marvelous macadamia mahi-mahi.

(or a close enough approximation)

this is my last official day of this cooking experiment of mine. i have made it a whole week, cooking real meals every night. i have had some triumphs, and i have had some failures. i have found things in my grocery store that i had never heard of before, and i have bought them. i have learned a lot of new things, and have gained momentum and energy for cooking.

i have also become bored with my blog - i dont know how food bloggers do it, but i am getting tired of droning on and on about everything i cook and eat in a day. i might continue to post the occasional post about food, if it is extra exciting or new or outrageous, but for the most part i think this is the end of my short career as a food blogger.

but before i go back to the regularly scheduled programming (and by that i mean sporadic posting about complete and utter randomness) i have to round out the "week" with the final dinner that i made - macadamia crusted mahi-mahi with roasted tomatoes.

i shopped for macadamia nuts at a different grocery store than i have ever shopped in before. i found them in the aisle with the bulk candy, of which i bought none. luckily, there was another woman buying nuts at the same time as me, and i was able to watch her and mimic everything she did - i scooped out the ones i wanted into a little ziploc bag, i weighed them on the machine, and i told it to print out a label that said how much my bag of macadamia nuts cost. i did end up in line behind a painfully slow couple, but i bought myself a york peppermint pattie and did not complain.

the fish (which i am continuing to believe is really mahi-mahi and not just leftover frozen tilapia from earlier in the week) was surprisingly easy to make, and rather delicious. the nuts added a nice texture and flavor to the normally bland fish.

but the star of the evening was without a doubt the pineapple sauce that went on the fish. ooh baby was that some good stuff. i used the pinapple juice from my can of pineapple instead of frozen concentrate, and i left out the low sodium tamari (anyone know what that is?) because it was not on my shopping list, and i also left out the vegetable stock because it was not on the ingredient list for this particular recipe. i did throw in a dash of ginger, even though it was not listed in the recipe either, just in the directions. it turned out great. it had a very tropical taste, especially since by this point in the evening i had completely convinced myself that i was actually eating mahi-mahi.

you might notice the lack of any roasted tomatoes in this picture. that would be because there werent any. turns out i bought the wrong kind of tomatoes for roasting, so we just ate our mahi-mahi with a side of brown rice a la rice cooker. 

but since i had a bunch of tomatoes on my hands, i decided to do something with them - i made my own tomato basil sauce. we will eat it over pasta tomorrow night for dinner. the hubband is going to make dinner while i am jazzercising. i am looking forward to it. 

doesnt that sauce look great? i will not go into detail as to how i made the sauce or what recipe i (mostly) followed, because i know there is a good chance that my italian brother in law reads my blog and he might be scandalized at my methods...