When the Blues Go Marching In...

I could start this post off writing about why I haven't posted in such a long time...or I could just start with the recipe, save you some time, pretend the gap never happened, and pick up where I left off...

This past Thursday night, my roommate Matt and I had made plans to watch hockey, but it wasn't just just any hockey game - it was the St. Louis Blues versus the New Jersey Devils. Translation: my team against his team. So I thought I'd at least make a good meal before the game began and someone ended the night unhappy.

Pad Thai - one of my favorite dishes and if you've never made it, I hope the rest of this post will help nudge you closer to making it.

Ingredients:

   - 1 Pad Thai Kit (Asian Creation was the name on the box I bought - it included rice noodles and peanut sauce)

   - 1 lb. chicken breast (as much or as little chicken as you'd like)

   - 1 egg

   - Carrots (either buy matchstick carrots or cut them yourself)

   - Green onions

   - Bell Pepper

   - Lime wedges

   - Peanuts (a solid handful will do)

Directions:

1. Boil a pot of water. I followed my step-mom's instructions for cooking the rice noodles and it goes as follows: Lay out the rice noodles in a 9x13 baking dish (basically a casserole pan). Pouring the boiling water over the rice noodles and loosely cover the pan. I used a cookie sheet to cover the dish to help keep the steam and heat contained. Set the timer for 20 minutes and let the boiling water do the rest.

2. Cut up the chicken into bite size pieces. Lightly season the chicken (I used salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes). Using 1 tbsp. of vegetable oil, cook the chicken on your stove top, flipping as needed to ensure the chicken cooks throughout. This should take between 5-8 minutes, depending on your stove top. Place the chicken on a plate off to the side and cover with foil.

3. Next, you'd want to scramble the egg. Unfortunately, I did not have any eggs in my place when I was cooking, but it's a delicious part of the meal so it has to stay in the recipe. 

4. Cut up your carrots (if needed), peppers, and onions into small pieces. The peppers you can cut how you like them, either small bite size pieces or strips, whichever you prefer.

5. Steam the veggies for a few minutes to have the flavors begin to blend together. I used the same pan that I cooked the chicken in, because I'm trying to use as few dishes as possible (less cleaning)! Add a little bit of water and cover.

6. Combine the rice noodles, chicken, egg, and veggies into a big pot. 

7. Add the peanut sauce to the pot and stir thoroughly to make sure everything mixes nicely. 

8. Cut up the limes into wedges

9. Mash up the peanuts into bite size pieces - I did have a wooden spoon or anything like that, so I improvised and used a hammer! Put the peanuts in a ziploc bag and starting smashing!

10. You can serve the peanuts and limes on the side and allow for your guests to add as little or as much as they'd like.

11. Bon Appetit!

Recommendation: If you like spicy, add some sriracha on top

Wait, there's more! I mentioned that Matt and I were going to watch a hockey game...in a first for my blog, we have a drink recipe to be shared! Now that I'm of age to legally consume delicious beverages, you might see more posts including drink recipes. Or, maybe not.

But anyways, for tonight's game, the drink I made was eloquently called...the Blues shot,

Ingredients:

   - your favorite vodka 

   - blue curacao

   - lime juice

Directions: Mix equal parts of each into a shaker. Translation: pour a shot of each into your shaker and start shaking! You can skimp on the lime juice if needed. 

Yes, those are despicable me shot glasses!

And to complete the post, let the record show that the Blues did in fact beat the Devils 4-3. Let's Go Blues!

Simple Cookin! (And a Bonus Section!)

Howdy all! Somehow it's the 10th of September today...so much for increasing the frequency of my postings. But, never fear, here I'm am, writing this post. And for those who are counting, this definitely wins more points than the homework I could be doing...let's write!

I rolled into my apartment at 8:30pm tonight and boy was I hungry...time to check the fridge and find out what I can cook. Operation inspiration began yet again. This one actually started with the freezer where I had some frozen chicken breasts - check. Then onto the fridge: pull open one of my drawers and there's a bag of broccoli - check. Went to the pantry next: my eyes settled on a 1/3 filled bag of pasta - check.
Chicken. Pasta. Broccoli. How'd I do it?

Chicken: shocker alert here, I followed the instructions on the bag. Preheat the oven to 375 F, place frozen breast onto a foil-covered cookie sheet, bake for 20 minutes. So I did all of that, but before I put the chicken in the oven, I sprinkled Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute onto the chicken (you could insert you favorite spice blend instead).
Some notes to take care of: Make sure the chicken is cooked throughout! If you have a kitchen thermometer (that's probably not what's it's called), poke your chicken and see how hot it is internally. If not, the taste and eyes test can be deployed. Also, not all chicken can go straight from freezer to oven, you might have to thaw first. Check the instructions.

Pasta: Simple stuff here, I cooked orecchiette pasta (sounds fancy, I know). Remember to always boil the water first - especially if you live in my apartment where it takes quite a while to boil. Here's my sauce concoction for the evening: Olive oil, butter, alfredo sauce, red pepper flakes, oregano. I got these from my fridge and just put together a little bit of everything. I intentionally went light with most of it because I didn't want one flavor to complete dominate - every bite was more of an adventure this way!

Broccoli: I put the broccoli into a pampered chef microwavable steamer, added a little water, salt, and pepper, and put it in the microwave to steam - again, pretty simple stuff.

And poof, you've got yourself a well balanced meal that tackles multiple food groups! 

P.S. I really didn't go into a lot of nitty-gritty detail here, so if you'd like more info or instruction, just ask!

BONUS: Check out my dinner from last night:

And one more BONUS: Here's the crew I shared the meal with! The food is important but so is the company that you eat with!

Caution: Selfie Sighting!

Hunger Action Month

Yes we talk about food a lot on this blog, but we must recognize our great fortunate...

September is Hunger Action Month, a campaign organized by Feeding America to help drive awareness and action to solving hunger issues. It's their campaign, read about it by clicking here. Take note of ways in which YOU can contribute to finding a solution.

As I continue to post this month, I'll mention and talk to the issues of hunger - 1 in 6 Americans struggle with hunger. 

How will you help?

Back Again!

Welcome to September! And welcome back to Joe's Jamaican Dinner! 

But before we get to September, let's talk August...somehow I managed to keep my blog silent all last month - not good, not good. But rest assured, I still ate dinner on most nights although I failed to post once...ONCE!

So as we get into September, I might drop in some pics and recipes from August, but most will be fresh content, like the rest of this post...

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I had just played basketball with some friends yesterday afternoon, including my apartmentmate (that's not a word) Matt. Matt and I returned home with growling bellies - the clock had struck whatever time and we were hungry! So we decided to make the following: Chicken and Pasta. That seems so bland, so we cranked it up a few notches.

Here's how we prepared the Chicken:

--We used leftover chicken that I brought home from a meal earlier in the weekend. Still not sure what sauce was on the chicken to begin with but we went with it. I cut up the chicken into small, bite size pieces.

--In a pan, I melted some olive oil, butter, and garlic. Yes I said some, because I could not tell you how much I used. I just poured "some" olive oil in, scooped "some" butter in, and dropped "some" minced garlic in.

--Then I added the chicken and combined the flavors over a low heat and stirred occasionally.

We cooked a pound of pasta but our last-minute decision was what sauce to use. We didn't want to use marinara sauce, just weren't in the mood. So I opened the fridge, looked around, and...got creative! We made our own sauce and if you've read my blog before, you'll know the concoction.

In a mixing bowl, I added some maple syrup, sriracha, lime juice, and salt...yep, I did it again with the "some" quantity. Poured a little bit of everything into the bowl and kept tweaking it until I had a delicious sauce! This specialty is especially tasty, because it's a great blend of sweet and spicy - sweet from the maple syrup and spicy from the sriracha.

Drizzled the sauce all over those noodles and then went after it! Bon Appetit! The blog is back in action!

An Instant Classic

Oh, what a day! I slept in, worked out, and spent some quality time at the pool. But when I got back from the pool, I needed to make some lunch. My options were: 1) make a PB&J, eat quickly, not so filling, etc. or option #2:  cook up something. Think you can guess which one I chose?

If you guessed right, you're still reading this post - because yes, I did decide to whip something up. And once I decided that I wanted to make something, my mind took off trying to figure out what I could make. Here's how my thought process working:
"Hmmmm, what sounds good?" (as I open the fridge and pantry). I spot an already opened box of jumbo shells that I had used earlier in the week (which reminds me, I will be posting that meal shortly - I just got excited about this meal so I'm posting it first). "Alright, this is good, but what do I pair it with?" I don't want to open an entire jar of marinara sauce, so I look through my fridge and found pesto! But I only have so much left and don't want to use it all on this meal...hmm "how do I make a creamy pesto?". Looked that up and realized I had most of the necessary ingredients so that will work.

So after doing this type of thinking for 7 minutes, I had an idea of what I was going to do: Egg and cheese stuffed shells covered in pesto! Let's do this!

Sneak peak of the end results

1. Boil water in a saucepa, big enough to fit all of your jumbo shells, and once it boils, add in your shells
2. Time to make the pesto sauce
• Oh yeah, I totally decided to ab-lib this. I used pesto, butter, cream cheese, parmesan cheese, and minced garlic - basically everything I had in my fridge.
• I realized early on that I didn't want to make a ton of sauce, so I added two spoonfuls of pesto, a bit of butter, cut off some cream cheese and dumped that it, shook out some parmesan cheese, and knocked in some minced garlic.
• Yeah, that's how I did it - sorry if you're trying to follow this post and make it exactly like I did. If you want to make it how I did, don't bother taking out a measure cup - just bring along your tastebuds and go for it!
3. Scrambled three eggs with a little salt and pepper
4. Cut up some small cubes of cheese (I used havarti with dill, a personal favorite)
5. When the pasta is fully cooked, (typically 10-12 minutes because the shells are bigger, some would even call them "jumbo"...yes, it's ok to laugh at my bad jokes), drain the water out.
6. Stuff your shells
• Grab a shell, add a small spoonful of eggs, a cube or two of cheese and put on your plate
• Repeat until your plate is sufficiently filled to your liking
• Take a small spoonful of pesto and lay out on top of each shells, not completely covering the shell but proportionally just enough (that's how I thought when I put spread on top, I don't know).
• To add a little garnish and color on top, sprinkle red pepper flakes on top of the pesto.
• I thought of red pepper because it's something I would add to pasta and also to eggs, so of course it would work for this dish
7. Take a picture and dig in! (This is funny, because this is what I do every time before I eat now, so that I have photo evidence for my posts)

Wow that looks good! Oh wait, I got to eat that.

Here's too a little Saturday afternoon creativity!

This One's for the People - Part 1

I like to think I'm a man of the people, so you must give the people what they want. Which means that I will be posting recipes on the top two selected dishes from my last post's vote (does that even make sense)/?

So here we go:

BEWARE: Prepare to have your mind NOT blown away!

Ingredients:

• Deli meat of your choosing
• They serve Boar's Head meat at my local deli so I splurge every now and then and get it.
• On this particular sandwich, I have the maple turkey breast and some chipotle chicken breast (it was on sale, definitely a bargain)
• A slice of cheese (you can put two on if you're really feeling your oats)
• Oh yeah, you get to choose the cheese. I went with swiss.
• Two pickles
• Kraft Sun-Dried Tomato Salad Dressing
• Alright so here's a little secret. I don't like mayo or mustard on my sandwich but at the same time, who likes a dry deli sandwich? Ketchup could only get me through my early years but I've evolved my tastes. Yes it's a salad dressing, but it's delicious. And because I don't always like a cut tomato on my sandwich, this still gives it a similar enough flavor...or at least I've convinced myself it does
• Butter
• Two slices of sandwich bread
• I kind of feeling silly putting this because you're making a sandwich, so of course there's bread, right?

Directions:

1. Make a sandwich with the above ingredients (You got this!)
2. Pretend the sandwich you've just made is actually a grilled cheese and proceed to step 3
3. Butter one side of your "Grilled Cheese" and cook in a pan on the stove for about one minute (or until bread gets that perfect grilled cheese color on it...if you don't know what that is, then maybe look it up?)
4. Before you flip the sandwich over, make sure the side that has not been cooking is sufficiently buttered
5. Flip sandwich and cook until you get that same color (about 1 minute)
6. Cut in half and eat it!

Recap:

Alright, by now you might feel overwhelmed by this post and feel like you're missing something. Well, you're not. All I did was make a regular sandwich...but then I realized how great it would be if my bread were toasted and I didn't want to pull apart my sandwich just for the bread. So I decided to butter 'er up and cooked it like a grilled cheese...if you still think my directions involved you making a grilled cheese, I'm sorry, but ti was simply a reference to the process of buttering the bread and cooking in a pan.

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It was simply enough, however there was enough of a flair that the sandwich had a little more deliciousness to it!  

P.S. This is a what a grilled cheese looks like

Pick your favorite!

Alright, my posts have slowed up substantially, but my cooking has not. And because things have changed, so will this post. Instead of me writing out the entire recipe for my last meal, I want you to tell me what meal you'd like me to write the recipe for!!

Below you'll find a bunch of pictures for recent meals, so tell me which one you want to see more of by posting a comment below!

A

B

C

D

E

F