My first night home, I was greeted with the delicious fettuccini with sausage and peppers, one of my personal favorites.

For dinner the next night I had a delicious chicken cordon bleu sandwich on ciabatta bread.  My mom made her own version of this this summer based on a Rachael Ray recipe.  It was paired with some sweet and sour cabbage which was soooo good!  Not pictured is the apple crisp she made for dessert.

Saturday for lunch we headed to a delicious barbeque joint called John Hardy’s.  I don’t have a picture of that, but I had a pork plate with their amazing JoJo potatoes, some corn, and garlic toast.  Yum!  That night my mom made me Chicken Tetrazzini, green beans, and toast.

For breakfast on Sunday my mom made French toast with homemade syrup (raspberry and boysenberry) and bacon (not pictured).  For lunch on Sunday, before I left my mom made one of my favorite foods, chili!  I always eat it with yellow corn chips and it is delicious!

That wraps up my delicious weekend eats.  Now do you see why I never want to leave?  Of course, it’s mostly spending time with my parents that I miss, but many times we spend time together eating, so the food definitely play a big factor.  What foods remind you of your family?

I ordered the Fried Fish Po’ Boy sandwich. My boyfriend had to have the Soft Shell Crab Sandwich. Both were amazing. See?

Both sandwiches had a little bit of hot sauce on them as well as sea salt and then the extra fixings. They were perfectly fried without being too greasy or overly crunchy. The sea salt made all the difference and the hot sauce made them really unique. I have to say the crab sandwich was stellar. I had never had real crab before since Minnesota is nowhere near any coast, and man I had no idea what I was missing! It was so tender and juicy and had so much more flavor than I expected. The texture was amazing. I could eat it every day!

Overall we rated the whole experience a 7.5. The ambiance of the place was fun and very casual and the food was great. I just thought that maybe it needed a little something extra to make it truly unique. I guess the fact that it is a seafood place in the middle of Minnesota makes it unique, but there are over 10,000 lakes here, so it’s not like we don’t have seafood. I also like when my food comes with something on the side. It is really hard for me to order something that doesn’t offer anything but the main dish because I like a variety when I go somewhere new. The crab sandwich came with coleslaw and a slice of honeydew (which my boyfriend kindly shared), but my fish sandwich was all alone. It was a huge sandwich that definitely filled me up, but I would have loved just something else to thrill my taste buds with on the side.

If you ever stop by the Twin Cities between April and October, I would definitely recommend this place.

What’s your favorite way to eat seafood? Any good seafood recipes a poor college student would be able to make?

Homemade pizza! My mom has been perfecting her pizza for many years. She makes a special crust now with special flour imported from Italy. She’s a phenomenal cook, and I am so lucky. Why am I leaving again?

Luckily, my priorities are in the right place and I have decided that an education is worth more than good home cooking (although I do cook for myself at school, it’s never as good as eating at home), but once I graduate, it’s back to my hometown (at least for a while, I hope) where I can mooch off my mom’s good cooking as much as possible! I guess that’s something to look foward to, right?