Food Friday

I hope everyone is having a good Valentine’s Day! Kris and I will be spending it the way we usually do – apart! I have to work for like 9 or 10 hours today so he will have to chill out alone most of the evening until I get home. At least we won’t be in separate states for it this year 🙂

We usually don’t exchange gifts, but figured that since we would actually be in the same city that we should go out for a date. We ended up going out on Tuesday night because Kris had Warhammer on Wednesday, the giant snowstorm occurred yesterday, and I have to work today, tomorrow, and Sunday!

For our date we went to a local restaurant that Kris went to for a former coworker’s retirement party. I really enjoyed it. One of the reasons we went there was that it was BYOB I’ve never been to a BYOB place before and I must say it was nice to enjoy wine for both of us for only $11! I’m always really awkward at drinking wine in restaurants, though, because I don’t know any etiquette (this was most embarrassing when we got wine at a really nice place in NYC and the server wanted us to sniff and taste the wine first and we were just kind of like “well, it doesn’t seem terrible, so we’re cool”).

I really enjoyed the food at this place, too. sorry I didn’t take any pictures – the atmosphere didn’t seem right for me to be snapping tons of smartphone photos (we were in a room of maybe 8 tables). We shared the best spanakopita I’ve ever had as an appetizer (spinach-feta phyllo pastries – they are a mediocre generic app at a lot of places, not here); for my entree I had fried ravioli with spinach in a creamy sauce, one of their many vegetarian options (they were a bit more crunchy than I expected, though); and we shared an amazing piece of tiramisu for dessert! I love chocolate but tiramisu is always one of my favorites. The place was a little more pricey but I didn’t feel like it was overpriced because of the quality of the food, which is rare because I can be a super cheap person.

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I tried a ton of new things for Food Friday this week!

I’ll start with Sunday, when I actually had enough energy to take crappy smartphone photos of what I was making. I tried a second recipe from Budget Bytes – “Italian Wonderpot.”

I don’t think I significantly changed anything about this recipe. It turned out really well and the serving sizes were larger than I was imagining on the basis of the photo that she showed. I’d probably use a bit more seasonings next time, though, as it wasn’t quite as flavorful by the time I got around to eating it as I thought it would be from the smells while cooking! Kris really enjoyed it as well, and it was VERY low in calories (about 350 per serving), so I am sure I will be making it again.

Everything I used to whip this together.

In the pan…I included this because it looks so much less appetizing than the photo on her site, especially with all that shimmery olive oil!

The finished product!

The rest of the week we basically ate this for leftovers, until Thursday, when we were stuck at home all day and decided to do nothing but eat. Seriously – we started out the day with cinnamon rolls, snacked on apples and peanut butter, and I tried new recipes for lunch AND dinner. I’m really glad it doesn’t normally snow this much! Unfortunately I was not as diligent with snapping photos of these, so you will just have to rely on my descriptions.

When I went home for Christmas, my grandpa had given me some canned salmon for some inexplicable reason. Well, perhaps it was that he had no idea what to do with it, because neither did I. I Googled “recipes with canned salmon” and came across a list of 50 things to do with it. The first thing on the list sounded easy enough so that is what we had for lunch. It was…ok. I was really grossed out by the canned salmon -it was like slimy looking and there was a lot of skin I had to peel off –  and sort of lost my appetite. I would have been happier just with the eggs, potatoes and vegetables, I think, but I made it with the intent of using the salmon so I made myself eat it. To be fair, this was “smoked salmon,” and it had like maple syrup and brown sugar in it or something, so perhaps that is why it was slimy looking. I have plain canned salmon and I’ll give it another chance with one of the other recipes later.

For dinner, I was inspired by this recipe for black bean-quinoa enchiladas. The added bonus of this recipe was that I got to give crockpot beans another attempt to make black beans and it went quite successfully. My freezer is now full of beans! I wanted actual enchiladas rather than a casserole, so I I halved the recipe and cooked it up in some tortillas. The only other major change I made to this recipe was that I used canned green chiles instead of bother to chop up a jalapeno, because the jalapenos at my grocery store are generally overpriced and low quality. I really enjoyed these, though I thought the calorie count was a little high (my fault for using tortillas) and Kris must have really liked them because he ate like half of the pan – there went my plan for leftovers! I still think I personally prefer the butternut squash ones I made before, though.