Playing with Fire

I've mentioned before that I had an awesome meal cooked for me, and now I've had two. SWB has kindly cooked me two lovely and fiery meals. I've never flambeed anything in my life so watching two of my meals get set on fire was pretty awesome.

Meal 1: Steak Flambe in Rum with Mushrooms with Banana Chocolate Amaretto Flambe
I sadly didn't think about photos until after the fire was gone, but let me tell you, the drippings, alcohol and mushrooms were one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten. I just wanted a whole carton of mushrooms in that sauce!




This steak of course prompted much singing of the Steak and Eggs song from Family Guy. If you don't know what I'm talking about take a look.


Meal 2: Salmon flambe with mushrooms
I couldn't find tuna so salmon became the fish of choice, and in an attempt to get back the yummy steak mushrooms I chose mushrooms as the 'vegetable' again. It was quite a tasty salmon, rare on the inside, but thoroughly cooked with fire. We still used rum, but it had less of the sweet taste that came with the meat. This time I got pictures!




Playing with fire.... definitely fun!

Don't Trust the Gorton's Fishermen

Even if the commercials tell you to trust the Gorton's fisherman, don't do it.

It's a rare occasion ( less rare than it used to be) that I actually want to eat fish, but sometimes the mood strikes me, as with the recent tuna post, so I go for it. Meandering down the frozen food aisle, I found Gorton's Breaded fish fillet's. I'd been planning to cook something nice and healthy, but abandoned it on discovering these crunchy breaded fillets and I opted to eat them for dinner instead.

The instructions stated that 17-20 minutes in an oven at 420 would cook them up to golden, crispy perfection. My oven, as I may have mentioned, seems to be extraordinarily hot, so I checked them early. When I went to flip them over, I noticed that they seemed incredibly oily. Thank God I didn't fry them, which is what I thought about doing originally. I let them cook all the way, in the hopes that they would crisp up some more.

Sadly they were still very oily when they were ready to come out. The fish inside was pretty dissapointing too. You could tell that it was an actually fish, which at least was good, but it became very mushy around where the breading was and the overall texture was mush soaked in oil. Overall I found them pretty lame. Despite the fact that they look nice on a plate, I'm giving them a big thumbs down :(

Tuna Two Ways

When I moved out East, I bought a Foreman Grill at Target because it was ridiculously cheap and it seemed like a fun way to cook things. It was only $15 but it is also pretty tiny, which works nicely for my lack of counter space.

A while back, I also purchased a nice frozen, air-locked 3- pack of tuna steaks from Trader Joe's. I've bought their fish once before and it was pretty tasty, so I figured it's a good thing to have on hand. I rediscovered the fish in my freezer the other day and decided it was time to get them cooking.

The tuna thawed all day in the fridge, which only left me with the problem of what to do with it. I decided to test out the grill, which so far has been sitting in the box, unopened. I wanted to test out a few methods though, so I decided one for the grill and two for the oven. I have had this packaged thai peanut seasoning that I've been wanting to try out as well so I coated two steaks in the seasoning and let one marinate in a ziplock bag with oil, vinegar, onion powder, garlic salt and a little soy sauce.

The grill was a little scary because it was brand new and smelled weirdly of new material. I decided to test it out on a few carrots that weren't in good shape anyway. You can see them there at the bottom in the drip pan when I took them out.
It seemed safe enough to cook so as my tuna steaks with Thai peanut coating were in the oven I put the marinated one on the grill. It cooked up really fast and came out with those pretty grill marks. I think the grilled one came out just perfectly done.

The others were good but I think they could have come out of the oven sooner. I was afraid of under cooking them so I think I overcooked them a tiny bit. They still tasted good, but the grilled one was the perfect texture.

I really enjoyed the Thai peanut coating though. It had a really nice kick to it. The box comes with two packages and I only needed one for the tuna steaks.


I cooked up some frozen french cut green beans to go with my meal and I was done. They were a little underwhelming, but don't they look pretty?