One day, Rebecca and I will be ‘retired’ and on a beach in Maui.  We’ll own a small taco restuarant on par with the likes of Maui Tacos and Surf Taco.  We’ll grow our own avocados (uhh I paid 2 bucks for 1 avocado tonight; something is not right!) and continually make fresh guacamole.  We’ll serve all types of tacos, burritos and the like.  Heck, we’ll probably even open up a road side stand on the Hana Highway where we’ll sell fresh banana bread.  One can dream, right?

How do I do that by 30?

We played the “what do you want for dinner? … I don’t know, what do you want? … I don’t care, what are you in the mood for?” game tonight.  We settled with doing some kind of fajitas.  Typically when we’ve previously made vegetable fajitas, the veggies were bland — maybe only a sprinkle of cumin and cayenne pepper.  So we both agreed that these veggies tonight had to have some kind of flavor.  We briefly talked about using the packet fajita seasoning, but we both shrugged it off.  Rebecca had the vegetable fajitas at Jose Tejas the other night and loved them, so she set off to find a recipe.

And sure enough a few seconds later, she found one and emailed me so I could pick up the ingredients.  We settled on some peppers, onions, carrots, mushrooms and broccoli.  These veggies would be cooked in the marinade provided by the Allrecipes.com recipe (btw, how come all recipe sites are horrible?). The marinade was pretty easy.  I just combined the following ingredients.

• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 1/3 cup water
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 teaspoons soy sauce
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke flavoring
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

I let the veggies soak in the marinade a bit before I cooked them in a wok.  I especially wanted the mushrooms to soak in the marinade knowing they would pick up, and hold, all the good flavors.

The broccoli and carrots were cooked for about 10 minutes first since they were the thickest and would need the most cooking time.

Once cooked, I added the remaining vegetables and cooked for another 10-15 minutes or so in the wok — constantly stirring.

And after spilling a glass of water ALL OVER THE PLACE, we finally sat down to relax and eat our fajitas.  And then Macky started SCREAMING for our attention.  It’s never ending here at our house with our three needy, yet very lovable, cats.  And to think, we almost adopted a little girl today too!

Oh!  And I cannot forget about the fresh guacamole!  3 avocados (at 2 bucks each!  2 bucks!  each!), some diced onion, diced tomato, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, salt+pepper, and some cilantro!  So good!

As usual, we’re linking this up to What I Ate Wednesday at Peas & Crayons!

Pizza.  Yeah, I know, real original.  But hear me out.  Back in the day when I used to visit Rebecca at college, we always ended up making a quick, easy and cheap meal.  The pocketless pita pizza.  Say that a few times fast.  It was your traditional pita pocket (but without the pocket kind) with some pizza sauce, cheese and whatever toppings.  Slip em in the oven for a few minutes and time and time again, we had a great meal.

But it wasn’t that crazy good pizza pie that you sometimes crave.  And as we moved into the condo, we began making pizza more and more.  We would often pick up fresh dough from a local pizzeria, roll it out ourselves, apply toppings and bake as needed.  Even these pies, though, were missing something.  We like our pizza thin, crispy and well done; something that is incredibly hard to get using a traditional oven.  Doing some googling and what not, we came across the ever-popular pizza stone.  The stone did help our pies get a bit more crispy, but not enough. Our residential ovens just do not get hot enough like a pizzeria oven.

That’s when I got the idea to bake the dough by itself for a few minutes on the pizza stone.  This would allow the bottom of the dough to get nice and crispy without soaking in the moisture from the various toppings.

I typically bake the dough just enough so that it’s slightly turning a tannish-brown; as seen below.

I’ll then rub a bit of olive oil around the entire surface.  This allows for the crust to get even more crispy and well done; just the way we like it.

At this point, it’s time to get creative: add whatever sauce you like, whatever cheese and whatever other toppings you can come up with.  We typically go with Don Pepino’s pizza sauce.  I know, I know, I should be making the sauce homemade.  But honestly, Pepino’s sauce is the closest sauce to an actual pizzeria sauce.

Pizza with peppers and onions has long been one of our favorites, so it’s almost always a must when we’re making pizza.  We like to dice our veggies small so they, too, get a bit more crispy.

When we have fresh ingredients, we try to make margherita pizza.  Unfortunately on this day, we only had fresh mozzarella to use.  But otherwise, we would have put on some chopped tomatoes and fresh basil.  Instead, we stuck with the regular sauce and some dried basil.  Still pretty damn good.

And finally, we did get a bit creative.  We decided to do a white pizza with ricotta and mozzarella cheese.  Can’t wait to make this one again!

Now I’m hungry again, but I do have hockey tonight so more pizza making will have to hold off until tomorrow night!

ps- We’re linking up to Jenn’s What I Ate Wednesday party over at Peas & Crayons, go check out the other meal ideas!

My first post for Jenn’s ‘What I Ate Wednesday’ link party was such a success (and fun) that we decided to do it again!

I know there are some vegetarians out there whose heads are currently spinning. You eat fish? Well, yes, kinda sorta. I have never really liked fish. I don’t like shrimp or even fried calamari. My dad is an avid fisher so there was always a lot of fish around when I was growing up.. and I hated it. But I like Mahi, it is the only fish that I like.

So why would I choose to not eat meat but to eat fish? Well for me it’s the “I don’t know what kind of life these animals lived” factor that ruins meat for me. We eat Mahi and Yellowfin caught by my father. It has roamed (swam?) the ocean and was no doubt killed humanely, since my father is a huge animal lover. What, did you think I was just born like this? I was raised to respect every animal out there as another life.  Growing up we rescued cats, squirrels, chipmunks, birds, turtles, ducks and I’m sure I’m missing some. Though I personally don’t think I could fish, I know my dad does it as humanely as possible.

So on to the menu!

Mahi filets…

The standard broccoli…

Some peppers and onions…

And perhaps my favorite food of all time, mashed potatoes…

We put some melted butter on the filets and sprinkled them with Phillip’s blackening seasoning…

Then we put the filets on the griddle that sits over the 5th burner on our stove. This griddle is fabulous. Cooks great, super easy to clean and convenient. We also have a $15 electric griddle we’ve used for years that works wonderfully.

(ps- please ignore the filthy burner in this picture, if you can even spot it. We had a spillage issue somewhere along the way…)

Mmm buttery goodness, I never said this was necessarily healthy 🙂

We added the peppers and onions, which we cooked for a little in a frying pan (somehow cause of dirty burner) to the skillet for a few minutes…

Then all done! We skip to Mike’s partially consumed plate because we were so anxious to eat that I forgot to take pictures…

I’m pretty sure we’re obsessed with blackening seasoning. We now use it on fries, veggies….practically everything!

Be sure to visit Jenn over at Peas and Crayons for some more cooking fun 🙂