Ideas for a Cinco de Mayo Party or When You Just Want Some Mexican Food

If you are planning to have a Cinco de Mayo party or just want ideas for making Mexican food at home, here are some of our favorites.

Roasted Green Tomatillo Salsa Read more

Miso Marinated Grilled Salmon and a Giveaway

While doing the South Beach Diet, I’m working very hard to make things that we all can enjoy and are healthy. This miso salmon is one of my favorite recipes I’ve tried recently, and it’s easy and fast to boot, so it makes an great weeknight dish. The fish is marinated in miso, mirin, rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, and scallions, and quickly grilled. You can make this with either skinless or skin-on salmon steaks. Serve the salmon as whole steaks or sliced on top of a bed of greens, either way you’ll have a quick, tasty, and healthy meal.

We enjoy grilling year round, but some days it really is too cold to cook outdoors, and for those times we use a grill pan on the cooktop. I recently tested a Scanpan Professional Grill Pan, and in fact made this salmon dish on the Scanpan. You can read my review of the Scanpan Professional Grill Pan at Andrea’s Reviews.

For this final week of celebrating the third anniversary of Andrea’s Recipes, I have one fabulous grill pan (right) just like the one in my review to give away, courtesy of Scanpan. To enter the contest, just leave a comment telling us about your favorite grilled food. Read more

Grilled Fish Tacos with Mango-Avocado Salsa

I wish I could come home after picking up the kids from school and have time to cook a nice meal. I long for a calm, zen-like cooking experience each day, but instead I find myself chasing after my sons who prefer to run amok, trying to keep them from raiding the refrigerator and the pantry even though I fed them a snack as soon as we got home. We had to put locks on to keep the Three Amigos from eating us out of house and home. Yesterday’s meal was supposed to happen on Monday, but the events of the day and the constant distractions left me disorganized and frustrated at dinner time and I pulled out some leftover pasta sauce and boiled some spaghetti. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact spaghetti with tomato sauce and/or meatballs is Michael’s favorite meal, but I had a grilling recipe up my sleeve for Cinco de Mayo which I had to grudgingly postpone.

I thought I could start some of the prep for dinner on Tuesday morning, but Monday night we remembered Top Gun, our three-year-old, had a project due for school the next day and I needed to finish some prep work on that before we could do it in the morning. So Tuesday morning was spent cutting photos and pasting them memory-book style onto a piece of paper describing his favorite things, and then we wrote our story about Spike’s visit (Spike is the class mascot, a stuffed kangaroo) and pasted more pictures onto that story. Read more

Steamed Mahi-Mahi with Stir-Fried Vegetables

I first tasted mahi-mahi when I lived in Saipan, and I fell head over heals for it. Until that time my experience with seafood was rather limited, and I didn’t realize that fish could taste so good and have such a nice texture. I enjoyed plenty of mahi-mahi and wahoo during my four years on the island. When I came back to the U.S. in the late 90s, I was thrilled to find mahi-mahi available in Midwest grocery stores. Now I buy fillets in freezer packs from the warehouse club and keep some on hand at all times.

This is one of those meals that I almost never make the same way twice. It’s a great dish for cleaning out your vegetable drawer, and I usually just pull out whatever is in the frig. This time I happened to have some broccoli, bell peppers, and snow peas on hand, so that’s what went into the pan. For the wine Read more

Japanese Salmon with Soba

I saw this dish a few years ago on the old Food Network show Calling All Cooks. It looked so good that I made it the next day with a few modifications based on ingredients that I normally keep on hand. We prefer to use Tamari soy sauce, which has a rich flavor that seems to go really well with the salmon, but you can certainly user regular soy sauce. The original recipe calls for the sauce to be poured over the soba when served, but I like to drain the soba and then add them to the skillet for two or three minutes so that they absorb more of the delicious sauce.

We enjoy this with stir-fried or steamed vegetables on the side. Read more