July 3, 2016

Cooking Together: Mexican Food

In our recent discussions about how we want to spend our newfound time, David and I have been trying to think of some things we want to do together.  So we had a talk recently about things that we want to learn or get better at--things that we can do together and that can be ongoing ideas that build our skills.  One of the things I mentioned was cooking.  I experiment pretty regularly with new recipes, but I still tend to go with convenience and easy meals most of the time.  So I'd love to learn to cook more and cook better.  And David was on board to try cooking some too (since uh, he really doesn't cook much at all right now).  So with a free weekend ahead of us, we decided to put cooking a meal together on our agenda.

We sat down on Pinterest Thursday night to look at recipes.  David mentioned starting out with Mexican food since that's one that we both enjoy and one that I cook a lot of anyway.  So we saved a few new recipes and I made our shopping list.  Friday night we went to the grocery store together and then we spent most of Saturday afternoon cooking.

I set out all of the ingredients and recipes for our 4 dishes we were going to make and we got started

This picture is of David opening the garlic... right after he asked "t-s-p?  Is that a teaspoon?" 
 We did lots of chopping fruits and veggies by hand and in my manual food processor
 And of course we had to photo document the whole thing
 Everything came together pretty easily--with only one trip to the grocery store when we realized we had bought lemon juice (in a green bottle) instead of lime juice Friday night.  And by the end of a couple of hours we had...

Shrimp, Mango Salsa, and Cream Sauce for Shrimp Tacos


And Cheesecake Taquitos for Dessert


We topped everything off with a few Mexican Sodas from the Grocery store and enjoyed a fun dinner for 2.  We thought the tacos and the corn cake were both amazing and we will definitely be making them again.  The beans were okay--definitely took more time to make than anything else and the outcome was only so-so.  I may try them again and play with the recipe some, but we will probably just stick with the premade stuff.  And the dessert was a good ending to the meal!

Overall our first meal cooked together turned out really well.  We had a lot of fun and made something yummy to enjoy!



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