Date Night Dinners - Don't Try This At Home!

12/12/2014 tringel 0 Comments

This week has been quite a doozy; I don't even know where to begin. In fact, I had an entirely different beginning to this blog post planned - that is until this week became more and more ridiculous. It began with my first power outage in my new "on my own" place that resulted in a nonstop beeping from the alarm system at 12:30 am, ended with a mouse eating through the wonderfully, gigantic three pound bag of popcorn I won at a silent auction, and somewhere in the middle of all that mess was a tuna melt for lunch that had no tuna on it and a phone charging (or not charging) debacle that is still being inquired upon. Let me just say, I am on the lookout for what will come next.

Now, as I said, I had a whole other intro in store for you. It went something like this:



Looks delicious right? Well, it was; it was so good, in fact, that it inspired Brenden and I for date night this week. Earleir this week I was craving sushi, and Brenden knows there is no stopping me when I want sushi, until I get it. So, we decided to splurge a little and have a nice lunch at my new go to sushi place, down the street. It has all kinds of interesting rolls that I am working my way through trying. This time I wanted something light, so I got a roll filled with crab and avocado and wrapped in cucumber. We both tried it and fell in love. We thought, this is so simple - no sticky rice to prepare, no fancy ingredients to save up for and hunt down, no super complex process to make it - why couldn't we whip up our own batch at home? And that is just what we did.

The rest of the post would then go something like, we knew it wouldn't be perfect and it turned out we couldn't cut the cucumber quite like the trained sushi chefs did but we got a basic roll and the flavors were amazing; it will definitely be a go to for us and makes a great snack; so on and so on.

But that was not the case. We have been doing date night for quite some time now, almost a year and a half, actually. I mean we have practically gone from beginner cooks to professional at home chefs, so why wouldn't we be able to expand our abilities even farther and not only create the added step of creating our own recipe of flavors (besides the basic, obvious ingredients) but also preparing a meal that we based off of a Professional. Sushi. Chef. For us? No problem. Please note the sarcasm.

Yeah, it didn't quite work out that way for us. Even if I wasn't having a week of ridiculously ironic things happening to me every time I turned the corner, I still don't think this would have made the favorites list. At least not this version, maybe we will try again...probably not.

Note: If you are new to reading this blog maybe you should check out some of our more successful dishes. My recent favorites are Butternut Squash Enchiladas, Moroccan Chicken, and Cauliflower Wraps. Build some confidence in us before making judgments on this sole post. Maybe realize we decided to make it more of a humorous post this week then another amazingly good, world changing recipe. Okay that might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but in all seriousness, we really can prepare some good tasting meals. 

If you are still reading this, you're probably all wondering (although maybe not), what exactly happened? Well, here is the overview. The crab and cucumber roll ups were going to be light and refreshing, so we wanted to add a little something more. We looked up Asian inspired recipes and after a lot of options decided we would make a few other little things.

We really do bring our failures upon ourselves. As if making our own recipe sushi rolls wouldn't be hard enough, we thought, let's add more!

We chose cauliflower tempura and a simple, four ingredient, cold noodle salad. Yum, yum, yum. Since Brenden was getting home from work before me he decided to get the groceries so we would be ready to go as soon as I got home, even though I had suggested we go together...numerous times. But he wanted to prove he could do it all on his own and get us started. And just like that, he didn't.

While Brenden began the task of cutting the cucumbers, I got started on the noodles and cauliflower. That is, until I saw that the cauliflower was moldy.

"No it is just dirt," he reassured me.

I was still convinced it was mold, and as he eagerly tried to rinse off the "dirt" and for once prove me wrong, he slowly realized just how right I was. So, cauliflower tempura. Not so much. But we still had the noodle dish and the star of the night, crab and cucumber rolls.


Well, everything else began to fail miserably as well. Turns out watching a Youtube video doesn't magically turn you into a knife cutting connoisseur. We couldn't get the cucumber to cut properly at all. After decapitating one cucumber, accidentally littering pieces throughout every inch of the kitchen, we decided we would just shred the rest and turn it into a crab and cucumber salad. Perfect.

But, we still had no actual recipe, and what kind of meal is a bowl of plain shredded cucumber, imitation crab, and weird avocado (that's right Brenden also bought, well not a haas avocado, let's just leave it at that). But we did our research, looking up the ingredients in similar dishes and drawing inspiration. Apparently not enough, thought. The sauce we concocted was, well, just not right.


But we still had the noodles, right? We whipped up the sauce for the noodle salad and cooked and cooled the pasta. Brenden didn't like the sauce for that, but I didn't think it was too bad. We still had all of the ingredients (except the moldy cauliflower) so I figured we could rinse off the crab/cucumber sauce and mix those ingredients with the pasta. Brenden threw some red sauce on his pasta, and made me an easy over egg to put on top of mine, almost making a homemade ramen noodle dish. Maybe?

Either way, after all that, it wasn't half bad. We still won't be jumping to put this on the favorites list, or even try it again any time soon (I need a recovery phase), but it did the job and filled us up with an interesting array of flavors.

"Ramen" Noodle Mishmash
I have listed the three recipes we took our ideas from, along with my recipe to the final "ramen" dish we ate. Give it a try, maybe yours will turn out great. Or just go from the original recipes. Either way, let us know what you think. Leave us some helpful hints!
Recipe adapted from: recipes.coles.com.au, Cucumber Wrapped King Crab with Avocado Emulsion, bbcgoodfood.com, Citrus Soba Noodles, bbcgoodfood.com, Cauliflower Tempura

Ingredients

• 1 package imitation crab sticks
• 1 cucumber, peeled and shredded
• 1/2 lb noodles
• 4 scallions, chopped
• Juice of one lime
• 1 Tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 eggs

Directions

1. Cook the noodles as directed on package.
2. Drain and rinse under cold water until cooled.
3. In a small bowl mix scallions, lime juice, and soy sauce until fully combined.
4. Cook eggs until easy over, or your desired cooking style.
5. Combine the cooked noodles, crab stick, cucumber.
6. Add cooked eggs on top of noodle combination.
7. Drizzle the desired amount of dressing (lime/soy mixture) on top of eggs and noodle combination.
8. Enjoy...hopefully!