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.

Avocado cucumber shrimp appetizers — *Man we really should have scooped off the brown parts of the guac before taking a picture.*

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.

Seafood cooking in the skillet

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.

Filed under: failing in my kitchen avocado shrimp looks better than it tastes only a little expired just kidding, it's way too expired note to self

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.