What became a PB and J Night...

Over the past few years I have had some real flops in the kitchen where Papa John’s has ended up with a late night delivery to our house. There was the infamous night where the beer cheese soup never thickened, tasted terrible, and then I severely burned microwave popcorn… and there was the night where I very unsuccessfully attempted to make crepes… or the eggplant pasta sauce that was inedible (ended up at Surin that night)… well you get the picture. Tonight will get added to the list as a dinner that just didn’t turn out. Now this one is a little different from the others in that in hindsight I should have know from reading the recipe that it just wasn’t going to be very tasty. I made Cooking Light’s Sesame Shrimp Salad and as everyone (except my Mother who eats salad dry – no dressing) the salad dressing plays a fairly key role in the overall taste. Well, the main ingredient in the salad dressing for this salad is fish sauce. Now, I do eat and like fish sauce when it is a minor ingredient in a larger more complex sauce that is hot, but cold fish sauce as the main ingredient… just not my thing. Just the pungent smell is really enough to turn me off from the entire salad. Now, some people may think the salad is great and it did have redeeming qualities like the use of mint in the greens. As a whole though this just didn’t do it for us and I blame the dressing. We had PB and Js and they were tasty and didn’t smell like fish. Russ rates the salad a 5.