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New Year, New Recipe!

Monday, January 2nd, 2012

Okay, I really made this in 2011, but it’s still a winner. It’s also really simple and quick to make. The original recipe is from Real Simple December 2011. The changes I made are minimal and really just less pepper than the recipe called for in the magazine. Too much pepper gets caught in Bea’s throat and it makes for an unpleasant experience for everyone.

Herbed Chicken Cutlets with Roasted Winter Vegetables

I didn’t look close enough at the chicken I had in the freezer, which turned out to be chicken breast strips rather than chicken cutlets. It still turned out just fine.

Ingredients:

1lb Brussels Sprouts, trimmed and quartered
1/2 head cauliflower, cut into small pieces (about the same as the Brussels Sprouts)
Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper
1lb chicken cutlets
2 teaspoons herbs de Provence

Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil (I use the broiler pan because it has higher sides than our cookie sheets). Toss the Brussels Sprouts and cauliflower bits with a few glugs of olive oil and a couple of grinds each of salt and pepper. Roast until tender, turning once. In our oven this was 20 minutes.

While the vegetables are roasting, heat one tablespoon of olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the chicken to the pan and season with the herbs de Provence. Cook until cooked through. Serve with the veggies.

Jonathan and I both really liked this. Beatrice enjoyed the chicken and cauliflower, but the Brussels sprouts were not her favorite. In her defense, I did make them extra crispy (just how I like them!), which I think was too much for her. I have no idea what’s in herbs de Provence, but it had a great flavor. Oh and if you’re looking for another recipe using herbs de Provence, you should definitely make this pizza!

Posted in Cooking, recipes | 1 Response »

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

I’m not someone who often eats chocolate, but I do enjoy chocolate and mint together, especially around this time of year. I happened to purchase the latest issue of Rachael Ray’s magazine a few weeks ago and noted a delicious looking cookie recipe that involved surrounding a york peppermint patty with chocolate cookie dough. Just my type of treat!

Here are a couple of photos of the final result:

Now, I will admit that these turned out looking pretty good. However, they took a rather long time to make. Also, they were fairly costly and kind of a waste of a perfectly good york peppermint patty. For my money, chocolate crinkles are my chocolate Christmas cookie of choice! (I’ll be baking those up on Thursday if anyone wants to swing by for a visit!) And if you’re looking for a good minty chocolate, Theo Chocolates Peppermint Sipping Chocolate is excellent!

Posted in Cooking, holiday, recipes | 1 Response »

Protein Power!

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

I’ve been strongly urged to eat a high protein diet these days. Since we don’t eat a ton of meat around here and I’m still the same cheapy-cheap-o, I haven’t been eating steak each night. BUT I have discovered two new favorite ways to enjoy quinoa! Here they are:

Quinoa Hash:

1 cup quinoa, cooked
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 handful mushrooms, chopped
4-5 leaves of kale, stem removed and chopped

Sautee the onion and garlic. Add the mushrooms and sautee until soft. Add the kale and a splash of water. Cook until the kale is bright green. Add the quinoa. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.

What? Not enough protein? Add an egg!

Prefer something sweeter?

Quinoa Porridge:

1/2 Cup cooked quinoa
2 Tablespoons sliced almonds, toasted
6 dried apricots, chopped
Milk and cinnamon to taste.

Cook the quinoa. Put it in a bowl and top with the almonds and apricots. Pour milk and cinnamon over the top. Enjoy!

Posted in 2.0, Cooking, baby | 3 Responses »

Zaycon Foods Chicken

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to pick up 40lbs of chicken breast from Zaycon Foods. Zaycon Foods has incredible “one day” deals for things like chicken breast or other meats.  Now, we do not eat chicken everyday or even every week, so 40lbs of chicken would last us a very long time. Thankfully, I was able to enlist the help of two other families to share the load! The chicken is fresh and butterflied, so there is a bit of work to get it to what I would use for everyday cooking.

We picked up the chicken and it was placed into our car in a tidy little box. I didn’t have to lift anything! YAY! I was feeling pretty good about things. It wouldn’t take forever to get it packed up and ready. In fact, it looked smaller than I’d expected:

Not so bad

Since I’m a bit of a paranoid preggy-pants, I decided that carrying 40lbs of chicken was not in my best interest. I’m glad to have a swell brother in-law who is willing to come over during the day to help out! Thanks Patrick!

Once inside, we opened the box and found this:

Inside the box!

After the three of us worked for a bit, we ended up with 28 chicken breasts. Not bad! I made my current fave for dinner that night: chicken parmigiana (with alphabet pasta! Beatrice chose, naturally).  After dinner, I got to work preparing the chicken into portions that we’d use regularly. I cut the chicken into chunks/cubes, strips and cutlets. All in all, I ended up with chicken for 11 meals, plus the dinner we ate “fresh” that day.

Foodsaver to the rescue!

And thanks to my Grandpa’s wonderful wedding gift to us, that chicken doesn’t take up much room at all in our freezer:

Packed away

The chicken does have great flavor and it was an incredible value (only $1.49/lb!), but 40lbs of chicken is a bit much for this little family. I like a good bargain as much as the next person, but I think the next “great deal” we get on a massive amount of food will have to be something we eat more frequently, like chickpeas!

Posted in Cooking, family, friends | 2 Responses »

Summer fruits

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

It’s warm! It’s sunny! It’s finally summer around here! Hooray! One of the great things about where we live, and our neighborhood specifically, is the availability of free blackberries during this time of year. A couple weeks ago, our friend Brenda and I picked a half-flat of blackberries in very little time. Naturally, I planned to make several items with said berries, but we ended up just eating them instead. No worries. Jonathan took Beatrice to pick some more a few days later and I made some great muffins.

Muffins and coffee. A perfect combination!

I also made delicious blackberry pie bars, but failed to get a photo. They were just that good!

Beatrice and I have also been able to enjoy stone fruits lately as our snack at the park. Her favorites are nectarines. Just like her Momma!

Yum! Fruit!

The next mission: tackle the pile of marionberries in the fridge!

Posted in Beatrice, Cooking, recipes | No Responses »

Don’t Eat All the Avocado

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

Something you may or may not already know about me is that I really like avocado. When I had my wisdom teeth removed the summer before sophomore year of college, I mostly ate avocado (with Johnny’s Seasoning Salt, the way God intended), while I awaited the green light for regular foods. I like avocado with pretty much anything, but mostly alone with a little salt. Tonight’s dinner was delicious; I’ll admit that the trickiest part of preparing the meal was making sure I didn’t eat the avocado before it had a chance to be introduced to the other ingredients, but it was worth it!

Here’s a photo of the end result:

Perfect summer treat

It’s a great summer meal! No need to turn on the oven and you could really prepare the ingredients in advance. You should know I used this recipe, but failed to read the directions in their entirety prior to chopping and mixing up the dressing portion. No worries if this happens to you. It was still delicious without cooking the ingredients, though I think heating them might marry them a little more. Ours was a little too limey for my taste. This is easily remedied with an extra dash or two of cumin. Oh, I’m also too lazy to shuck corn unless I’m eating it off the cob with my teeth. I used frozen corn.

Also, Beatrice is now old enough to wear the little apron I wore when I was young. I love it! She did help by holding the sieve so I could rinse the quinoa, but she decided she would make a batch of scrambled eggs for herself while I was doing the boring bit of cooking the quinoa.

Little Chef

Posted in Beatrice, Cooking, recipes | 1 Response »

Recipe of the Week: Just a bunch of links

Monday, June 13th, 2011

Okay, so I have made a bunch of things lately but nothing terribly memorable. Jonathan got me the Food Matters Cookbook for my birthday, so expect quite a bit from that in the coming weeks. And here are a bunch of links to things I’ve made or am planning to make because sometimes it’s nice to see another blog/website.

Most of you know that I’ve done away with store bought salad dressing. We just don’t use dressing often enough. I’ve been making vinaigrette and this week tried my hand at homemade ranch dressing. It was GOOD. Nice and dilly and it was made from stuff we generally have on hand! I found the recipe here. I wouldn’t mind if I could be like Mary when I grown up. Except not in Idaho. It’s too far away from the fam.

We received our first weekly share from the CSA last week! Yippee! This means I will be searching for recipes for fennel. Oh fennel, you are a summer delight. Fennel Salad with Parsley, Parmesan and Lemon sounds delicious to me; maybe to be served with some fish?

A month or so ago, I bought a giant box of sweet potatoes at Costco. In an effort to use the sweet potatoes, I made sweet potato pot pie, which was really, really good. Except I read the recipe wrong and now I have both puff pastry and filo dough in the freezer. Classic. I think I’ll make some pear and goat cheese pouches. Mmm! And yes, that will probably be dinner some night.

I’m also looking forward to some meals consisting primarily of cheese, cut up veggies, and crackers. Because when you’re a grown up, that’s what you can make for dinner. I maybe also just made chocolate chip cookies for dinner the other night. I made them into oatmeal chocolate chip cookies so they’d be healthy. It was practically like just eating oatmeal, which is a regular breakfast food, so we’ll call it breakfast for dinner night rather than cookies for dinner.

Here is one of the latest photos of our little kitchen helper. She’s such a sweet pea!

Posted in Beatrice, Cooking, recipe of the week, recipes | 1 Response »

Recipe of the Week: Rhubarb Salad with Goat Cheese

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

As I’ve mentioned before, rhubarb was never my favorite thing as a child, but it has truly started to become more appealing as of late. I believe this is because I can get rhubarb for free. I like free. I like free quite a bit! I wish I’d had the foresight to take a before photo of the rhubarb, but suffice it to say that when I asked my Mom if we could get some rhubarb from her friend’s house, we had a rather large pile of it in the trunk on the way home! I didn’t really have a plan for how to use it, rhubarb just sounded kind of nice. Then I found this recipe for salad! Mmmm!

The original recipe is here and I nearly followed it. The few changes I made were to half the amount of arugula. So essentially we had more “toppings” than the recipe originally called for, but that was just fine by us! Oh and I don’t have white basalmic vinegar and it was just fine using the regular stuff. You could probably get by with any type of vinegar you’ve got in your kitchen.

Later this week, I roasted more rhubarb in honey and made a little snack for J and I with a cracker topped with some goat cheese, chopped roasted rhubarb and chopped toasted walnuts. It was delicious! The only thing I’d change is to use herbed goat cheese the next time. This would be a great snack to have for a little springtime party. Hooray for spring and fresh veggies, herbs and fruit that arrive during this time of year!

So there ya go, two great rhubarb ideas! Please don’t pay $3/lb for rhubarb though. Find a neighbor or a friend and get some for free. I’m hoping we’ll have our own rhubarb plant soon and you can just call us if you’re feeling like cooking rhubarb. Or just ask me to make something with rhubarb when you come over. That’d be good too. Happy cooking!

Posted in Cooking, recipe of the week, recipes | No Responses »

Recipe of the Week: Pepperoni, Potato and Broccoli Rabe Pizza

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

This past Friday, we had my great friend J over for a little adventure and some dinner. It was sunny! It was warm! We went to our local nursery where we perused the offerings for both indoor and outdoor plants and generally enjoyed the last of the warm spring sun. It should also be noted that I was a horrible hostess and didn’t hear J as she arrived! I was so happy that it was sunny, I was outside trimming some of our shrubs and pulling weeds. This meant that rather than wearing my maxi-dress as planned, I went to the nursery with my yard work clothes on. No big deal, but not a great way to be a good friend! Thankfully, J is full of grace and she didn’t even say anything unkind about my old jeans and t-shirt.

After our time out and about, we started our culinary adventure. I’m not going to lie to you, I had low expectations for this recipe. I like broccoli. I like potatoes. I like pepperoni. But I’ve never had them all together and it just seemed a little crazy to me! It was crazy. Crazy delicious!

Friday night delight!

For those of you who have a copy, this recipe can be found on page 20 of the May issue of Everyday Food magazine. A quick online search revealed that you can also find it here. I’d avoid going here though, because nobody really wants to know how much fat and calories are in pizza, right? Or maybe you enjoy having nutritional information and this would be totally helpful because it is already there and you don’t have to spend the rest of your Friday night calculating the calories. You can watch a movie instead!

Overall, I was impressed with this recipe, but for my time and money, we’ll be dining on junk pizza rather than forking over the money for special ingredients or spending my time searching four local stores and a farmers market to find broccoli rabe (which we never found). Broccolini is a great substitute if you can’t locate broccoli rabe.  I’d even go so crazy as to say you could use regular broccoli. This would be a great option for a dinner party or if you were having a new man friend over and you weren’t sure how he felt about meats or veggies. There’s something for everyone! (As long as everyone is fine with picking off the toppings they hate!)

Happy cooking friends! May your pizzas all be delicious and may your tea always be warm!

Posted in Cooking, friends, recipe of the week, recipes | No Responses »

McDonald’s! McDonald’s! Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut!

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

For all the “healthy” eating we do around here, I must confess that I’m a pretty big fan of things that are unhealthy. Here’s a list of them, in no particular order: queso, coca-cola classic, full-fat dairy products, g&t, and yes, pizza. Generally, we make pizza that is of the thin crust variety and contains vegetables. I also use pizza crust to mask the “clean out the fridge” night we’re having. One of my favorite types of pizza is Pizza Hut pan pizza. It’s delicious. It’s kind of like having fried pizza. It’s the perfect thing to accompany a large coca-cola classic. I really, really like it! It may also kill us. As such, we don’t eat it often.

With that said, I read something about making pizza in a cast iron skillet and this was enough to prompt me to buy one! For $15, I had the perfect tool to try out deep dish pizza! We made this recipe and it didn’t disappoint us! The caramelized onions were delicious and while the use of three cheeses seemed to diminish the healthful quality, it was very, very good. We’ll be making it again!

Here’s a photo of our finished product:

Posted in Cooking | 3 Responses »

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