Food adventures: Pan-seared tilapia, part 1

I made this dish twice within a two-week period, but with slight alterations. I got the recipe for the tilapia from FoodNetwork.com - it was a Bobby Flay recipe for a simple pan-seared tilapia. The original recipe called for flour, but since I didn't have any the first go-around, I used bread crumbs, and actually think I liked that version better.

I tossed some potatoes with onion soup mix and olive oil which gave a great coating and great flavor to the potatoes. The roasted potatoes came out great and were a good compliment to the fish. I paired the potatoes with steamed broccoli (one of the only vegetables I can eat without having many issues) and the tilapia recipe had a small lemon juice sauce that I poured over the tilapia and broccoli.

It ended up being a really flavorful dish and the tilapia was lightly browned, flaky, and delicious. The lemon sauce wasn't too strong and was a great sauce for the broccoli as well.

And, here it is!



Part 2 will be posted soon.. same recipe, slight modifications. Happy eating!

Food adventures: Quick Fix

The hardest thing about cooking for one is figuring out to do with leftover ingredients. I made the following pasta dish with leftover ingredients from my pasta with roasted tomatoes.



I had an extra package of grape tomatoes so I tossed them with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted them in the convection oven. I took two packages of "Pasta Sides" and made those, and also cooked up some white onions and mushrooms as well, and a can of green beans. The pasta side (packaged pasta, and a very easy quick fix for me) was an Alfredo flavor, which complimented the rest of the vegetables quite nicely.

Above all else, I love making things from scratch, not using things like 'pasta sides' and canned green beans, but sometimes, in a time crunch, I'd rather be eating something like this than getting fast food or something that's even worse. I love to follow recipes and experiment with what I can eat, so throwing this together is more out of necessity.

Also, thanks for reading! I'm trying to start blogging at least twice a week, so thanks for keeping up with the blog!

Food adventures: Bacon chocolate chip cookies

Ah, these have been my favorite cooking adventure of the past few months. I did not come up with this recipe, sadly, but over the past year or two my love and obsession for bacon has grown pretty out of proportion, so why not make cookies? I got the original recipe idea from my friend Michael's sister, Laurain (check out her food blog here). Since the summer, I've made three batches. The first batch included candied bacon, shown here:

Candied bacon isn't actually too hard to make, just baking bacon with a lot of brown sugar, and baking it. The result is delicious, crispy, and sweet bacon. This I chopped into pieces and rolled into the cookies.

The first batch also included rendered bacon fat. I slow cooked chopped up pieces of bacon, then removed the bacon bits (to be put in the cookies, of course) and put the bacon fat in the freezer. It turned out like this:



It pretty much has the consistency of butter and it substituted about half of the butter that the recipe originally called for.

The pictures of the cookies below are the third batch, where I actually cheated a little bit. I took a package of frozen cookie dough, added bacon, and rolled out cookies from there. I'm a big of "semi-homemade" things, and since I have limited time to cook, I figure any shortcuts I can take for now are okay. When I made this batch, I picked 4-5 bacon bits to roll into each cookie, and then one big one on the top of each cookie so you could tell it was bacon. My two other batches had uneven amounts of bacon - some people complained they had too much bacon, and some not enough. Doing it this way proved useful since everyone had just the right amount of bacon to chocolate chips.

Here's cookies before they baked:



And here they are after!



From the three batches (more than 30 cookies each batch) I think I only had one or two of these cookies. They're too good not to share! I brought them to Johnson & Johnson to share with co-workers, my friend's graduation party, my parents, friends at the rock gym, ResLife training, made a whole batch just for the Philly dance community, and even sent them to Washington D.C., Boston, Nashville and Astoria, NY. They're simple, delicious, and satisfies my love for bacon and chocolate.

Food adventures: Planning ahead

I'm a college student on a budget. I am also a college student with multiple food allergies and the list of foods I cannot eat is slowly becoming longer than the foods that I can eat. Since I've been living in my house in June, I average about $150-200 a month on groceries. Most people are pretty impressed with this, and I do it through a variety of ways.

I am a born bargain shopper. My mom has always been one, and since I was a young adult I helped her find sales and cut coupons from the circulars on Sundays. When she stopped cutting coupons (I was probably in high school), I started cutting coupons for her so I could get food that I wanted because they were on sale. At my most recent shopping trip to Stop and Shop, every item in my cart, besides two boxes of store-brand cereal, a necessity, was on sale. I saved $30 in just one trip.

This isn't to say that I don't eat well. I eat the veggies that I can and am not stuck eating ramen and eggs; on the contrary, I am quite pleased with the amount of meals I can come up with with my limited diet. I actually find it pretty fun to see what kind of meals I can come up with for the least amount of money.

To organize my thoughts, I keep a recipe binder with any recipes that I've found. I find a number of recipes online, jot some down, and most recently found a recipe from the magazine Real Simple. I keep track of everything I've made, and on the front of the recipe binder, I have the following post-its:




I got the idea of meal planning from my parents - they've been doing it for over a year, or maybe even longer than that. Another great meal planner is my friend Tina, who does her meal planning electronically. I'm a little more old fashioned and since I already had these post-its, this is what I use. I fill in my schedule for the week, plan out when I can actually eat my meals throughout the week, and try to have at least two or three different entrees per week, and two or three different lunch options. Lately, I've even been planning how many servings each meal I cook will get, and that way I can keep track of how much food I actually need to cook.

Some say this is boring, but this is what works for me. The hardest thing about living on a tight budget is not letting any food go to waste. Making sure to portion meals correctly and having a detailed grocery list helps me keep track of all my food while still being able to enjoy it all.

Food adventures: salmon in a brown sugar bourbon glaze

Ah, seafood! I mentioned in a previous post that salmon is my favorite fish, and after my teriyaki salmon, I still had two fillets left in the freezer pack I bought. I found this recipe (can't recall where, but I think either allrecipes.com or the Food Network) and don't really cook stuff like this, so I decided to give it a try.

The recipe started out with melting butter with brown sugar, so it looked like this:



Then I added the salmon, let it cook, turned, and added the bourbon and let it cook some more:



I paired it with some rice (also one of my staple foods) and some green beans that I had in the freezer. It's not that I'm a HUGE fan of freezer food, but I can't seem to make it to the grocery store often enough to always get vegetables when they're fresh. With such a tight schedule it's difficult to grocery shop more than once a month right now. Once I get settled with school and my multiple jobs maybe I can work some more time in and get fresh vegetables because they're cheaper, but for now, freezer vegetables will have to do.

The end product looked like this:




I enjoyed it, though I will admit I didn't get too much of the bourbon glaze and it had more of a brown sugar taste. Maybe next time I'll add a little more bourbon to get more of the flavor. The brown sugar also burned a little easier than I thought it would, so next time I will certainly experiment so I can figure out how to not get that.

Since I just returned from a trip, I have some thoughts going on in my head about difficulties going out to eat with all my food allergies. It's becoming increasingly difficult, and although I may joke about it, it's become a thorn in my side and it's most of the reason that I don't go out to eat, but on trips, it's a necessity. Others' jokes and whatnot sometimes help, and sometimes they don't. But I'll save those thoughts for another post.

Happy eating!