friday and although it turned out a little less rare than we normally like it was tasty and went well with the grilled Russet potatoes and steamed broccoli.
This started out as a sheet pan recipe.
However, it is 99F outside and we are trying to keep the house cool so we changed it to a pan-fry cook and also decided to use raw kale instead of cooked spinach.
I have eaten gnocchi two times before this and have been unimpressed. This third time I was also unimpressed. Give me potatoes or give me pasta. Don’t try to mush them together! This just seemed like a heavy, sauceless plate of food. I think John liked it though. He ate the leftovers for lunch. So maybe it’s just me.
This is a new recipe for us. We saw Sunny Anderson make something similar on The Kitchen and thought we would give it a try. Here is her recipe. https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sunny-anderson/sunnys-easy-rice-and-lamb-stuffed-peppers-16716844.amp
I par-cooked the peppers, drained the lamb fat, and added some tomato sauce to mine. I also used the yogurt as a garnish rather than a sauce.
My negatives are that it was a bit greasy and the lamb flavor was lost. I guess I like my regular ground beef, rice, and tomato sauce better.
As often happens I get tired of cooking at the end of the week. So I decide to push the gnocchi dish into next week. The gnocchi is shelf stable and onions, kale, and mushrooms will last a while longer.
So I use up the rest of the linguine in the package, pour out the remainder of the frozen meatballs, open a jar of Rao’s tomato and basil sauce, and voila! dinner. I do put a little of my own spin on the sauce with red pepper flakes, garlic powder, and oregano.
It turns out really yummy. Now I wonder if I will bother making my own spaghetti sauce or meatballs in the future!
When I was a teenager I remember my father grilling steaks on Saturday night. We each got a steak and we all looked forward to it. At our house we are not giving out one steak per person but John’s excellent grilling job means that we usually eat as much as is grilled.
Along with the steak I prepared sweet potatoes to be finished off on the grill, steamed asparagus, and a tomato salad with Boursin cheese balls.
Our plates were very colorful and appealing. The food was outstanding.
I did not write a post Monday because we called for pizza delivery due to the extreme temperatures. Unfortunately it was even hotter on Tuesday (100F!) Luckily I had planned a no-cook dinner.
The hummus was store-bought but I made the tabbouleh and skordalia. For the tabbouleh I use a recipe from Martha Shulman at The NY Times https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1012585-tabbouleh?smid=ck-recipe-iOS-share. It puts the emphasis on the parsley rather than the bulgur wheat although I do up the bulgur wheat to 1/2 cup instead of 1/4 cup. My family thinks it is the best!
I also made skordalia which is a garlicky, lemony potato dish. I used some microwave potatoes for the mashed potato part and added olive oil, 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice, and a bunch of garlic. It didn’t turn out exactly like the skordalia that I have had at Mediterranean restaurants but the family ate it for dinner and finished it up for lunch today.
We have a couple of reasonable weather days before the hot comes back on Friday. (Will it ever end!!?) I am running out of no-cook ideas!
John did his expert sauté of the shrimp and I steamed some broccoli and chopped up a bit of oregano from the garden to give the rice a little pizazz. As we get toward the end of the cooking week the dinners get simpler to make but still taste great.
Cavatappi is hollow, corkscrew shaped pasta. I know I have said that I prefer strands with red spaghetti sauce but John likes shapes so we compromised. It turned out to be really delicious! I took a cup of leftover Rao’s tomato and basil sauce and added V-8, tomato paste, oregano, chile flakes, and oregano. Doing this expanded the amount of sauce I had. The meatballs were simply Rosina’s frozen home style meatballs I added them, still frozen, to the sauce as I was cooking it.
Omnivore 