Emptying the refrigerator (and some rambling)

It's been a long time! O_O

I haven't posted much lately because our freezer looks like the north pole and for that I've been using up stuff to be able to clean it. Not much shopping and not pretty pictures of what we eat, just plain boring but tasty meals. Its a shame you can't photograph tastyness!

Also, major house cleaning project has been initiated so if I didn't have anything interesting to show in the beggining, I don't feel like cooking until everything is clean. It's the longest setback I have had since I started blogging but it will probably be worth it.

On my next To-do-foods I want to try some inarizushi and the tamagoyaki again with or without square pan. I did find a way to maybe get the pan: one of my classmates lives in that town and she does over there for the weekend. It's a shame I can't go see it with my own eyes but just the trip would be more than I can afford right now (around 45€ which could be spent getting uhm, bento gear! or anything else at all)

School isn't going all that great either... I am running out of options to make a good exam at the end of the year simply because I'm tired of begging people to play with me... I want to get at least a decent mark which for me is quite high and I'm stressing because we're 3 months from the exam and I still haven't done half of what I need and the worse part: It doesn't depend on me...

Enough rambling about bad things!

I have plans for when the freezer is clean and all set, and I'll have plenty to blog about at that time. Until then please bear with the lack of posts, they will come sometime later.

Oh, I almost forgot. If you're looking for bento giveaways check Adventures in Bento making and Bento zen !

Pan-fried Shrimp, Garlic & Lemon

I'll be talking about a giveaway at the end of the post, stay tuned!

I forgot to take a picture at the bento box (tupperware actually) but I took one at my plate:

It took a bit to make this because I had to peel the shrimp and save the shells for stock. Underneath there's plain rice and the vegetables came from the freezer and sauté'd.

Shrimp with skin on, defrosted.

I decided to leave the end of the shell for better presentation.

For the shrimp, what I did was:

- Heat a pan with a little olive oil and put a small dried red pepper along with whole (slightly mashed) garlic. Let the flavour come out a bit and then start putting the shrimp (which had salt and some lemon juice) gently and flip it over until it's nearly cooked. Don't overcook shrimp or it'll feel like chewing gum.

Here's the shrimp just cooked.

As you can see, I didn't peel off the garlic because I like the flavour that it adds to the rest and prevents the garlic from burning too quickly. It's a shame whole shrimp can be so expensive. We can't really afford buy this, and this one we got was from relatives that were really nice in sharing some :D

Yesterday I was running through my RSS feeds and one of them had a "Win a Tamagoyaki pan"! I immediately read the whole post and wanted to enter the contest. I have been looking for a tamagoyaki pan for a while now and there are none available in my country :(

So, if you want to join the competition and give it a try, here's a direct link to the post. Thank you Sarah for hosting this event!