Southwest Shrimp Quinoa

Over the past few month's I've been trying to eat a lot healthier. One of the things I decided to add to my diet is Quinoa. I never had it before so I looked up a bunch of recipes. Man are there a lot out there. A good amount of the recipes used it in salads cold. I was looking for a one pot hot dinner item. After researching for an hour or so, I merged a few different recipes together and added my twist to it and came up with a Southwest Shrimp Quinoa. The Shrimp can always be replaced with tofu or omitted completely to make it vegetarian. I cook this every few weeks. I also make enough so I have left overs for lunch the next day.

Ingredients

½ lbs Shrimp – chopped into 1/3’s (depending on size)

¼ Red Bell pepper – Large Diced

¼ Green Bell Pepper – Large Diced

¼ Onion – Diced

½ jalapeno – diced

High Temp cooking oil

Juice 1 lime

1 Cup Quinoa

1 ½ Cup water

Hand full Cilantro

Cooking Directions

Heat oil in pan

Add vegi’s and Sautee for 5 minutes

Add in shrimp and lime juice and sauté for 5 mins more on until shrimp turns pink

Remove shrimp

Add in water and bring to a boil

Add in quinoa

Reduce to a simmer, cover and cook for ~20 minutes

Add shrimp back in

Add in cilantro and Fluff everything together

Serve hot.

Lasagna Time

When I was a kid, we used to go on skiing trips to June Mountain with a few families. we would rent a big house for all of us to stay in. We always made a menu for the week to save money an not eat out every meal. One of the staple meals we would have is a frozen Lasagna from Smart & Final (CostCo like store). It was easy to make and filling for a large group. Other than on those trips, I never really ate lasagna. Now that I like to cook and with the new gadgets I got form Christmas, I decided to make Lasagna. Once I started thinking about it, I realized I can make almost everything from scratch. Well, I did and it ended up taking 2 days, but it was worth it at the end.

Oven "Pulled Pork" Fajita's

Tonight I knew I wasn't going to have any time to cook dinner because I had band practice for 2 hours. When trying to decide what to cook the night before, I realized I had 1/4 of an onion, 1/4 green & red bell pepper, and 1/4 of a jalapeno. I didn't have any meat in the freezer other than a small amount of pork shoulder that I had cubed left over from when I was making sausage. I decided to defrost it and think of what to make the next day.

Let's Get Saucy

I recently started making pasta and pizza dough from scratch. I usually make my own sauces just out of a can of tomato sauce and adding to it, but never just an all purpose red sauce. Here is what I came up with.