Wednesday: Meal 3 – Tofu Pad Thai

By the time Wednesday rolled around I have to admit I was pretty exhausted. Late night dinners, grocery store guessing games and relationship tightrope walking had all taken a lot out of me. That being said I was really looking forward to Wednesday’s meal as my friends Justin and Alex were hosting us over at their place. This meant way less stress and way more wine.

Justin is a vegetarian and part of the inspiration for my 1 month vegetarian goal later this August so I was excited to try out this veggie dish as I think I’ll be eating a lot of it later this year.

Surprisingly this dish was extremely easy to make. We started by making a simple home made Thai sauce, boiled some pad Thai noodles, then fried a combination of Tofu squares, garlic, chillies, ginger, and green onions. We cracked in and fried an egg on the side, and served with bean sprouts, crushed peanuts and a lime wedge. Boom, done!

The entire process took maybe 20 minutes. It was unbelievable… Maybe these veg-heads actually had something here… And most surprisingly, it was actually pretty tasty! I mean I can’t speak for all vegitarian meals (of which I’m sure like carnivorous meals there is a sliding scale of quality) but this one I would actually make again.

Lessons Learned:

• Cooking at your friends house is Way nicer than cooking at home.
• Cut out the protein and shave 20-30 minutes off your cooking time. This is a great hack for good, healthy, tasty meals that don’t take long at all to prepare.

Here is the recipe link, just substitute Tofu with the diced chicken breasts.

Thursday: Meal 4 – Slow Cooker Chicken Fajitas

One easy Tofu meal later and I was feeling refreshed and back in the game. I was hoping to orchestrate another layup for Thursday night as I had our monthly Jr Chamber meeting at 7pm so I wouldn’t be home to attempt something too fancy.

I decided to try my luck with a slow cooker meal. After all they seemed easy enough and a set it and forget it dinner was exactly what I needed. I found a simple recipe for Slow Cooker Chicken Fajitas from tiphero.com the same site I had good luck from at the beginning of the week.  The only problem, I again didn’t have all the ingredients to make this happen and this time I had an added complication. My coworker had come down with the flu and had called in sick to work that morning so not only did I not have the ingredients, I was also trapped at work all day and couldn’t start my slow cooker…

I sat at work all morning struggling to figure out a solution to my problem. I couldn’t get to my slow cooker but maybe I could get my slow cooker brought to me, I thought. I made some phone calls and managed to bribe a friend to swing by my place to grab my slow cooker and my missing ingredients I needed. At about 3:30 it had slowed down at work so I could jump into the back and quickly dice up my veggies and chicken breasts and tossed them in with the other ingredients.

I was ecstatic! My slow cooker was on, my dinner was warming, I had won.

Unfortunately I ran into one more problem. The recipe called for the slow cooker to be on either high for 4 hours or low for 6. It was now 4pm and I needed to be at my meeting for 7pm, only giving my meal 3 hours to cook…

No big deal I thought, I’m off at 6pm so I’ll bring it home and turn it on low before I leave. My girlfriend Brittney was off at 8:30 so she can pull it out when she gets home.

Again I confidently thought I had won. I brought my slow cooker home after work and plugged it back in, I flicked the knob to low and headed out the door for my meeting.

At 9:30 I got home to this:

Brit unfortunately ran late getting off of work so by the time she got home and turned it off it was closer to 9pm.

To be honest it still tasted pretty good but the chicken had dried out quite a bit and rather than crispy chicken fajitas everything looked a more like fajita soup.

Lessons Learned:

• Slow cookers are a fickle beast. They are great when used on low for slow roasting but when you try and rush them or leave them on too long they can have disastrous results. A friend sent me a slow cooker hack after I posted the above image on Facebook: If your slow cooker doesn’t have a timer on it go to Home Hardware (or whatever local hardware shop you have) and buy an automatic plug timer for $8.99. Plug your slow cooker in and voila, fancy slow cooker with an automatic shutoff.

Here is the link to the recipe, maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.