Things got a little "cray cray" in the kitchen during our last Sunday Funday. Denise allowed me to use her camera to document that night's shindig, so naturally I put on my creative cap and started shooting random things at random angles - you know, in an attempt to be artsy. No, I am in no way expressing a desire to be a photographer; I just like to capture the little moments that make my life so rich, even if it's just using my dingy little Blackberry camera.
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| Yeah. Cray. |
Thankfully for you, you won't have to endure any Blackberry camera quality in this particular post (I can't promise that for the next one, though). In the theme of "cray cray," Denise discovered a recipe that combined two very yummy types of food into one shell - one taco shell, that is. Yes, we had a little Mexican-Asian feast of Orange Chicken Tacos. No, we didn't decide to just throw the two together to mix things up. When opened our wallets, avoiding the dust and moths that shot out at us unpleasantly, and found a yummy recipe that matched our college student budget. If you haven't figured out the general theme of my food blog posts so far, it's that you can be poor and eat like a king at the same time! How cool is that? All that is required to accomplish this is the research, the right kind of friends and loads of cheap wine from one's local Albertson's ... which was absolutely fantastic, by the way.
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| That's right, keep it comin', peasant. |
Our dinner consisted of orange flavored chicken, which slow cooked itself on the stove in an easy recipe our master chef Denise tweaked just a tad, making the chicken even more flavorful. I'm not going to lie, when I think of orange chicken, my mind directly goes to the stuff sitting in the tubs at Panda Express. I was trying desperately to divert my feelings away from that route, even though I find Panda Express to be delicious - but in tacos? Really? How could that even work? Well, I'm clearly not a cook for a reason, and the chicken came out nothing even remotely like your typical orange chicken dish. It came out juicy and begging to be snuggled into its own flour tortilla, complete with tomato and avocado chunks as a security blanket. With a splash of lime and our sidekicks, Spanish rice and a red wine from Spain, our table was a delicious Mexi-asian feast of surprising deliciousness. One of the lessons I've been learning in this whole Sunday Funday experience is that tastes, regardless of their origins or how it seems virtually impossible that they should fit together, can be brought together in an artsy culinary way. I suppose it is like painting; a counter of different tastes is like a palate of different colors, all waiting anxiously to be blended together to create something fresh and new.
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| Panda ain't got nothin' on Denise. |
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| A taco's best friends. |
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| Oh, the love. |
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| I'm sexy and I know it. |
It would not be Sunday Funday without an all American, heart attack-in-a-pan type dessert. Thanks to The Help, we decided to indulge in a caramel cake again, although this time the general consensus was to change out the yellow cake to chocolate. While the cake was an excellent ending to the meal, yellow caramel cake definitely takes the ... cake. Yeah. Something like that
To add to the "cray cray" atmosphere and the fact that I was wielding an expensive camera around like I was the paparazzi at a royal wedding, we had to throw in some random nerdiness. Hope you enjoy the rest of the evening in pictures ...
