Dinner with the Queen

by Lauren on March 9, 2011

After work there was working out, and after working out there was dinner with the Queen. The Cuisine Queen that is! My friend Jill came over last Sunday for a Sunday Night Dinner, and we got creative in the kitchen. Jill and I love food and we love to cook. She is great at finding healthy and delicious recipes for us to try, and she motivates me to do more cooking. So Sunday night since I was already thawing some shrimp we decided to make Sesame Orange Shrimp and Broccoli.

Because we were modifying a recipe due to the ingredients we had on hand, the sauce was a little runny. But I will be sure to post the recipe once I perfect it because it’s definitely a recipe you need to try.

We started by peeling and deveining about 20 shrimp and coating them with sesame seeds.

While Jill made the sauce with orange juice, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, scallions, stevia, and sesame seeds, I steamed and sautéed the broccoli, baby corn, and bean sprouts in a separate pan.

We decided to cook the shrimp before adding them to the veggies, and cooked down the sauce in a separate pan as well.

Here is where the dish needs some modification. I think next time I will add corn starch to the sauce to make it thicker.

We transfered the shrimp and the veggies to the sauce, tossed it all together, and served.

I picked a Tablas Creek Vineyards Cote de Tablas Blanc 2009 to go with this dish because it was a blend of Viognier, Marsanne, Roussane, and Grenache Blanc, all which pair very nicely with the orange flavor in the sauce. I liked this wine as a pairing to this dish, but I wasn’t crazy about the wine on it’s own. It’s a fuller body, more fruit forward white wine, and I usually like something a little more subtle. But it was a great pairing with the orange flavor and of course with the shrimp.

I loved this combination of shrimp, broccoli, and orange sauce. It was so refreshing and light dinner after our work out.

And since we can’t have dinner with out dessert we made baked bananas for a special sweet treat. Healthy, SUPER easy, and absolutely delicious. Just slice a banana in half length wise, drizzle with honey, sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake at 350* for 10-15 minutes. The result is this warm, sweet, banana dessert that tastes like heaven. Try this please…you will thank me later!