Breakfast Hash

January 26, 2019 9:41 AM

So I don't work at google, but my company has its fair share of free food opportunities. Once a month, there's leftover breakfast, and it's always the same thing: a hash of potatoes, eggs, bacon, cheese, and onions. It's delicious, and almost certainly bad for you, so it's probably a good thing I only have it once a month.

But I always think...I can totally make this myself.

But when I don't follow a recipe, my food ends up being questionable, so I was really excited when I saw a Cheesy Bacon And Egg Hash recipe from Cafe Delites.

As far as adjustments are concerned, if cooking on the stove, I absolutely recommend cooking the bacon first and then using the bacon fat to cook the potatoes. I think I'll bake it next time though. It was a little too crispy for my tastes.

Shrimp Tacos

January 25, 2019 6:34 PM

Yeah, I wasn't kidding with my last post.

I don't impulse buy very often when I'm at the grocery store, but when I do, it's almost always seafood. And seafood goes on sale at least once a month. So I guess I impulse buy a lot. I got a frozen bag of shrimp the other day, and I had a single tomato in my fridge that needed to be used, so I decided to make Super Simple Shrimp Tacos from Budget Bytes.

I think the recipe is pretty fantastic on its own, but I had to modify it to fit what I had in the kitchen.

• I only cut up one tomato...because that's all I had.
• I used "Asian Chopped Salad" mix instead of an iceberg salad mix. Because I don't know when iceberg lettuce is ever the ideal vegetable to use for anything.
• I cooked a whole 1.5 lbs of shrimp. There is more than enough marinade for it.
• And I turned the sour cream into Lime Crema. With cilantro! That's what really takes it over the top.

Lettuce Wraps

January 24, 2019 10:04 PM

Man, there are not enough hours in the day. I come home from work, run an errand, cook dinner, eat dinner, wash the dishes, shower, and then it's already 9pm! And I told myself I was going to prioritize sleep this year. When am I ever going to have time to actually write blog posts?!

I gotta catch up on posting about the things I've cooked. So here's some pork lettuce wraps I made a few weeks ago.

I actually bought lettuce to put in a hamburger, but I used maybe two leaves of it for that so naturally I decided to make lettuce wraps. I really like the Asian Chicken Lettuce Wrap recipe from skinnytaste, but I do make a few modifications.

• Replace ground chicken with ground pork.
• Replace shiitake mushrooms with whatever mushroom is cheapest.
• Use 2 whole scallions instead of 2 tablespoons of scallion. I don't even know how you're supposed to measure scallions in tablespoons.
• Don't use iceberg lettuce. It is really hard to eat a lettuce wrap with iceberg lettuce.

We used green leaf lettuce...which was also hard to wrap with. Why do people like wrapping things in lettuce anyway? Next time I'll just make a taco.

Seafood Blend: Part 2

January 20, 2019 2:38 PM

...is unfortunately not as successful as part 1.

Last Christmas my aunt made these shrimp avocado cucumber bites, and it was probably the most Californian thing I've ever seen. And I was convinced I needed to make these myself. I googled "shrimp guacamole cucumber" and grabbed the first recipe I saw: Avocado Cucumber Shrimp Appetizers from Natasha's Kitchen. Now it probably would have made sense to actually buy some shrimp for this, but I had half a bag of seafood blend that I needed to use up.

I also had guacamole that we had made earlier in the week using Skinnytaste's Best Guacamole Recipe. So really all I took from that other recipe is the Cajun shrimp part. It wasn't so bad, but next time we'll just use shrimp, and actually use freshly made guacamole. Or be lazy and buy it from the store.

We actually had leftover pieces of seafood, and my sister remarked that we could throw some pasta in it. I checked my cabinets and I found a box of that Banza chickpea pasta...that expired last year. Hey, it's a box of pasta! It should be fine!

Second note to self: Do not eat expired chickpea pasta. In fact do not even buy chickpea pasta at all. It is way more expensive than regular pasta and doesn't taste as good.

Seafood Blend: Part 1

January 20, 2019 9:37 AM

I just happened to be at Trader Joe's the other day, and I remembered a Budget Bytes recipe that I really wanted to try: Seafood Rice Skillet. Now this recipe calls for some sort of seafood mix, but Beth used the one in Trader Joes so I figured, why not.

Note to self: never buy Trader Joe's Seafood Blend again. It is tasteless.

I followed the recipe exactly, and the end result was a really beautiful dish. I think it needs some adjustments though:

• Double the seafood. There is a lot of rice in this, and not enough seafood.
• Cook the seafood first, and mix that in with the rice at the end. I always find cooking seafood with other things to be kind of tricky, but if I cook it by itself then I can get it to just the right amount of done-ness.
• Fewer peas. There were also too many peas for my liking, but let's be honest, the next time I use frozen peas in a dish, I'm not going to bother actually measuring them.

Oh, and I also replaced parsley with cilantro. Because parsley smells weird and cilantro makes everything better.