Seafood is always a nice treat. Seafood is somewhat available where I live, but it’s not always fresh or terribly affordable. For that reason I find flash frozen seafood to be both affordable and just as good in quality as fresh. Seafood goes great with oil, that’s what there are so many recipes for seafood with an oil and butter sauce. This tilapia and shrimp also have a very light flavor, so adding chives adds a nice flavor that might get lost if you choose a stronger fish like salmon.This recipe takes only as long as it takes to cook your noodles. The tilapia cooks up very fast and the shrimp, if frozen and pre-cooked, only takes about a minute to cook before you’ll have to start worrying about over cooking. This recipe made 4 Adult sized servings.
1. Begin boiling water and cooking pasta of your choice. Add oil to a frying pan and place over medium heat. Once hot add tilapia and butter. Cook for 2 minutes, then flip and cook for another 2 minutes.
2. Break up tilapia into large chunks. Add the shrimp, coat, and heat until warmed, Stir in Chives, then remove from heat. Strain pasta, plate, then top with seafood and some oil. Top with grated parmesan if desired.
This Asian beef is easy to make and can serve lots of people. This recipe is also great for using up leftover veggies or to help use some things up from the freezer. This Asian beef is flavorful and pairs great with the rice. I like to place about 1/4 cup of meat on 1 cup of rice then stir it all together before eating. This ratio is my favorite and the flavor is in every bite! This recipe is very similar to Korean beef, but really it was just a way for me to use up leftover beef dumpling filling from the previous night. This recipe makes 4 adult servings.
1. In a bowl, mix together meat, sesame oil, oyster sauce, chives, and ginger. Mix together then transfer to a hot wok and cook until browned. Add any desired vegetables, 1/2 cup water, soy sauce, and garlic, then cook until vegetables are soft, 4-5 minutes over medium heat. Serve over rice.
Homemade pot stickers/dumplings are delicious. Sometimes homemade isn’t always worth the effort for just a few dumplings, but dumplings are much cheaper to make than to buy frozen. In the same way, it is also unnecessary to make homemade dumpling wrappers, but not everyone has a stack of wrappers in their freezer. This was my second time making homemade dumplings. Last time I made Pork Dumplings and they were delicious. This beef dumpling recipe is just as good. The flavorful filling is my favorite part of this dish, and the taste paired with the dipping sauce makes this dish even more savory and flavorful.
This recipe makes 10 dumplings, making 3 servings of food. I’m still not very good at making these pot stickers. We tried both pan crisped and boiled, and pan crisped were far superior with the crisp bottom being a huge highlight. Once the dumplings get added to the water, you cannot touch them until you’re sure the bottoms are crisp enough. This is tough because you’ll feel really nervous that the bottoms are burning, but they don’t really burn. One way to tell when they are fully crisp is when the starch web on the bottom of the pan is a crisp sheet. If you try to remove them too early, you will likely tear your dumplings, so patience is worth it. For this, I also recommend a non-stick pan.
1. Slowly add the water to the flour until a supple dough is formed. You may not need all the water. Once dough is hydrated, but not sticky, divide into 10 portions. In a bowl, mix together meat, half the sesame oil, the oyster sauce, chives, and ginger. Place 1-2 Tbsp of mixture on the homemade wrappers and seal.
2. Fill a frying pan 1/2 with water, and add the dumplings leaving space so they don’t touch. Place over medium high heat and cover. Cook until all water evaporates. Remove the lid and cook until the bottom of the dumplings are crisp. Break free from bottom of the pan, and plate. Mix together soy sauce, remaining sesame oil, and garlic, and serve as dipping sauce.
I bought this butter chicken sauce from Aldi about two months ago, and I was just feeling in the mood for some curry and thought it was a great opportunity. This recipe is simple and super fast! This curry is labeled as mild, but it is still spicy and may not be suitable if you/your family can only handle a little spice. Serving this curry over rice is a must, and definitely helps with the heat. This jar makes delicious curry with a few spicy bites mixed in! This recipe makes 5 adult sized servings.
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What You Will Need
1 lb Chicken Breast, Diced
Aldi Butter Chicken Curry Sauce
2 Cups Rice Cooked
Directions
1. Add chicken to a pan over medium heat. Cook until chicken is brown, about 5 minutes. Add the spices and coat the chicken. Cook for 2 minutes.
2. Add the sauce to the spiced chicken and cook for 3-4 minutes until chicken is fully cooked. Serve over rice.
This was a fun little experiment I tried with my husband last week. If you’ve ever cooked with venison, you will know that people love to add pork to their venison, and people love to cook with bacon fat. For this taste test, we tried 3 different burgers. The first one was just venison fried up with a little vegetable oil. The second burger was a venison burger that was fried up in bacon fat. And the final burger was half venison and half ground pork fried in bacon fat. To make this test fair, I served all burgers on the same type of bread with no cheese, condiments, or even salt! Check out my findings down below!
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Pure Venison Burger
The pure venison burger was just that, only venison. I made this burger on the side in it’s own pan so I didn’t have any crossing with the bacon fat. I used about 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil to fry this burger since venison has very little fat, and I cooked this burger for 4 minutes per side. This inside was medium well compared to the other burgers that were all well.
What did I think of the burger? Honestly I thought this one was probably the best. It tasted most like a burger. The other burgers were very good and had their own unique flavors, but this one was unmistakably a burger. To me, I guess a burger should taste like beef more than anything else, but you can chose on your preferences what you might like most.
Venison Burger in Pork Fat
This venison burger was also fried on it’s own in a skillet with some pork fat rendered from bacon. Like the last burger, I cooked this burger 4 minutes per side. This burger cooked well, though the inside wasn’t completely gray.
This burger tasted like bacon. The crisp and browned parts of the burger tasted exactly like bacon. The inside of the burger had a slight bacon flavor, but still tasted like venison. This burger was juicy and had a good texture. This was a very tasty burger, and if you really enjoy bacon, I think you would like this probably more than the plain venison. As for my taste, I like bacon, but I don’t believe everything needs to taste like bacon.
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Half Pork, Half Venison in Pork Fat Burger
Finally, this franken-burger was fun to make and had a unique appearance before cooking that I had never worked with before. I ground some pork chops to get some ground pork. I mixed half a pound of venison with half a pound ground pork, then I hand mixed them together to the best of my abilities. I divided it in half then cooked each burger in the pork fat pan for about 6 minutes per side because these burgers were the biggest. This however, left this burger the most well done of the three types.
This burger was the juiciest of the three burgers. Not only that, but it was a good tasting burger. The pork covered some of the natural venison flavor while also not making the entire burger taste like pork. It seems to be a great way to make venison taste more like burger. That being said, in my opinion, I think this mixture would make an amazing meatloaf, but it just didn’t taste like a burger to me.
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Conclusion
Each person could look at this and come to a different conclusion. If you like bacon, fry your burger in some bacon fat to make a savory bacon burger. If you like burger and not so much venison, mix venison with pork to hide some of the flavor. Or, mix venison with pork to get a delicious and juicy burger. You could also chose just plain venison if you enjoy the taste of lean venison burgers pure of other flavors. The important thing to note with this trial was that I didn’t season these burgers at all. Seasoning added to any of these burgers would have changed the test completely.
Inconsistencies in Testing:
How much each burger was cooked
For more consistent testing, cook to a set internal temperature
Bread Used
I used my homemade white bread which was way too big and sweet, for more consistent results, burgers should be eaten on their own without bread, or on a very neutral flavored bread
Amount of Fat per Burger
If the test is to see the difference in flavor, they should all have the same fat content. Fat is flavor and to truly judge which burger is tastiest, the amount of fat per burger should be equal.
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