Three so-so recipes and one delicious one

Since I have once again been remiss in my blogging and because three of these recipes really don't warrant their own posts, I'm treating you, readers, to another massive marathon recipe review!

The final meal in P's and my week of delicious dinners was pork chops with Carolina rub. I left out the onion powder since I didn't have any, and ran out of paprika about 1/2 tsp in. For the bbq sauce I used that same awesome mustard bbq sauce I used with Lloyd's pork in an earlier post. Paired the chops with some broccoli slaw tossed with Newman's Own light honey mustard dressing (so good!!) and a hunk of store-bought corn bread from Whole Foods (which was okay, but not stellar). Overall, an awesome meal and actually pretty easy, even though P said, "wow, this is pretty major for a weekday meal!" Win.

The next week P was out of town, which is probably good because it meant I didn't have to serve these next three dishes to anyone but myself. They weren't bad at all, they just were ho-hum with a side of blah. To wit:

Black bean-tomato soup with cilantro-lime cream was easy and not bad, and tasted better the second day. But not amazing and there was way too much lime in the cream (I used non-fat Greek yogurt instead of sour cream).

Halibut with lemon-fennel salad. Used mahi instead of halibut and shallots instead of red onion. (I thought I had a half a red onion in the fridge but it turned out to be shallots.) Paired with a take-and-bake wheat dinner roll. Eh.

Asian chicken slaw. Cut back on the chicken a bit since I had a 7oz (versus 16) breast in the freezer that I needed to use, no bell pepper, 3-color slaw instead of just green cabbage, used half rice vinegar and half white wine vinegar in place of rice wine vinegar. Also no almonds or sesame seeds. The nice thing about this dish was that it had a lot of volume for not a lot of calories--I generally ate ~2.5 cups at a time, for somewhere around 225 calories! The bad thing is that it made so much that I was really sick of it before I finished it all. Ended up topping with a peanut sauce the last time just to change the flavor!

So, now we are all caught up on recipe reviews. At least until dinner tonight...