Shari's Sweet Potato Habanero Crawfish Boil

I had some crawfish kicking around in my freezer at home because I randomly discovered them and bought them on my last grocery shopping trip. I thought of making the crawfish for Valentine's Day since they are red, exotic, and fun. I was so excited to make them however, that I could not wait until then.

I had so much fun planning it all, making it all, and eating it all. Of course, it would not have been the same without my dear husband Anthony and his good nature humoring me in feasting on this dish with me. I think I had a little too much fun with the whole event. When we sat down to eat Anthony asked me how we were supposed to eat them. I said I had posted a YouTube crawfish eating demo video earlier on my Facebook page that day saying that he and I were going to need it soon. I told him maybe he could look up the demo video on his phone for us both because I had never eaten crawfish before either. We laughed, looked up the demo video, and followed the instructions.

When we ripped the meat out of the crawfishes, I was surprised to see yellow. I thought maybe I hadn't cooked it all of the way. I googled a few different words and thoughts before finding a few pics that helped me determine whether our crawfish were indeed cooked. They were. The yellow that I had seen was guts, and I just had to pull some more of the meat out on the other side to get to the meat of the matter. Phew!

As for my recipe, I decided to just work from ingredients I had on hand after reviewing multiple crawfish boil ingredient lists online. Most of the lists included: crawfish, potatoes, corn on the cob, onions, garlic, sausage, lemons, water, and seasonings. Some even included mushrooms, or shrimp, or crabs. I wanted my crawfish boil to be original so it just worked out that I didn't have exact ingredients for the recipe. Below you'll find a list of the ingredients that I used to create my own original crawfish boil.

Shari's Sweet Potato Habanero Crawfish Boil:

1/4 Cup Cajun Seasoning

6 Quarts Water

2 Lemons

2 Onions

2 Sweet Potatoes

2 Habaneros

1/2 Lb. Cooked Ham

2 Lbs. Cooked Crawfish

1. Bring water and cajun seasoning to boil in a large pot.

2. Quarter lemons, squeeze juice into pot, and then drop lemons into pot.

3. Chop onions, sweet potatoes, and habaneros. Drop them into the boiling pot. Cover and cook 15 minutes.

4. Add ham and crawfish. Cover and cook for ten minutes.

Shari's Easy Meaty Borscht

Making borscht is one of the best ways to use red beets in my opinion, and since we had some red beets, I made borscht. Further, the Olympics happen to be in Sochi, Russia this week, so what could possibly be a more appropriate pot of soup to prepare? You know borscht is just "so" Russian.

Shari's Easy Meaty Borscht:

1 Lb. Ground Beef

2 Red Beets Chopped

1/2 of a Medium Onion Chopped

1/4 of a Napa Cabbage Chopped

3 Quarts Water

3 Tb Balsamic Vinegar

Salt & Pepper to Taste

1. Cook beef. Drain fat.

2. Chop veggies and cabbage. Add them to pan.

3. Add water, vinegar, and seasonings. Mix.

4. Cover and let simmer for a half hour.

Easy Fennel Soup

This soup was easy to make and fun! I had never worked with fennel before. It is quite delicious! I saved some for later to snack on raw. Fennel is quite exotic looking with it's huge edible onion-like bulb, bright green foliage that looks like dill, and fibrous stalks that look and cut like celery. The flavor of it is like licorice, only it's healthy! When you cook it down in soup with the beef, the fennel's flavor becomes so mild and comforting. This soup was so warm and satisfying Anthony went back to the stove for seconds!

Easy Fennel Soup:

5 Cups Water

1 Lb. Ground Beef

2/3 Bulb of Fennel

2 Cups Egg Noodles

Salt & Pepper

1. Bring 3 cups water and ground beef to a boil.

2. Chop fennel and add to water and beef.

3. Add noodles and 2 more cups of water. Salt and pepper to taste.

Two Chefs In The Kitchen

Let me preface this mess with, think about MythBusters. This particular blog post will be a kitchen version. I decided to post this story with pics after facebooking with a friend the other day and finding out from her that she liked reading my blog to see what I had tried in my kitchen and liked. That being said, there are also things that I try in the kitchen that I do not like. Maybe I can save you the trouble of trying some things that I have tried that maybe didn't turn out so beautiful.

This snack gone awry started with Anthony and I being hungry at the same time late at night. . . We decided to make a midnight snack. We sought to raid our cupboards. My idea: pudding and jello together. Anthony was like,"No." He pulled a couple different flavors of jello from a bag in the cabinet and started cooking first lemon jello and then raspberry. While he did that we decided that I would whisk some vanilla pudding up and that we would enjoy the pudding and jello, but separately, not in one dish. I quickly googled "pudding and jello together." Easter Creamy JELL-O Jigglers on the Kraft website was the first recipe I clicked on. Amazing, I liked what I saw. I excitedly began telling Anthony of my findings but to no avail. He was unimpressed and would not hear of it.

Anthony was thinking he was going to layer the jellos. I told him that they needed to set, and that he would need time between the layers. He said he was going to try to make a thick layer on the bottom and pour the second layer on top, and that he was going to omit a time lapse in between layers. He began trying to think of thickeners. He said, "flour." I said "No, maybe yogurt." "But yogurt will make it taste sour, what you want is pudding." And yes, I laughed as I said that. Finally(smile), he was like, "okay, I guess we can put some pudding in the lemon jello." "Yes!" I thought. The combination of the two was very good, and we stuck it in the freezer.

Next, "operation second layer." It started with raspberry jello. Ick. The stuff is a sickly sweet fake version of what raspberry should taste like. We again needed a thickener. This time we used cocoa. Yum. Chocolate raspberry. Now that was good.

The lemon jello and vanilla pudding combo had quickly set in the freezer. We did not want our bubbling chocolate raspberry combo to melt it. "How to cool our second mixture quickly" we thought . . . Anthony had the idea of spreading it out on a dinner plate. We did just that. I had to feed the baby so Anthony and I agreed that we would check on the jello later.

When we returned to the kitchen to complete "operation second layer" we were aghast. The raspberry chocolate plate looked like blood. Not only that, it was stuck. The chocolate raspberry jello had hardened fast and we were unable to pour it atop the lemon jello vanilla pudding layer. I should have just spooned the lemon mixture onto a plate and spooned some chocolate raspberry topping over it, but that is not what I did. Instead I attempted to mix the topping into the jello and pudding. Fail. Terrible fail. We both refused to eat what we had made. 

Gourmet French Toast Sticks & Chicken Sticks

Last night Anthony asked me if I wanted to make french toast for breakfast this morning. I said something to the effect that we had just eaten french toast recently. He said maybe I could make french toast sticks. I said sure.

This morning when we woke up, it was too late for me to prepare french toast sticks for Anthony before he had to leave. In the afternoon today, when I started thinking about what to prepare for dinner I decided to make french toast sticks for dinner. I remembered that we had a couple chicken tenderloins kicking around in the fridge though that I had been saving all week to create a sweet potato chicken curry recipe with. I then decided I would make the sweet potato thing another time after I go to the store for some more fresh ginger to complete that recipe. So then at present, it was on me to figure out some innovative dinner combo for the french toast and chicken so that the two chicken tenders did not go bad.

I quickly came up with the idea that rosemary and thyme would be the perfect herbs to create a fun flavorful finger food meal of savory french toast sticks and chicken tenders. After I got to cooking the dinner, I thought it might look funny to just serve one chicken tender a piece for each of us, and the chicken tenders were taking a little long to cook so I split them down the middle. My now slim chicken sticks mirrored the french toast sticks well. I really enjoyed the overall look of the dinner. I loved this fresh, new, edgy, dinner french toast entree.

Rosemary Thyme French Toast Sticks:

2 Wheat Sub Rolls

3 Large Eggs

1 Tsp Rosemary

1 Tsp Thyme

 Grilled Chicken Sticks:

2 Chicken Tenderloins

Dash of Rosemary

Dash of  Thyme

Food Shopping

Who knew that one could have so much fun food foraging, I mean going to the grocery store? Anthony and I had come to the conclusion that all we really lacked for this week's food supply was oatmeal, fruits and vegetables. I hurried off to the store while he watched baby Shastya.

When I got to the store I decided not to buy anything that I had bought on my last trip to the store. I wanted to try some new items, maybe some things that were a little unusual to us. Publix did not disappoint.

I perused the cases of produce making sure to miss the organic case because I did not want to pay extra for my food. Moving on, one particular case had a lot of interesting, beautiful roots, greens, and vegetables in it. I began bagging up some of these. After bagging a large bulbous something, I turned to the produce professional and asked,"By the way, what is this?" He said it was fennel, and that it had a licorice flavor and some other flavor but I forget what he said. He said I can find a bunch of great recipes for it online. I smiled, and said that's what I was planning to do. It's kind of hard to find recipes for an item if you don't know what the item is called, if you don't know what to type into the search engine.

Then, I moved on to find some chicken. I became distracted as I was passing through the seafood department. I saw a rack of crawfish. I started snickering. "Those are great," I thought. Into my cart they went, as I turned my cart, and trudged forward with glee. These would make a great Valentine's dinner being red, exotic, and all. I couldn't help but laughing thinking of what Anthony's reaction would be when I brought these frozen critters home.

When I got to the check-out, the cashier and bagger and I small-talked about food. The bagger asked what I was going to make with the pretty purple cabbage. I said I had no clue, that I was going to google it. She said her grandmother made the best purple cabbage with egg noodles! I said that I had seen a similar recipe on Pinterest, and that maybe I would make that with my pretty purple cabbage! I asked the two girls if they liked to cook. They said no, that they didn't like following directions! I laughed. I told them I don't like following directions either. I just look at recipes but then do whatever! Kind of ironic, I had a cart full of gourmet items and I was saying I don't like to cook from a recipe.

On the way out to my car the bagger asked if I liked cabbage. I said yes, that I had grown up in Pennsylvania, and that they eat a lot of cabbage up in Pennsylvania Dutch country. She said her family was from PA too.

I'm still wondering what one of the items is that I brought home. I ripped off a leaf and ate it. It tasted good. Food can be such an adventure.