food and friends: Coconut Shrimp and Sweet Potato Fries!

Baked Coconut Shrimp with a Spicy Orange Marmalade Glaze (sides of Sweet Potato Fries and Sauteed Spinach)

What I love more than anything is having the time to cook a good old fashioned home cooked meal with a friend. These past couple weeks, Sam has been my cooking partner-in-crime in making super delicious meals for dinner. This particular night, we decided to try our hand at a healthier alternative at a restaurant classic-- Baked Coconut Shrimp! When thinking about what to pair with this, we kept healthy by baking some yams to make fries and sauteing spinach. We had a couple problems along the way with breading the shrimp, but in the end they turned out alright. Overall, it was a delicious treat!

Great ingredients= Great Food: The Lobster Place

Red Chile Crusted Sea Scallops with Mango Tortilla Salad (sorry for the poor quality!)

Up until this point, I've only talked about places I go to eat, which is super awesome for me... IF I had an unlimited budget. But, as a jobless college student, I have to find ways to get my gourmet on without spending outrageous prices (yes, I just said that). A simple solution? Cook for yourself! Any time you go to a restaurant, their prices are based on the price of the ingredients plus a profit, so cooking for yourself cuts out a big cost and can provide you with multiple meals! Here's one of my more favorite meals of recent: red chile crusted sea scallops with mango tortilla salad and a citrus vinaigrette! Scallops are one of my favorite things to eat, so I'm a bit biased in saying that anything with them in it is automatically fantastic. But with seafood, especially, its really important to get fresh, well preserved fish, which is part of made this great. This meal was especially delicious due to the amazingly fresh sea scallops I got at the Lobster Place after work, right in Chelsea Market (of coursee). They have all types of seafood from fish to clams to live lobsters! They also have super yummy soups, sushi, salad, and sandwiches if you want to grab something quick (I recommend the spicy tuna wrap!).

If you'd like the recipe for this dish, head on over to foodnetwork.com! (link will go straight to recipe). It was lots of fun to make the tortilla strips, and corn tortillas normally come in pretty large packs so you can make extra to snack on. The viniagrette was delicious, and the salad was great for a second day meal. This recipe is definitely good ol' Bobby Flay at his best.

Other than that, midterms are over! I've been a bit quiet in the past week as a result of locking myself in my room to study, but expect a lot more reviews and cooking posts soon! Restaurants/Recipes up to bat include: Baked Coconut Shrimp, Sauteed Shrimp, Artichoke Pizza from Artichoke, and the God of sandwiches, the #4 with eggplant from Tino's. Get excited!