Tuna Steaks!

Today was the first day of the fall semester for me so it was a bit depressing, but I cheered up when my mom consented to letting me cook some fresh yellowfin tuna steaks for supper.

The key to good tasting fish is to start with high quality meat. The fillets, steaks, or even whole fish should not smell fishy at all. It should have a firm, springy texture and if possible shouldn't be frozen. If the fish was frozen make sure that it was vacuum packed and frozen as to allow for minimal water content in the fish. Freezing fish with water around it creates mealy, mushy fish which is unappetizing.

These tuna steaks were pretty large at about 2 inches thick and 4-6 inches square. I laid them out in a glass pan to allow them to thaw and then poured the liquid off and patted them dry. I tried mixing a few different things to create my own marinade but couldn't come up with anything that matched what I had in mind. So I settled on using a store-bought teriyaki marinade and adding some honey; about a 2-1 ratio of marinade to honey. I marinated the tuna for about 2 hours before placing on the pre-heated grill. I grilled it for about 10 minutes and it turned out perfectly!

The honey gave the fish a tiny bit of a crust and glazed the steaks beautifully. They were flaky, a tiny bit juicy, and extremely flavorful. Best of all there was only the slightest hint of a fish flavor, it was so minimal that my mom even ate quite a bit and enjoyed it! The tuna steaks, garlic bread, pasta, and broccoli were a great finish to the day. Wish you could have been there to share!

Happy Eating!
"Chef" Slade

Chocolate!

Sorry its been so long since I've posted! A lot has happened lately that has kept me from posting. But without further delay here's the latest installment of "Kitchen Critic!"

My girlfriend, Beka, and I love to try new recipes and do our best to be Iron Chefs. Well the other day we were looking at a delicious book of recipes featuring that most wonderful of all substances....CHOCOLATE!

Well after looking through all of the recipes we picked out a few but then had to narrow it down to just one because we lacked some of the necessary ingredients. The recipe we ended up with was Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes! They are supposed to be scrumptious chocolate cupcakes with a molten chocolate center. Well they didn't turn out too good. They were edible, but not tasty. We didn't have any self-rising flour so we had to make our own using a mixture we found on the internet, that didn't work out too well. And we didn't have any regular size muffin tin liners so we had to make them extreme mini size. All in all they turned out kinda salty, barely chocolate flavored, and all the chocolate in the center had mysteriously disappeared!

Although we were disappointed we'll probably try them again because the pictures in the cookbook look so good! I'll let ya'll know if they turn out!

Happy Eating,
"Chef" Slade