Sushi Dragon!!

Well, it was my birthday (yes it was in August, and yes I'm super delayed on actually posting posts, lol) and to celebrate my parents and some family friends and I went out for dinner to Asia Star Cafe in Tinton Falls, NJ.  Normally we stay a little closer to home, but I was in the mood for something different, so we went a little outside our normal realm.

It truly paid off!  I’m hard pressed to find sushi as good as my favorite place (Asia Sushi & Chinese Cuisine) in Hoboken and this place compared very well.  The service was great, our friend likes to give people a hard time and our waiter kept up perfectly.  He was just as snarky as our friend, it was hilarious!

Everyone ordered an appetizer for themselves, our friends ordered a spicy tuna roll, which was really good.  Sometimes the spicy tuna roll can be a little too spicy for me, but this one was perfect.  My Mom ordered a California Roll.  My Mom has never had real sushi before.  The most I’ve ever been able to get her to try are those rolls that they sell at Costco.  They’re basically fake sushi.  They’re ok, but there is too much rice on them and the taste is just kind of off.  The rice is too sweet too.

Anyway, I got my Mom to order a regular California Roll and she really liked it!  I was so happy!  She made a face and said, "Wow, this is a lot better than the Costco stuff... we can't buy that anymore."  Lol!

For dinner I ordered an East Roll which is shrimp, egg, avocado and cucumber, an Eel Avocado Roll, and an Asia Roll which is salmon, avocado and cucumber.  It was really good!  To top it all off, the plate came out nicely decorated.  There was a dragon drawn on it!!  I love dragons, so this was a really nice surprise and had me smiling throughout dinner.

I managed to get my Mom to try the East Roll, which she did end up enjoying.  I’m really happy that I was able to at least begin introducing my Mom to sushi!  Yay!

I really must not have enjoyed my dinner.  ;-)

~Mich

Fettuccine Land and Sea

Well, I suck so much at posting, that the posts I've written to get ahead went woefully unpublished.  That being said, here's another food post!

My cousin turned 21, so to celebrate we had dinner at Pisano's in Rutherford, NJ, the name of which I can't remember right now.  We like Italian food in my family and the food here is always delicious.

We started with a few appetizers; fried calamari, fried calamari in a ginger sauce, and Spiedini Ala Romana (fried mozzarella).  I doubt that these are the actual names of what we had, but it's descriptive enough for me!

The regular calamari was delicious, nice and salty and not too tough.  The calamari in the ginger sauce was also pretty good.  I'm a huge fan of regular, salty calamari, and this added a bit of sweet to it with the ginger sauce that it was tossed in.  Almost like a duck sauce actually, but way more tasty.  It was really good and a nice difference to the regular dish.

The Spiedini Ala Romana (fried mozzarella) is basically little triangles of mozzarella lightly battered and fried.  I would compare it to mozzarella sticks, but it's much tastier.  The batter isn't heavy or crunchy at all, and the cheese is melty, but is still able to maintain some of its shape after you cut it.  I could honestly just eat a few plates of that and be done with it, lol

I ended up ordering the "Fettuccine Mountain and Sea" for dinner.  It was fettuccine, with Wild and porcini mushrooms sautéed, with baby shrimps and spinach in a light cream sauce.  It was so good!  I'm not a huge fan of red sauces, so I do what I can to find good cream sauces when I'm out at Italian places, and this one was no exception!  Everything was delicious!  The mushrooms added a really awesome earthy flavor that was much more interesting than my usual order of fettuccine alfredo.

I ended up taking most of my dinner home with me because it was incredibly filling, especially after all the appetizers we ate.  Yummy lunch for me the next day!!

~Mich

Bistro Olé - Sea Bass

We went out to Bistro Olé, a restaurant in Asbury Park, NJ to celebrate a relative’s birthday.  (August is a big birthday month for my family.)  It’s "Latin infused Spanish Portuguese cuisine," and was a really nice restaurant with a lot of tasty food!  When we first walked in, they were going to seat the 8 of us at a booth table near the door.  It was kind of tiny and felt a bit cramped.  We nicely asked to be seated somewhere else and they happily obliged.  The way the place is set up is a little weird, so we ended up walking around the outside of the place to be lead to another room that was a slightly more spacious than the front of the restaurant.

We had a few pretty tasty appetizers; "Ole’s Spicy Meatballs," "Cala, Cala, Calamari," "Just Crab" (crabcakes) and something else, but I can’t remember what else right now.  (Yes, I referenced the menu on the site because well, it’s there and I can’t remember everything we ate!!)

When it was time to order our food, I decided on the Sea Bass, which according to the menu is the Chef’s "best seller".  It was seared sea bass topped with Spanish pesto sauce, bread crumbs and guacamole on top of garlic mashed potatoes.

Holy God it was delicious.  The fish was cooked perfectly, it wasn't ridiculously flaky, the guacamole was delicious with the fish, and the garlic mashed potatoes were to die for.  Honestly, I'm finding that guacamole on most things is delicious, hehe.  The whole meal was awesome!

Obviously I didn’'t like it.  ;-)  Honestly, I probably should have stopped eating 3/4 of the way through the meal, but it was so good I just couldn't bring myself to leave anything on the plate!

~Mich

Nachos!!

Finally, the nachos post!!  A few months ago (maybe two or three) a friend and I had dinner at McSwiggans Pub in Hoboken, NJ.  We ordered their "Irish Nachos" appetizer and it was AWESOME!  Basically, it was nachos, but instead of tortilla chips, they used waffle fries.  I can't even tell you how great of an idea this was.  I'm getting hungry just thinking about it now actually.

So, me and my obsession with fries, I had to try and make it at home.

Ingredients:

• Frozen waffle fries (this time I used two bags, one bag feeds 2 to 4 people, two bags feeds 4 to 6)
• Black olives
• Grated cheddar and mozzarella cheese
• Sour Cream
• Guacamole
• Chili

Some of the ingredients - chili on the left and grated cheese on the right:

Now, in order for me to make a tasty version of it at home, I need my brothers delicious chili.  I’ll get the recipe for that later, but I’m sure you can use any kind of chili that you like or can make on this.  Don’t use just beans.  Well, you can use just beans and it will turn out alright, it’s just MUCH better with some kind of chili on it.  The first time I tried to make this dish I used the Hormel Vegetarian Chili.  It was ok, but is seriously so much better with my brother’s chili on top.  The chili was made the night before, so all I had to do was warm it up once the fries were done.

I cheated a little when I made the guacamole.  I used three avocados and this packaged “Guacamole Mix” made by... I can't remember the company name right now.   The package actually calls for two guacamoles but I used three and it tasted much better.  Next time I’m going to try making Guacamole totally from scratch because it seems easy enough, but for now, this was a really quick and simple way to make it with basically two ingredients.  When I bought the avocados they weren’t quite ripe yet, so I put them in a brown paper bag with an apple and left them in the closet for maybe a day and a half and they ripened up really nicely!  I was actually surprised that method worked.  I don’t know why, I just figured it would take longer.

I put the waffle fries (this took around 25 minutes) and while I waited for them to finish I grated the cheddar and mozzarella cheese.  Once the fries were finished I put them all on an oven safe glass plate, with the warmed up chili on top, cheese on top of that and olives around it.

Then I popped the dish into the oven for a few minutes to let everything get all deliciously melty.  Once the melty ness was to my satisfaction I put the guacamole and sour cream around it.

Close up:

Then we ate!  Oh man, it was SO GOOD!  Seriously, I wish we had fries in the house because I'd make them right now.

If there are any recipes that I post here that you try to make, I highly recommend this one.  It's incredibly easy, and will work as a great appetizer if you're having a few friends over.  I hope you all try and enjoy it!!

~Mich

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

Oreo Fudge Update

I'd like to just give you guys a quick update you on the Oreo Fudge I made with my brother on Saturday.  I did taste it and it wasn't bad!  My personal preference for sweets is a little different typically, so the fact that this wasn't a base of milk or dark chocolate doesn't make it my favorite.  However, it was pretty good!  A nice change, if you will.  If you're a fan of cookies and cream flavored things then this is definitely the recipe for you.  The best way I can think of to describe it is that it's like an Oreo with way more cream filling.

It's actually making me think of other tasty things I can do to my current (and favorite) fudge recipe.  If I have my way, my coworkers are going to hate me this holiday season.  Muahahahahaaaaa!

~Mich

Halibut w/ a parmesan cheese risotto

We went to Mr. Shrimp tonight for dinner and I had the very tasty Tropical Halibut special!  It was Halibut, I believe grilled with a really light chipotle sauce, which had a little bit of heat to it but was good for me because it wasn't "omg hot".  It was also topped with thinly sliced mangoes and zucchini like a little salad.  It was all on top of parmesan cheese risotto.

The whole meal was really tasty.  The halibut was cooked to perfection and the risotto complimented it very well.  I swear, the risotto at Mr. Shrimp is really really good.  So far the two specials that I have had here both topped some kind of risotto were very good.  They could just serve the risotto and I would go for that.  :-)

~Mich

Oreo Fudge

I love fudge and I enjoy making fudge.  Up until tonight I had only really made chocolate fudge, which I have been making since my Mom has allowed me to help her in the kitchen. (Last year.  Heh, kidding.)  My brother came home from college and declared that we needed to make this oreo cookie fudge so we did tonight.

Ingredients:
1 package of Oreos

Save 1 cup crumbled oreos (for on top)
3 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter of margarine
2/3 cup (5 fluid ounce can) Nestle Carnation Evaporated milk
2 cups (12 ounce package) Nestle Toll House Premier Whit Morsels
1 jar (7 ounces) marshmallow creme - Fluffernutter!
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Combine sugar, butter and evaporated milk in a saucepan. Bring to a full rolling boil, stirring constantly. Boil (while stirring) for at least 5 minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in morsels, Fluffernutter, crushed oreos and vanilla extract. Pour into pan. Sprinkle the crushed oreos onto the top. Refrigerate for 1 hour or until firm.

David putting the last bit of Oreos on the top of the fudge:

The finished fudge!

I would also like to point out that through this whole process my brother was singing Conan the Barbarian: The Musical.  Specifically the line about women lamenting or something like that.  It was pretty funny, hehe.

But I digress, back to the fudge.  Well, the preliminary taste test of it tells me it's going to be tasty.  ;-)  I'll actually know tomorrow though.  We're going to let it set overnight and we'll eat tomorrow.  I'll take pictures of it then.  :-D


~Mich

Chocolate Chip Pancakes w/ Cherry Compote!

Hi everyone!  Ok, so I know that I mentioned in my last post that this post would be about nachos with a twist, but, you're just going to have to wait for that post.  It took me two tries to make them properly and on the second try I forgot to take a picture!  We were really anxious to eat, and it lasted for about two seconds.  I think if I had asked everyone to wait an extra second I would have lost a limb, lol.  I also need my brother's chili to really make it right, so you may have to wait 3 weeks for this dish.  ;-)

Buuuuut, you don't have to wait three weeks for something tasty!  This morning (ok, so it was closer to this afternoon, but who is keeping track?) I decided that I wanted to try making chocolate chip pancakes with a cherry compote. From Wikipedia, "compote is a dessert originating from 17th century England made of whole or pieces of fruit in sugar syrup. Whole fruits are immersed in water and with sugar and spices added to the dish, over gentle heat."  I think the most difficult part of preparing the cherry compote was pitting the cherries.  We don't have a fancy kitchen tool to help me pit the cherries, sooo I got to get right into it with my knife and fingers.  When I was done my left hand looked like it had been through a battle, lol.

Pitting cherries:

Bowl o' cherries:

I yoinked the compote recipe from this recipe.  

• 4  cups  pitted sweet cherries (about 1 1/2 pounds)
• 1/4  cup  granulated sugar
• 2  tablespoons  water
• 2  teaspoons  cornstarch
• 1/4  teaspoon  almond extract

You put everything (except the almond extract) together in a pot over medium heat, stirring constantly.  The recipe says to cook for 1 minute then remove from heat but I let it cook for a bit longer so it got a bit more syrupy.  The only thing I changed was the 1/4 teaspoon of almond extract.  We don't have that on hand, so I used vanilla extract and that worked out just fine.  (It smelled so good when I poured it in at the end, mmmm.)  Also, I didn't measure the cherries prior to cutting them, so I think I ended up with more cherries than necessary.  It still turned out tasty, so yay!

Right off the stove:

I didn't do anything fancy with the pancakes.  I just followed the recipe on the back of the Bisquick box and threw some chocolate chips onto them after they were poured on the skillet.  The cherries tasted great on plain pancakes as well as chocolate chip ones!  (Yep, I was a fatty and had a whoooole bunch of pancakes.  It was so worth the stomach ache, lol!)

Plated and delicious!

Overall, this was a really easy and tasty way to jazz up pancakes!


~Mich

Pseudo-Home Made Pizza!

I made pizza the other night for dinner and it only took me about a half hour total to get ready and cook!  It was also delicious.  ;-)  I didn't attempt to make my Mom's homemade pizza because that would have taken me all day, lol.  It wasn't your regular run of the mill frozen pizza either, hence it was only pseudo-home made.  ;-)  This dish was my Mom's idea.  So thanks Mom for a delicious dinner idea!

Ingredients:
Boboli pizza crusts (I made two mini 8 inch ones)
Grated mozzarella cheese
Artichoke hearts
Sun dried tomatoes
1/2 can of olives
Ricotta cheese

I took a little bit of olive oil, and oil from the jar of sun dried tomatoes and spread it on the top of each pizza crust.  Then I covered it with mozzarella cheese.  I chopped up the artichoke hearts and the sun dried tomatoes into small pieces and topped the pizza with those.  You don't have to chop them up, but I did because I hate it when you take a bite out of pizza covered in toppings and you end up with a piece of topping that just kind of falls off the pizza when you're attempting to bite through it.  Maybe it just happens to me because I'm weird, lol.

Where was I?  Oh, I cut olives in half and spread about a handful of them per pizza as well.  Last, I put dollops (is that a proper term?) of ricotta cheese around the pizzas to finish them off.  Then I popped the completed pizzas into the oven for about 12 minutes and you have tasty, cheezy pizza to eat!

All in all it took me almost 20 minutes to prepare everything and then another 12 for cooking.  I'm a little slow when I work so if any of you decide to try this it may not take as long to prepare.  :-)

Picture time!!

The completed pre-oven pizza:


A close up:


The cleanup wasn't too bad.  Here is the scene of the crime:


Finally done and out of the oven!!


Close up of the deliciousness:


Plated and being enjoyed!


I obviously didn't like it.


Word to the wise though... stop eating when you're full.  I know, you're thinking "Well duh Michelle, of course I'll stop eating when I'm full."  I ate half the pizza and thought "Hm, I guess I could save the rest of this for lunch, but meh, let me have one more piece."  Then there was one lonely piece left and I thought "Well, I can't just take one piece to work... so I'll just finish it now."  I had to wait to post this blog because I couldn't look at these pictures without feeling a little ill.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Anyway!  This really was a very easy and tasty meal to make and it didn't cost an arm and a leg.  Chances are that you already have your favorite toppings tucked away in your pantry somewhere!  You can top it with whatever you want and don't need to worry about making the dough or letting it cook long enough because you're basically sticking it in the oven to make everything warm and a little crispy.

I highly recommend this to anyone with a bit of interest in preparing a relatively quick pizza meal (without all the grease) for themselves.  :-D

~Mich

Cheese stuffed cheeseburger for Mother's Day!

Today, I made the ULTIMATE cheeseburger.  Ok, so maybe it wasn't the ultimate cheeseburger (I have a long way to go before I'm really good at burger making), but it was pretty tasty for a first attempt!  The family and I were watching The Food Network last night and cheeseburgers seemed to be the theme for about an hour.  So, Mom decided that she wanted cheeseburgers for Mother's Day, and cheeseburgers we provided!

Dad and I went out this morning and bought ground beef, I made the patties, stuffed them with white American cheese, threw them on the grill and ta-da!  Cheeseburgers!  The gooey cheese on the inside was perfectly melted, though next time I think I'm going to cook the burgers a little longer. 

Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take a picture of the burgers, so I'll just have to make them again!  I promise pictures next time.  :-)  All in all a pretty successful attempt at making burgers!  Hooray!

~Mich

Celery Seed Encrusted Salmon = Thumbs Up!

Aloha everyone!  I just wanted to write a quick post about this delicious meal that I ate last night at Mr. Shrimp in Belmar, NJ.  It was celery seed encrusted salmon over shrimp risotto covered in a beet and something else (I can't exactly remember what) cream sauce.  I looked at the menu on their site for the full description, but sadly I wasn't able to find it because the dish was one of their specials for the day.

Oh man, was it delicious!  My first bite of the salmon was a little odd.  I honestly wasn't expecting to taste the celery so strongly, but it was definitely good.  You were left with a very nice celery aftertaste with each bite.  The sauce over top of it was also very tasty.  I'm a huge fan of cream sauces and whatever pureed vegetable they used (in addition to the beat puree) worked really well with the salmon and the risotto.  The risotto was nice and creamy and the shrimp mixed in there was like a little surprise.  The meal was a lot larger than I expected.  By the time I had finished the salmon I was pretty full.  Mom had to help me finish the risotto!

Here's a picture of the dish.  Sorry it's a little bit blurry.  The next time I eat something delicious I'll be sure to take a better picture!

~Mich