New Recipes: A few weeks behind

I have fallen a bit behind on posting about new recipes I've been cooking and baking lately. Our planned trip to San Francisco and unplanned trip to Indianapolis have put me off my rhythm the last couple of weeks, but finally feeling back into the swing of things.

What I have to update: Thai Enchiladas, Pasta Salad, Pizza (with Jim Lahey's crust), chocolate chip cookies, Asian Surprise dinner and most recently, shrimp florentine pasta.

This past week my new recipe was shrimp florentine pasta. Sadly, I've never actually cooked anything with shrimp before and this was my chance. Luckily, it's super easy and tasty! This was am incredibly simple and easy to make recipe and we found it quite tasty, although a little bit spicy (whoops!). I added fresh basil from my garden (love!) but I forget that a little fresh basil goes a long way. Next time I won't add quite so much it. Overall, this was really yummy and will definitely be making it again!

The thai enchiladas were also really tasty and easy. Essentially, they were exactly like any other easy enchilada recipe, just with asian flavors instead of a mexican. We enjoyed it!

Right before leaving for San Francisco I made an "Asian Surprise" dish, so named because I knew I was making something Asian but didn't exactly have a recipe. I used ingredients I was familiar with: ginger, garlic, soy sauce and sesame oil and sautéed the steak with these sauces as well as the veggies and threw everything over rice. It was actually simple and easy but I loved the flavors.

For our 2nd anniversary I made pizza following Jim Lahey's easy crust recipe. The crust was really easy to make, but a little bit trickier to work with than what I was used to. The crust was very tasty but hard to bake. I used a pizza stone and followed the temperature and time directions, but my thin pizza stone was not up to the temperature task and I cracked my stone. I also am clearly not practiced enough with the pizza peel, which causes stress when trying to put my nicely topped pizza onto the stone. The pizzas themselves were great, but the effort to make them was a little bit much for me.

Finally, to go along with the pizzas I made chocolate chip cookies. These were easy and awesome! YUM!