Vegetable Orzo creation

One night last week Ryan and I were throwing dinner together and it didn't seem like we had much food in our pantry.  We had some pork chops and Ryan was in charge of those (that can be a separate post) and I took the challenge of figuring out the side dishes.  We had a few bags of frozen veggies and I found some orzo in the pantry and an idea was born!! It was a very quick and easy meal.  While the orzo was cooking according to the package instructions I roughly chopped a shallot and some fresh mint.   When the orzo was almost finished I put the veggies in the microwave (it was the Steamfresh veggies bag, Asian medley).  Once the orzo was done, I drained the orzo and the added the veggies and orzo back in to the sauce pan along with some olive oil.  I added the shallots, lots of garlic and mint and stirred everything together.  After I drained the orzo, I turned the burner down to low heat so all of the ingredients could warm together.  Then I just started playing around with flavors, I added about a 1/2 cup of white wine, salt and pepper, crushed red pepper, and parsley.  After I added all of that and stirred everything around it tasted pretty good, but it definitely was missing something.  Next time I might try adding lemon juice and maybe some lemon zest, but we were fresh out of lemons, so instead I added some white wine vinegar and it brightened up the entire dish.  The dish turned out really great and it has been really good for leftovers!  The mint was a nice addition, it really added a nice fresh flavor to the dish and the white wine vinegar is a must.  Next time I want to use fresh veggies, but the frozen veggies made this a quick and easy weeknight meal. 

Some Good Things, some bad things

A few weeks ago when it FINALLY started to get warm out, we bought some steaks and we were ready to get the grill going. We also bought some shallots at the store and I wanted to use them in some sort of pasta dish. I'm not trying to be mean, but the steak and the grilled onion did not turn out very good, but the pasta dish was actually pretty good especially for totally winging it.
Ryan seasoned the steak with a lot of things, too much seasoning which was the reason it wasn't very good. Some of the seasoning was jerk seasoning I bought in Jamaica and other spicy things. It was waaayy to spicy for me so I didn't eat much of it. The other thing we made was grilled red onions. We have done this before and it is really good, grilling the onion brings out all of the sweetness and I swear it's better than any fried onion ring I've ever had. We made the mistake of just cutting the large red onion in half and grilling it. We made a balsamic dressing to pour over the grilled onion, but that couldn't save it either. It didn't cook all of the way and I don't really enjoy chomping on raw onion, so I didn't really eat much of that either....
My "winging it" shallot pasta actually turned out really well. I started by sauteing shallots in about a 1/3 cup of olive oil and once those had softened a bit, I added fresh garlic, minced. I did a trick that Ryan does when seasoning a sauce, I added crushed red pepper flakes to the hot oil and let the red pepper flakes flavor the oil instead of just having every other bite be spicy. Once the shallots and garlic were nicely cooked I added about a half cup of white wine and I also added basil and lemon zest. After the penne was finished cooking I drained it and added it straight to the saute pan to combine with the olive, shallots, wine and herbs. I added a little more wine and some lemon juice and let that flavors heat through a few minutes and it was ready to serve! Once in a serving dish I grated some Parmesan cheese on top. I must say, the pasta turned out great, it was a light sauce but the flavors of the white wine, lemon juice worked really well together.

We also made some green beans and just seasoned it simply with salt, pepper and olive oil.

We learned some lessons in this meal and proved that we are still foodies in training.