Total time: 3.5 hours with two of us working pretty actively most of the time
Source: Master of the Grill
Servings: 8+
This is one of those days when I sit down after dinner and am the best kind of tired. Sean and I spent a lot of time prepping and cooking (and doing dishes and more dishes and running to the grocery store for a forgotten ingredient) but it was absolutely worth it. I don’t like shrimp but the shrimp tacos were pretty good (the people who liked shrimp loved the shrimp tacos) and the fish tacos were amazing. The asparagus had nice spice to it without being overwhelming and paired well with the tacos. There were a lot of different flavors going on in this meal but there was chili powder and lime in everything, so that worked nicely.
First of all, yet again, I adore our mandolin. It’s becoming a running joke for me to ask Sean if I’ve told him how much I love the mandolin while I’m cooking. Tonight’s miracle was jicama. Just cutting the jicama to size and peeling it was a lot of work, since it’s so tough, so making matchsticks would normally be a total pain. But instead, I did this is well under ten minutes:
Love love love it. Love. So much.
But even with wonderful tools and doing what I can to stay organized, sometimes I end up with a counter that looks like this while I’m cooking:
Today, in the midst of everything, I stopped and saw this and realized that even though this is far from my ideal work environment, I knew where everything was and what I needed to do next and what cleanup I needed to prioritize. It’s really nice to feel comfortable in the kitchen even when things are chaotic.
This picture was taken when we were getting close to the end of prep time. After prep was done, I was able to mostly focus on bringing things out to Sean at the grill and washing dishes so there weren’t a ton to wash after dinner, then shredding/cutting things to finish up the meat and the pineapple salsa. This pineapple salsa is my favorite thing. We’ve made the fish tacos (with swordfish, this time we used mahi mahi) and I had forgotten about this salsa until I started working on it tonight. It was amazing again and the recipe makes a ton, so I’m totally eating chips and pineapple salsa for the next few days.
And my sister is eating the jicama slaw with radishes and crema as a salad because it was delicious, too.
Testing the Test Kitchen 