Cod vs. the Crazy Life

I live a fairly chaotic life. I have one of those jobs that never leave you. I rarely spend 40 hours a week in the office and when I do, I end up spending much of my nights and weekends catching up on work I couldn’t get to or attending work events.

I try to plan better and go food shopping once every two weeks to cut down on cost and impulse shopping (never walk into the grocery store hungry!) but my schedule sometimes doesn’t permit it.

On top of that my boyfriend and I live in separate homes that we both own and spend our weeks bouncing back and forth from place to place. On any given day I can be found carrying around a rolling shopping bag filled with clothes, sauté pans, ziplocks of jewelry and other miscellaneous necessities.

Why am I spilling my guts on my topsy turvy personal life? No, I’m not pitching a reality show. I just happened to find myself yesterday in the fortunate position of being able to cook dinner at home (With all of my high-quality cookware and ingredients to keep me company), but also in the unfortunate position of having no actual plan or food for that matter. Oh, and we planned dinner for 6:30.

So, all I had to do was figure out what to make (I’m still on a diet L), pick up all of the ingredients, cook it and get it on the table in an hour and a half….ha!

Luckily I stumbled upon this fantastic cod recipe that required little purchasing on my part and fairly little time and effort (roughly 30 minutes). With a little bit of rapid fire cooking and a blind eye to kitchen mess, I managed to get dinner on the table in pretty good time.

The Mediterranean flavors quite simply sing and compliment the cod beautifully. I served it on top a bed of steamed spinach (though sautéed would be tastier) and tri-color orzo (Go full throttle on that one- make it with chicken stock and mix in some of the tapenade) but a nice rice pilaf and roasted veggies would be nice accompaniments.

V-Day Inspiration: Outside-In Lobster & Mashed Potatoes

Unfortunately life doesn’t like to halt for a better blogging environment and so the “Hors D'oeuvres” post I’ve been planning will be postponed until the end of the week. In the meantime, yesterday’s Valentine’s Day hustle and bustle inspired me to write something about one of my favorite quick and easy romantic recipes.

When I feel like spoiling my man (or myself for that matter) with a romantic dinner, I usually think lobster. But I, like many other people out there, can’t stand the idea of killing a lobster. It just breaks my little heart.

So I like to buy frozen lobster tails, you can order them online or get them at the supermarket. As long as you’re smart about it, they can be a great and (mostly) guilt-free alternative. Read this great tutorial on “How to Buy Lobster Tails & Not Get Ripped Off”.

One day, when pondering what to pair with my lobster tail, I came up with the idea for “Outside-In Lobster & Mashed Potatoes”—a quick & easy recipe that involves “butterflying the tail”, cooking the lobster using the method of pulling the tail meat out of its shell (but keeping it attached and resting it on top) and then stuffing the hollow shell with mashed potatoes, so the yummy lobster juices seep into potatoes imparting yummy lobster flavor.