I started my Friday not so bright but very early – when my alarm went off at 5:10 AM. I wanted to get an early start at the office so that I could leave at 3pm to start my weekend. I started my work day before 7am! I was in the car and headed to Wegman’s a few minutes after 3 o’clock.

I had three recipes to make for Friday’s dinner and they were all from one of my favorite websites, http://www.skinnytaste.com ! I just love SkinnyTaste and thankfully a lot of my friends do, too. We are always trying new recipes and reporting back to each other and I always have old favorite recipes that I go back to on a constant basis. During the winter I was using the crock pot recipes on a regular basis and loving them. I will probably continue to use them during the summer – the crock pot is a great tool to have when it is really hot and you don’t want to turn on your oven and heat up the whole house.

On Friday I was planning on making the Asian Meatballs, the Cauliflower Fritters and Zoodles for the first time. I was super excited about all of the recipes – but especially excited about the zoodles. After stopping at Wegman’s to get all of the produce, I stopped at Starbucks to get an iced latte which I hoped would keep me awake while I was cooking. I could feel that I had woke up very early and I didn’t want to fall asleep while I was cooking! I had a free drink on my Starbucks Gold Card so I ordered a vent skim iced latte! Yum.

I started making the meatballs first because I figured they could stay warm in the oven as I made the rest of the dinner. This was definitely my favorite part of dinner. I just LOVED the flavors of the meatballs and the dipping sauce. A huge success!

The meatballs were also super easy to make. I did all of the chopping (cilantro, scallions, garlic, etc) and threw everything in a big mixing bowl…

I mixed everything up with my hands, formed the meatballs and threw them into the oven. So simple! But when you are rolling the meatballs, make sure that your hands are wet – otherwise the meatball mixture will stick to your hands and it won’t be really smooth.

Once the meatballs were in the oven we moved to the cauliflower fritters. We steamed a head of cauliflower and I chopped it up once steamed. Then we mixed all of the ingredients together:

We cooked up the fritters on our non stick pan with a little olive oil and cooking spray:

I have to say one thing about this recipe. I did not like the type of cheese the recipe called for. We used the cheese that the recipe called for Pecorino Romano, and I didn’t know much about the cheese, so I just bought it at Wegman’s and took it home. It is a very strong cheese and it really turned the whole recipe into something that I did not love and this made me so sad. I am definitely going to make this recipe again – but I will just make it with a different cheese. I loved the rest of the recipe.

After making the cauliflower fritters, I decided that the zoodles would have to wait. I was exhausted from cooking for hours! The meatballs were really easy but the fritters were kind of involved and the time they took to make surprised me. So this is what my dinner plate looked like on Friday:

Two fritters and three meatballs. (The dipping sauce was on the side) I ate the fritters with some hot sauce. It was a very filling dinner! I think I will make the zoodles today to go with some of the grilled chicken we have for dinner tonight.

I am so excited for the warmer weather which means great produce and grilling – fantastic times are ahead, stay tuned!