Saturday night eating!

When you're hungry, everything looks like it will taste good.  You know how some people say not to food shop on an empty stomach?  Well, you also shouldn't look up "grill recipes" while hungry either.  You'll end up with a word document with 7 different recipes in it like I did.

That being said, on our menu for the night was:
Grilled Tilapia and Mango Salsa
Grilled Salmon with a soy sauce marinade
Lemon Rice
Salad w/ Strawberries, Mandarin Oranges, Walnuts and a Raspberry Merlot Olive Oil Vinaigrette dressing (I made this one up, it was the best salad ever, heh)

Let's get started with the prep work!

All of these recipes were pretty easy to put together.  I began with the marinade for the salmon, since it had to sit for at least two hours.  Mom seasoned the salmon fillet first with salt, pepper and garlic powder then we put everything in a plastic bag and popped it into the fridge.

The marinating salmon:

Then I made the marinade for the tilapia fillets.  Again, this was pretty easy to do.  Just mix the ingredients, put everything into a ziploc bag and stick it in the fridge!  For the mango salsa I used one mango, 1/4 of a green bell pepper, a red bell pepper and a red onion each.  Actually, I ended up with extra minced veggies, so really, you don't need much when you're making it

The mango salsa:

We put each fillet into a tin foil pouches for grilling (about 15 minutes), which worked out pretty well.  Honestly, we didn't want to try and deal with cookiing the fish right on the grill.  I'm a little too lazy for that, and I didn't want to have to clean it up.  ;-D

Just before the pouches:

Salmon:

Tilapia:

Easy cleanup grillable fish pouches!

On the grill!

We got the rice cooking a few minutes before I put the fish on the grill.  I zested and juiced the lemon, which was actually kind of fun to do, and the only part of the recipe that we changed was the type of rice used.  I used the regular rice that we had in the house and it seems like it worked out just fine.

Rice ingredients:

Finally, the salad! It was super duper easy to make!  One can of mandarin oranges, a few strawberries that I cut into quarters and I topped it off with walnuts and Crasins.  The dressing I used was Bolthouse Farms Raspberry Merlot Olive Oil Vinagarette.  It definitely helped bring together this fruity sweet salad.

Ingredients:

Finished:

Food!!!

Boy, my feet were killing me after a few hours in the kitchen, but the end result was worth it!  The fish turned out great, the tilapia was our favorite.  That's definitely a recipe we'll be making again.  The rice turned out pretty good, it had a bit of a tart (probably from the ton of lemon and ginger I put in it) flavor to it.  I had trouble eating it alone, but with the tilapia it tasted awesome!  I really really liked the salad, and for me, that's saying something.  I don't usually eat salad, but putting the fruit and the raspberry dressing on it made it nice and sweet!  Huzzah for tasty food!!

~Mich