Brady Cooking Dinner

This has been a lucky week for me. Jason cooked dinner on Sunday and Brady cooked dinner on Wednesday. AND it wasn't just a regular meal - it was deluxe meal both times. I am such a lucky Mom!!

 I told Brady that he needed to take 2 days a week and start cooking dinners for us. I think it is great missionary/college student/husband training.

Brady's Foods and Nutrition class "final" was to make a meal for your family. He had to search for a recipe he wanted to try that was nutritious and modify it to make it more nutritious. He chose a recipe for "Shrimp on Skewers". He made up the shopping list and I took him to the store with me and he pick everything out. He doesn't like to go to the store - but it was HIS assignment and he needed to do the shopping.

Recipe:

20 large shrimp, peeled and deveined, about 1 1/4 lbs.

2 sm zucchini, about 1/2 lb (he changed this to lemon squares)

1 tsp minced garlic (only used 1/2 tsp)

1 tbsp. chopped parsley

3 tbsp. oil

1 bay leaf

3 tbsp. lime juice (used 2 tbsp lime & 1 tbsp lemon - because we ran out of lime juice)

1/2 tsp thyme

1. Cut zucchini into 1/2 inch rounds.

2. Combine all ingredients and marinate for several hours.

3. Alternate shrimp and zucchini rounds (lemon) on skewers. Skew the shrimp so that they will lie flat, i.c., inserting skewers through the tail end and the head of each shrimp.

4. Lay skewers flat on grill for about 4 minutes. Then turn over skewers baste, and grill another 3 to 4 minutes. Serves 4.

Brady is making the marinate. He is crushing the garlic. I told him that 1/2 Tbsp was probably enough. That was a lot of garlic and it was yummy with half of that. Here is our handy dandy garlic press - which I love. See the garlic coming out?

Squishing the lime for the lime juice. We only bought 1 lime and should have had two. We used a lemon for the last tablespoon.

We purchased a bag of frozen shrimp. We unthawed it under running cold water while he took off the shell and made sure it was deveined.

Twenty beautiful shrimp.

Then he put them in the marinate for a couple of hours.

In the mean time he chopped up all the vegetables for the stir fry. I had him separate the vegetables into two bowls. The hard veggies that need to cook first and the soft veggies that you add later.

1st bowl had carrots, celery, green onion, green pepper. 2nd bowl had zucchini, crookneck squash and broccoli.

He also made brown rice in the pot next to the stir fry. He added some olive oil to the fry pan and put the first bowl of veggies in the pan.

Then the second bowl... doesn't that look yummy!

Brady put the shrimp and lemons on the skewers. Next time I will have zucchini on the skewers.

They look wonderful. He did such a great job with this deluxe meal.

It was a windy day and every time he had the grill lid open the flames would blow out. Here he is brushing marinate on the shrimp as they cook.

His presentation! Brown rice, stir fry and shrimp skewer.

Ooooh it was heaven. I felt like I was in a restaurant. I loved the flavor - aaaaaah! Everything tasted great. I always order grilled shrimp from Sizzler or Red Lobster - it is my favorite. This was a great recipe and one that we will be making again and again. I've never made shrimp taste this wonderful - I didn't know how to get that flavor in it.. Now I know.....Marinate. Yum!

Today he has to give a presentation in class. Here is his presentation board. The assignment was to create your own company, frozen meal for the diet conscience. He had to design the way the food would be in the box, the box artwork, the nutrition data for the meal and the price.

Because we are kind of "over the top" weird people - he spend hours and hours on his assignment. He stressed out last night making sure he had all the information ready for his presentation. I am sure it will be wonderful! That was quite the assignment. It probably took him 10 or 11 hours for the assignment. Two evenings. One shopping and making the dinner. The next night he put it together. The biggest thing was making the nutrition information that you find on a product you buy in the store. Then he had to write down what he was going to say. He did a beautiful job on his poster display and I could hear him in his room last night saying out loud his presentation. He's such a great kid!

Thanks for a yummy dinner. Because you are such a great cook - your new assignment is dinner 2 times a week. Love ya!