Tequila lime shrimp

I used to love to buy margaritaville's tequila lime shrimp, but it has been so expensive that it is worth trying to find a recipe I like myself. I found a recipe that I could modify to my purposes.

My Tequila Lime Shrimp Pasta Recipe

• 1/4 cup butter
  
• 8 Tblsp tequila
  
• 6 Tblsp Lime juice
  
• 3 tsp minced garlic
• Frozen, pealed shrimp
• Cayanne pepper to taste
• 1 box pasta
• 1 cup frozen peas

Instructions

• Boil some lightly salted water (for the pasta.) Drop the pasta and cook according to the manufacturer's directions.
  
• Saute the garlic in the butter for 1-2 min, then add the tequila and lime juice.
• Once the sauce is simmering, add the frozen shrimp until they are cooked through (completely pink and curled up.) If the sauce isn't thick enough, then remove the shrimp and keep reducing the sauce.
  
  
  
• Drain Pasta (don't rinse) and combine with frozen peas, stirring thoroughly.
  
  
  
• Pour sauce and shrimp over the pasta and mix.
  
  
  
• Enjoy your yummy pasta dish!
  

Pasta Medley - Yum!

I had a bit of a dilemma when it came time for dinner. I had a lot of different kinds of pasta, but none of them were enough to make a complete meal. I therefore decided to combine a bunch and make a pasta medley.

The sauce had some stir fried kilbasa sausage, peas and tomato sauce.

I got really excited about this meal, and decided to take advantage of some more leftovers I had laying around. I had some homemade pizza dough in my fridge, but there wasn't enough for a pizza big enough for both me and Keith. (I had considered making an individual pizza for lunch, but had never gotten around to it.) I shaped the dough into stitcks, brushed them with olive oil and then sprinkled them with garlic salt.

I baked these breadsticks at 350 until they were solid (around 10 min). This meal that was just thrown together ended up being quite amazing! I will definitely make these breadsticks again.

Beef with broccoli

I picked up this beef and broccoli mix at the supermarket, and decided it would be a nice variation to my standard teriyaki beef stir fry.

I chopped up some stake and stir fried it with onions. I added some defrosted broccoli towards the end (so the broccoli would not get soggy.)

I was expecting the sauce to be a brown sauce like you would find at a restaurant. Instead, it is a clearer sauce. It would be really amazing with shrimp. I will definitely use it again.

Kielbasa Spaghetti

Uhoh... I chopped up the ingredients to make a stir fried turkey kielbasa tomato sauce spaghetti... only to find that I was almost out of sauce. Thankfully, I found a tiny, neglected can of tomato paste on the bottom shelf of the pantry.

I mixed a 6 oz can of tomato paste with half a cup of water and then bottled sauce to it. I add garlic and other spices while I'm cooking the meat, so I didn't add any additional spices to the sauce. Frequently I add frozen peas but for some reason that night I decided against it.

This was such a fast meal to cook, eat and clean up! Is it hard to wonder why I love stir frying?

Tempura Chicken

Another Trader Joe's masterpiece. The tempura chicken kit is $4-6 (I cannot remember at the moment) and is so delicious and fast to prepare.

The sauce is good (amazing actually), but there's not enough to cover a lot of rice with. Therefore I've started supplementing the mix with a sauce made out of pineapple, green pepper and onion. It's simple, but yummy and adds some veggies to the meal.

The ingredients for my supplemental sauce.

This time I only had a small onion, so I added half a shallot to the mix. I'm not sure the shallot added anything to the sauce, but it certainly didn't hurt anything! I don't always use crushed pineapple, when I use chunk I usually cut each of the pieces in half to make them into smaller bites. The extra juice helps make the sauce go farther.

I add a dash of low sodium soy sauce to finish off the sauce.

The sauce simmers while the chicken is in the oven.

If the sauce is too thin when we're ready to eat, I add a little corn starch to thicken it.

The frozen chicken

I layer the pepper/onion/pineapple sauce on top of rice, followed by the baked chicken and then topped with the (DELICIOUS) sweet and sour sauce that comes in the kit. There is definitely enough food for 3-4 meals.

Yum! Better than delivery, and much cheaper, too!

Beef Teriyaki Stir Fry

I love to stir fry. I joke about how bad I am about baking meat, but why would you take 40 minutes to wait for dinner when you can fry it up in 15? The dish I am going to describe today is one of my favorites to cook. There is no recipe here because you find the stuff you have and toss them in together.

This dish revolves around an amazing teriyaki sauce by Culinary Circle (see below). The sauce is sweet, but not too sweet and whatever spices in it are perfect to hit all of my taste buds. For the beef, I tend to choose whatever is on sale, but with a preference for steak tips or other small cuts of beef. I slice it thin, and leave it to marinate in the sauce for a few minutes before I begin cooking.

My favorite frozen vegetable mix is the frozen sugar snap stir fry by Birds Eye. I will defrost the vegis a bit in the microwave, using a tiny bit of water and some plain teriyaki sauce. After the vegis have defrosted, I pour out the water (and sauce) from the bottom to keep it from diluting the sauce in the finished dish.

In today's batch, I'm going to add some old rice (not quite fried rice, but it's an easy way to warm it up). The final component is some shelled edamame. I will either shell it myself, or use frozen pre-shelled. I add this to the stir fry at the very end, and don't bother defrosting it at all. It cooks really fast and gives the dish a nice crunch.

And here you go, a nice big pan full of deliciousness. This is a well r0unded meal all in one pot, and since there are only two of us this lasts for longer than one meal!