Meatless Monday: Camping & Parmesean Tilapia

 
Phew! It was a whirlwind of a weekend! We headed out on the five hour drive to Arches National Park on Friday morning, after gorging ourselves on Kneaders French toast of course. The drive was long and hot and windy in our car without any A/C but we made it!

The weekend was full of destroying precious dirt, flashing teenage boys, cooking on the car's engine, and getting lost on the way home (on the one road that goes south). We survived despite forgetting pillows, very cold nights, and the threat of being eaten by wolves, cougars, and bears (oh my!). There are many stories and pictures on the way!

There were a few challenges on our meatless camping trip:

1. No meat, duh! I don't know about you but when I camp I eat hot dogs. If we decide to get really fancy we eat hamburgers. There is also a lot of beef jerky involved.
2. While the fire ban has been lifted around here it is still in full force up north. No fire makes it slightly difficult to cook anything.

We had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, trail mix, cliff bars, and lots of these wonderful little fruit packs. We brought boca burgers to have for dinner one night but the no fire thing squashed those dreams real fast. The first night we made nachos. Chips, cheese and refried beans. Spread it all out in some tin foil and through it on top of the fire. We had to improvise and use the car engine. A fire would probably work better and a whole lot faster. And when I say probably, I mean definitley. As for dinner the second night. After a 4 hour hike in the desert sun a peanut butter and jelly wasn't going to cut it. We drove into town and pigged out on pizza! :)

First camping trip without our beloved hot dogs and jerky was a success!

For this Meatless Monday I thought I would share Chad's new favorite dinner with you! We definitley go through eating spurts and get stuck on one food for a while, and this is the latest. Now before anyone decides to lecture me on what a vegetarian is let me explain ourselves :)

Obviously if you've been following along you know that we do eat fish. So I guess technically we are called pescatarians. Thanks Tay! ;) Fish are full of healthiness so we add them into our diet.

Ok, ok, on to the recipe! I found this on pinterest a while ago and we've loved it ever since. I bought the frozen tilapia fillets at Costco and thought I would try new recipes on all of them. Wrooong. We found this recipe and haven't tried anything since! Ha!

So give it a try, it's cheesy and delicious and goes great with a side of pasta, twice baked potato, salad, or garlicy green beans. We've tried it with the Walmart frozen tilapia fillets but found those to be smaller and much more fishy. So if "fishy" isn't your thing, is it really anyones?, try the frozen tilapia from Costco!

Tilapia Parmesan

serves 4

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs tilapia fillets (orange roughy, cod or red snapper can be substituted)
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 4 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• 3 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
• 1/4 teaspoon seasoning salt
• 1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
• black pepper
• 1 dash hot pepper sauce
• Panko bread crumbs

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line a sheet pan with foil (hello easy cleanup!). Lie your fillets down flat and brush the top with lemon juice.

2. Bake the fish for 15 minutes. 

3. Meanwhile mix together the remaining ingredients, except Panko. Spread this cheese mixture on top. Sprinkle top with as much panko as you like and continue cooking for 5 more minutes.  Turn your oven on broil for the last minute just to get the breadcrumbs toasty and crunchy! Keep an eye on them so they don't burn though!

A Crafty Weekend

Isn't it the worst when the weekend ends? Luckily for me I get a new holiday in Utah, Pioneer Day. I'm not still quite sure what they do to celebrate, all I'm sure of is that I got today off. I'm also sure that we used it as an excuse to abandon all reason and go on a mild shopping spree. It's Will's fault really though, we needed to get sheets for him to sleep on when he visits. Of course we went to Target to get them, and of course you can't leave Target with only the thing you went in there for. Here is my sad attempt at trying to get into Instagram. It took me way longer than I will admit to figure out how to upload this very important picture.

There were a LOT of craft projects this weekend. Lots of spray painting, painful trips to hardware stores, and one very long trip to Costco. There was not however, a lot of "meatless monday" cooking. The one attempt for Sunday night dinner ended with a pot full of burnt milk. Mmmmm, delish. Since I figured a recipe idea for grilled cheese was a little ridiculous I skipped it yesterday. Although it was fancy grilled cheese with tomatoes and avocados, well... fancy to us anyways.

Our first craft project all started when we found this awesome frame at our favorite (and usually overpriced) consignment store downtown. It was (surprisingly) inexpensive and we love, love, love it. We love it even more now that it's pink :)
 

  Chad spray painted it and then we went and took pictures up at the temple. Chad did his editing magic with it and we headed up to Costco to print it out. After 2 printing attempts, 2 slices of huge cheese pizza and 2 churros we finally had an acceptable picture. Since it was so cheap to print it out at Costco we figure we can switch it out whenever we take a picture we really love. We like how it turned out and finally have a picture of a temple in our home!

Project #2! Right above our stairs we used to have a big frame that held a bunch of pictures. It was a cheapy frame though and after falling multiple times it finally died and had to go. I didn't want to have to buy another one, as much as I like them I think they are overpriced. We started with spray paint of course! Chad painted another big frame that we had picked up at the Salvation Army. We picked up a piece of smooth wainscoting (had them cut it for us) and modge podge and headed home to craft it up.

I laid out the pictures, modge podged them all down, threw it all in the frame and voila! You could paint the background any color your heart desires to get a different look, but we kept ours white. We are really pleased with how well it turned out! We are also really pleased with how easy it was to put together! Love modge podge!

We also made a ridiculously cute jewelry holder but it's not quite done yet. This was far more painful and time consuming to make. The cuteness thankfully makes up for it. More to come :)