Food is good

We're cooking a lot more so this blog may be about food for a while. In reality, we cook all the time. But recently we've become even more adventurous. Last Friday for instance, we wanted something spicy, cheesy, and that used up the 1/2 lb of frozen shrimp we had in the freezer. The result? About 30 min of looking through shrimp recipes until we stumbled upon this one for Portuguese Spicy Shrimp and decided to put it on top of a pizza.


We made about a 1/2 recipe and used Trader Joes whole canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones. Honestly, I don't think you'd be able to tell the difference, and the canned tomatoes come with the tomato juice that you need for the recipe. Otherwise, we actually stuck to the recipe. Our mini food processor (they're like $15, if you cook, buy one. worth every penny) was a real time saver. We were able to chop two onions, about 8 cloves of garlic and the peppers w/o 1) dealing with onion tears and 2) in about 15 seconds flat.

Although I'd love to say we made the crust, it actually came from Trader Joes, as well. After several years of experimenting, the best way to cook their crust is to pre-bake it on parchement paper on a pizza stone. Once again, if you cook or bake, especially bread, you can get a pizza stone at Ross for $6-7. We brushed the crust with olive oil, baked about 8-10 min, topped with mozzarella, smothered with shrimp, and returned to the oven for another 10 min or so.

The veggies you see are zucchini Spanish-style. Rather than do the eggs or the 2-pan hassle, I just did all the ingredients in one pan and topped with cilantro and parsley left over from the pizza (also chopped in the mini-processor). Our wine was a Chianti, which broke a bit with the Iberian peninsula theme, but was really, really good. Yet another $6 treasure from everyone's favourite grocery store: Trader Joe's.

You may get back to hearing me bitch about grad school and work, but for now I'll spare you the boring rants and just keep making you hungry.