Friday, August 26, 2011

Dashing Dishes - April and May

I'm still just LOVING Dashing Dishes. We went for our August session, and we were a well-trained, efficient team: to the community centre, assembled, and home with everything in the freezer in HALF AN HOUR, people! It doesn't get much faster then that. We have a really good system - we get our bag of meat from the girl, go to the station, and one of us works the ingredients from left to right, and the other from right two left. If it's a two-bag dish, we split up and do a bag each. Then Trevor closes everything up while I get the instruction label, and then he takes it out to the cooler while I go get the meat for our next dish. We are an impressive example of teamwork, if I do say so myself. :)

In April we had two dishes with pesto - cavatappi with mushrooms, and scallops. I must just not be a pesto fan, because I didn't like either of them at all. The cavatappi is fun though - a twisty, spiralled type of pasta that I did like. We had Chinese BBQ Pork, cooked in the crockpot that we weren't a fan of, because the meat was too dry. I'm finding that common theme with most of their crockpot pork dishes, so we're going to try to stay away from those, as well as from the Pineapple Chicken, which was simply uninspiring.

We did enjoy the Greek Shrimp, although we left out the cheese sauce that came with it, and the Pizzaiola Pork. My only complaint about the Pizzaiola Pork is that it didn't re-heat well, although it was quite tasty the night we made it.

The big hits in April were the Hong Kong Chicken Drumsticks and the Smothered Roast Beef - both were excellent, and we'd definitely make them again.

In May we had really good results, except for the Maple Glazed Pork, which wasn't a favourite, although doing it in the oven made it turn out better then some of the other pork ones we've tried.

We really liked the Honey and Garlic Beef Stir Fry, the Parmesan Crusted Pork Chops, the Savory Chicken Drumsticks, the Slow Cooker Beef Roast, and the Thai Chicken with Basil.

However, we loved the Zesty Sauced Ribs. Meaty, saucy ribs stewed in the crockpot all day...they were divine. We could have eaten them every day that week!

We didn't do a session in June, because it fell while we were on holidays, and we actually still have one of the July dishes left, which is right now thawing in the fridge for dinner tomorrow. It needs to be baked in the oven for an hour, which made it not such an idea candidate for a work night dinner. So stay tuned for another Dashing Dishes post in a month or so, when we're done with the August dinners we just made!

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