Orange-Ginger Tilapia with Mango-Coconut Rice and Asparagus

Happy Friday! Since I'm occupied tomorrow morning, I thought I would send my message to the blogisphere tonight instead. You can already tell that John and I lead an exciting life. Our friday nights are usually spent making dinner and then watching a week's worth of TV in one sitting.

Side note - we got Canadian Netflix! It's like TV, but so much better, even though they only have the streaming aspect of Netflix so far.

Fun Fact: this week was sort of a historic one, in the grand historical narratives of both our educations. John and I are finishing our coursework this semester, and this week involved the final meeting for both our classes. No, that doesn't mean that we're at all close to graduating, but it's nice to have one more thing out of the way.
As I've said here before, the Canadian Mother Nature doesn't know that it's the end of the semester, and so it still snowed a few inches early in the week. That weather was perfect for the first thing we cooked:

Chipotle-Spiced Sweet Potato Chili
from the Tasty Kitchen, aka, Pioneer Woman's blog's blog.















This chili recipe brings in a lot of flavors John and I really like, some of which I wouldn't think to put in chili - namely, bar-be-que sauce. A cup of it. We also added chilis in adobo sauce, and hot sauce (per the instructions). The result was such a spicy chili I could barely eat it, except that I did eat it, because it's amazing chili. My only comments would be to eliminate the hot sauce and double the sweet potatoes.







Check out that vegan corn bread biscuit. It's a happy marriage between corn bread and a biscuit.









This recipe is vegan, too (if you use the right kind of Worcestershire sauce), hence the vegan/vegetarian tag on this post. It was clearly screaming out for some corn bread, so I made the corn-bread-biscuit recipe from Vegan Brunch.
It went perfectly!

Moving on...





















Here's a random shot of some citrus that I consumed this week. Long story short, I have trouble with motion sickness, and - you have to believe me when I say this - the thing that seems to aggravate it most right now is grading my students' papers. I have no reason to lie about that, since it's not as if I'm exempt from grading them. Drinking tons of lemon-lime water seems to help.


The citrus theme continued with our citrus-themed fish dinner tonight. All the flavors in this recipe are perfect for the warmer weather that arrived later in the week.

Orange-Ginger Tilapia with Mango Coconut Rice and Asparagus,
from Paula Dean of all people.

















Let me say first, I love Paula. There were times when I felt homesick after we first moved to Canada, and I would watch the DVD collection of her shows that Sargibso bought me at T. J. Maxx, just to listen to her accent. I've made several of her recipes and I own a couple of her cook books. But since John and I decided to change our diets last year, I've more or less stayed away from her recipes (hello, butter!). But this recipe is relatively healthy! Each of those tilapia filets is only 110 calories (they're from a jumbo pack of frozen fillets from Costco). Grilled fish with orange juice and zest, ginger, and a little hot sauce.




















The mango-coconut rice is the worst of it for you, but we at least used brown rice and omitted the oil involved. The mango cooked in the rice melts like butter but adds so much flavor. And the asparagus, also grilled, adds a little green to the plate with a very complimentary flavor. We saved some of the marinade and raw asparagus to make this again tomorrow night! It's a wonderful meal.