Spicy Sesame Shrimp with Quinoa

I know it's been a long time since I've posted anything here. I could give a thousand excuses but I'll spare you and just share tonight's creation. It all started by staring at a half pound of sugar snap peas and a half bag of spinach wondering what I could do with them since they were about to go bad. Realizing I hadn't had the forethought to thaw a protein today, I thought I'd go with shrimp since they are quick and easy to quick thaw. With shrimp and sugar snaps I was Asian inspired and here's where I went with it. It's quinoa with edamame, garlic and ginger sugar snap peas and spicy sesame shrimp.  It's a perfect dinner for two on the table in less than 30 minutes




Quinoa with Edamame

1/2 cup quinoa
1 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup edamame, frozen

Bring quinoa and stock to a rapid boil on high. Boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cover for 7 minutes. Add edamame, cover and return to low heat for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and leave covered for five additional minutes.

Spinach and Sugar Snap Peas

1/2 lb sugar snap peas
4 ounces spinach, tough stems removed
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2" ginger, finely grated
1/2 Tbsp oil

Place sugar snap peas in a gallon zip-lock bag with 1 Tbsp water and microwave on high for 2 minutes. Combine oil, garlic, ginger and spinach in a sauté pan on medium heat, tossing frequently until spinach is wilted. Add cooked sugar snap peas and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Spicy Shrimp

1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tsp lemon juice
1/2" ginger, finely grated
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp to 1 Tbsp Asian hot sauce (depending on how spicy you want it)
1/2 Tbsp oil
1 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined

Combine first five ingredients in a bowl. Add shrimp and marinate for 5 minutes. Add shrimp and marinade to a small sauté pan and cook over medium high heat, turning the shrimp until done, approximately five minutes. Remove shrimp and continue cooking sauce until reduced by half and thick.

To serve:

Mound quinoa on a medium sized plate, add spinach and peas then top with shrimp. Drizzle with reduced sauce. Garnish with sesame seeds and soy sauce.

Apple Spice Cake with Caramel Sauce

Fall is my favorite time of the year. Football season begins and the chill in the air brings out the beautiful fall foliage. It means the holidays are just around the corner and the foods and flavors of the season are the best. This dessert (or breakfast if you wish) has many of those fall flavors that I love like apples, cinnamon and caramel. I even baked it in the Fall Harvest Bundt Pan that I picked up from Williams-Sonoma last year to make it even more festive!

The cake is from the King Arthur Flour recipe for Apple-Spice Cake. I did not use the cherry juice concentrate nor the Cake Enhancer and I chose to use pecans instead of walnuts and it still turned out wonderful. I also decided to make a caramel sauce for the cake instead of using the glaze from the recipe. Topped with a little whipped cream and served with a pumpkin spice latte and I think I could be in heaven.

Caramel Sauce
makes ~1 1/2 cups

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
3/4 cup heavy cream
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon fleur de sel

In a 2-qt saucepan, combine the sugar, water and corn syrup and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Boil over medium high heat until the syrup is deep amber in color, about 8 minutes. Remove the saucepan from the heat and carefully whisk in the cream, butter and salt. Let the caramel cool to room temperature. Sauce will keep in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks.

Pita Bread

I know it's been a while since I've posted. I haven't stopped cooking, I just haven't been as good about taking photos of the food. But when I made homemade pita bread for the first time today, they just looked too good not to take a picture of and share. Of course, since pita is a bread, I went to King Arthur Flour's website for the recipe.

They were surprisingly easy to make and turned out much better than what you get from the store. I followed their recipe as written and used instant yeast, which is the only yeast I bake with since it doesn't require "proofing". I placed the rolled pitas and parchment and baking them on a half sheet pan. I was able to fit three on the pan so it took three batches to bake off all eight pitas. All but one of my pitas "popped".

While good on their own, I'm looking forward to stuffing them with balsamic chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and lettuce for lunch. They would also be great with hummus too.

Stuffed Tomatoes & Risotto with Turnips and Bacon

For this meal, we grilled some beautiful rib eye steaks from Costco (see my Perfect Grilled Steak post on how we do that) along with Stuffed Tomatoes & Risotto with Turnips and Bacon. The tomatoes were leftover from last week and the turnips were in this week's AHO box. For the tomatoes I used Sunny Anderson's recipe found here. I used panko bread crumbs and the last of the basil from our herb garden this year. The Risotto with Turnips and Bacon recipe is from Gourmet magazine. I found the it using the awesome Epicurious iPad app. We really liked the way that the spicy turnip flavor was mellowed out by the creamy risotto. And bacon, well doesn't it make everything better?!

Broiled Salmon with Roasted Tomato and Lemon Vinaigrette and Bok Choy

This week my AHO box had fresh marjoram in it. I have never cooked with marjoram, so as I was looking around the Internet I stumbled upon this recipe from Emeril on the Food Network website. The irony is that tomatoes and bok choy also came in this week's box and we had a salmon fillet in the freezer from my father-in-law's fishing trip to Alaska that we wanted to use. I'm not much of a fish eater and I usually shy away from Emeril's recipes because most of them are involved and time consuming, this one was quick, easy and turned out amazing! I used four regular tomatoes, seeded and chopped, and one full sized bok choy. If you are feeding four, you need would need two full sized bok choy, but for the two of us one was fine. The lemon in this dish cut the richness of the salmon and the marjoram added a subtle, yet elegant freshness to the dish.

Easy Chicken and Dumplings

Few things are more comforting that a bowl of chicken and dumplings, but it's tough to find the time to make the traditional version on a week night. This Rachael Ray recipe can be made in 30 minutes and is almost as good as my mom's. I added 2 tsp of fresh thyme to the biscuit mix because I love the flavor of fresh thyme with chicken.

Fig Salsa

This Fig Salsa recipe is courtesy of AHO. We've received several pints of figs over the past few months and this is my favorite way to use them! I used one serrano pepper with seeds instead of two jalapeno without seeds, which gave it a little more heat. We ate much of the salsa with tortilla chips. We also had it on grilled chicken breasts, which was awesome. This salsa's got heat and sweet and the mint really brightens it up.