Going to the grocery after school on Friday was a little frustrating.

In an attempt to avoid the I don’t know how to cook any of this stuff feeling, I decided on several recipes I wanted to try, made a thorough list, and Google translated several of the items into Korean in case the labels weren’t in English. Unfortunately, even with all that prep work, I was left standing in the seafood section wondering why I had to either buy frozen fake crab or an entire live crab in order to make crab cakes. I’m not sure if there is an option to buy lump crab meat and the store we were in just happened to be out or if it isn’t something that is sold at E-Mart. Either way, after contemplating the live crab and the necessary purchase of a larger stock pot if we went that route, Alex suggested shrimp. Duh, much less complicated.

Clockwise from the top left:

Random root vegetable. I thought it was a sweet potato when I bought it…it wasn’t. I attempted to make french fries out of it anyway…weren’t great. I still don’t know what the veggie is so I have no idea what I’m going to do with the other two I bought.

Lemon zest sour cream sauce.

Shrimp cakes. I chopped up some raw peeled shrimp and mixed them with red bell pepper, scallions, jalapeño, basil, salt, pepper, veggie flavored crackers, a piece of toast, and half an egg. So basically anything random I found laying around the kitchen. I then formed them into patties and left them in the fridge for awhile while I dealt everything else. The were quickly fried on both sides and served immediately.

Mustard sauce.

Shaved asparagus salad. I loosely followed this recipe, but added shaved parmigiano reggiano and toasted walnuts. I forgot that we didn’t have balsamic vinegar otherwise I would have added some of that too. Whoops.

Zucchini Fritters. Based on this recipe. Yum! And they were delicous with the lemon zest sour cream on top.