Day 2 - Fruit and Fish

Today's menu:

• Wild Salmon with Lentils and Arugula
• Carrots and hummus
• Fresh Fruit with Applesauce-Sweetened Tahini
• Blueberry-Almond Butter Smoothie

Day 2 was harder than day one. For sure. I was very, very tired and there was no coffee to help me through the afternoon. But the food we ate today was amazing. I never realized that wild salmon tastes so much better than farm-raised! It was a tasty and satisfying dinner, and quick to boot.

The fruit salad was also excellent, although we just used apples, tangelos, and grapes...mango is expensive and bland up here. I would never have thought to mix tahini with sweet foods, it always seemed like a savory item to me. It worked really well though, and made a light but filling dressing for the fruit.

And the smoothie was a perfect start to the day. I have to say that doing this whole "detox diet" thing is much easier when there are weekly menus planned out with simple recipes to follow. We just went through the master recipe list and picked out a handful that looked especially good. I would have been super stressed out trying to come up with appropriate detox food on my own. Thank you, Martha!

Sunday Dinner - Birthday Style

Tonight's menu:

• Shrimp and veggie linguine
• Garlic bread

This dinner was a special birthday treat, made by Matt! I got to sit back and relax while he planned and created this delicious meal...a wonderful way to spend my birthday evening. He used two recipes to make it, combining elements from each. One was from Allrecipes.com and he pulled some inspiration from this Ezine article as well. I don't know exactly what he did since I wasn't in the kitchen, but the final dish included shrimp, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, and spinach all sauteed in garlic, shallots, and butter, then mixed into the pasta. The flavors and colors were marvelous, and the dish was light and healthy to boot.

The garlic bread was a bake-at-home frozen garlic baguette. We usually make our garlic bread with a fresh baguette covered in melted butter and minced garlic, but since Matt was cooking by himself he opted to go the easy route. It actually worked really well with the pasta dish, which already had a lot of garlic. The pre-made garlic bread is usually more salty than garlicky, and I think our usual garlic-intense version would have been a little overpowering. As it was, the bread was a perfect complement to a light and savory dinner. Happy birthday to me!

Sunday Dinner - Valentine's Day Edition

Tonight's menu:

• Pan-fried tilapia with beurre blanc
• Roasted asparagus
• Warm baguette slices with butter

This was an unusual dinner for us, in that we didn't plan the menu well in advance. Normally we plan a week or two's worth of menus at a time and then grocery shop every few days to get fresh produce for our planned dinners. However, this past week has been a little crazy and Matt was on call all weekend, so we didn't plan much of anything. We were at our local co-op grocery this afternoon and grabbed some fish fillets, white wine, asparagus, and shallots...surely, we thought, we could make a good meal with that?

Yes, as it turns out, we could. We simply sprinkled the tilapia with salt and pepper and fried it in butter in a skillet. The beurre blanc recipe was from our much-used 400 Sauces cookbook, which we picked up for $5 on the clearance rack at Borders. It's a very easy recipe; just saute some diced shallots in 3 tablespoons each dry white wine (we like chardonnay) and white wine vinegar until the liquid is reduced by about half. Then turn the heat off and let the whole thing cool a bit, stir in 1/2 cup unsalted butter, and season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Delicious!

The asparagus was cooked using our favorite method. Trim off the ends and put the whole bunch in a baking dish, coat with about a tablespoon of oil (we normally use olive oil, but we ran out today so we used Canola oil instead...it tasted fine), and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a lot of minced garlic. Roast at 400 degrees F for about 15-20 minutes and they're done. We also threw a store-bought baguette into the oven, wrapped in aluminum foil, to heat up while the asparagus was roasting.

The whole dinner took us about 20 minutes to make, was relatively healthy (except for the entire stick of butter we used...) and tasted amazing. Plus the shallots turned a lovely shade of pink, a perfect Valentine's day surprise!

Also, I just have to say something about my Valentine's day/birthday gift, because my very clever husband got me something for the blog! It's an awesome Lowel photography light to make our food pictures clearer and brighter. I took tonight's picture with it...still getting the hang of using the reflector, plus I'm using my G1 phone camera to take the picture (my digital camera broke a few months ago) so the pics still aren't perfect, but they're getting better. Thanks Matt!

Saturday Dinner: Fish Tacos

Tonight's menu:

• Beer-battered fish tacos
• Tomato and avocado salsa
• Rice and black beans

Wow, this was a great meal! The fish tacos were better than I've ever had in a restaurant. That's one thing I love about cooking; you can have the same food you would get in a restaurant (a great steak, hamburger, fish tacos) but for half the cost and you can cook it to suit your tastes perfectly. Why eat out?!

We followed the fish recipe exactly and it was delicious. Crispy on the outside, flaky on the inside, and with that slight flavor of beer which, when combined with seafood, makes me think of a beach vacation.

The salsa was absolutely amazing...there is nothing better than homemade salsa. We left out the cilantro because we aren't huge fans and for some reason it's really hard to find up here in New England. We also added garlic because we are of the opinion that garlic makes just about anything better. It was so good we both wanted to eat the salsa straight out of the bowl. We will definitely be making it again.

The rice and beans were plain and simple...just some basmati rice, cooked in our new favorite way, with a can of black beans thrown in for extra protein and flavor. And yes, we did use canned beans. Back in the co-op days (more to come on that later) we would have cooked the beans from scratch along with the rest of the meal. But that is, frankly, way too much work for us now that we're only cooking for two people. Sometimes canned food just makes more sense. It's a little more expensive, but worth it to save a couple hours of cooking time.

The only problem with this meal was the sorry-excuse-for-a-tortilla we had to use. Back in Texas, really good tortillas were easy to come by. Apparently that is not the case here, and we had to use these flavorless, mealy, floppy things. I'm thinking we're going to have to start making our own tortillas. If anyone knows of a good tortilla recipe, post it in the comments please!