Pretty plates are an auspicious start
E and I have definitely made up for our last dinner fail. E was a little bit of a show off. She made a zucchini and yellow squash spaghetti from Mel’s Kitchen Cafe AND rosemary garlic pork chops from Redbook Magazine. While I’m sure she thought she could do it all on her own, I did my part by making asiago shrimp bisque from How Sweet It Is. Because it looks better than it sounds, I’m going to tell most of the rest of this story in a series of pictures.
Asiago Shrimp Bisque!
Before the immersion blender attacks.
Cut up bits of shrimp and leeks
Big bowl of asiago cheese
Here I’d like to note that The New Best Recipe book recommends you puree the shrimp with it’s shell because that’s where the flavor is. But, because the shell, once pureed, is more dangerous than delicious to swallow, you’re supposed to strain the pureed shrimp and shell out of the soup before serving. My favorite part of bisque is little bits of yummy surprise shrimp in each bite, so I didn’t cook the soup with the shrimp shells. I thought there was plenty of flavor.
Zucchini and Yellow Spaghetti Squash
Erika arrives!
Erika hard at work. She’s on a mission.
She’s racing the sunset
There is not enough squash
Rosemary Garlic Pork Chops
Fancy pork chops
Et Voila! Dinner Assembled!
So far, none of our dinners have been complete without some kind of new cocktail. This time I had to make use of a ginger simple syrup that I made because of the pound of ginger E brought over to my apartment the week before. Simple syrup is truly simple. 1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of water, boil until sugar has dissolved. To flavor it … you put in whatever you’re flavoring it with (in my case, a pound of ginger).
By the time E got to my house, the ginger simple syrup was cooled off and I had to find a cocktail that needed simple syrup. I settled on something called New Orleans Buck that I found on yummly.com. As you can see, I used mango orange juice in place of orange juice because that’s what we had. It was good.
Ginger Simple Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 lb ginger, peeled and sliced
Put the sugar, water and ginger in a pot. Heat the water until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and let sit for a half hour. Then strain the ginger out of the syrup and chill. Enjoy!
Dueling Dinners 