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!

I’m not quite sure what to call this. Monday Deliciousness? Tonight’s dinner was inspired by the BHG magazine I borrowed from my parents’ house. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Dinner!

The recipes:

For the chicken:

Take two chicken breast and cut a little pocket into the side. Stuff this with crumbled feta and the zest of one lemon. Sprinkle the outside of the chicken with salt and pepper (or Mrs. Dash). Heat some olive oil in a pan at medium high and add the chicken. Cook, turning once, for about 15 minutes (ours took 18  minutes, but I’d say 15 minutes is generally appropriate for chicken breast).

For the salad:

Two big handfuls of spinach (chopped into bite-sized pieces)
Two sprigs of flat leaf parsley (chopped)
One can of cannellini beans (drained, liquid reserved, and rinsed)
Zest of one lemon
One or two handfuls of cherry tomatoes (halved)
12 kalamata olives (chopped)

Dressing: A dash of olive juice, a splash of bean juice and a squeeze of lemon juice (to taste)

That’s it! You have a delicious, pretty dinner in about half an hour. As long as you keep your little helper happy by feeding her tomato bits every now and again!

My sister and her friend Tracey have a power breakfast they’ve created and it sounds delicious. My Mom told me about it and said it had quinoa, onion, eggs, spinach and deliciousness. I thought about just creating something, but then I really wanted to make it into a muffin. I’ve also been in search of a good savory option for muffins and did a quick online search. I found this recipe for spinach quinoa muffin. A good idea! But things are a little different here in our house. For example, spelt flour? Not so much. Here’s what I made:

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

3/4 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup quinoa, cooked (don’t ask me how much this is, I just dumped it into the bowl from the pan)

1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
1 medium banana, mashed
1 bunch spinach leaves, cleaned and destemmed (should amount to about 1 cup of processed spinach)
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
zest of 1 lemon

slivered almonds

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Do whatever you generally do to prepare muffins; grease a tin, put in the paper liners, or have your baby do her “job” and get out your super awesome silicon muffin cups that do not require grease (with the help of Daddy, of course).

Put 2 cups of dry baby spinach leaves into the food processor and pulse until the the mixture looks close to a puree. You should have about 1 cup of  chopped spinach total. This was not a puree for me. Since I’ve pureed quite a bit lately, I’d call this more of a fine chop, but you want it to be small. Really small because you want those little bits of spinach to mix up nicely with everything else and avoid having spinach bits on your teeth after you eat the muffins.

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk. In another bowl, mix wet ingredients (I used our mixer here). Pour dry ingredients into the wet mixture and stir just to combine. Gently fold quinoa into the mixture.  The batter will be thicker than cake batter, but thinner than biscuit dough. Spoon batter into muffin tin to about 3/4 full each. Top each muffin with chopped nuts of your choice. Or don’t. I happen to think the plain ones were just fine.

Bake for 16-18 minutes until centers set or a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

The verdict? They’re pretty good! The banana I used was really ripe, so it’s a very strong banana flavor, but they were great! It’s not quite the savory option I was going for, but the lemon and nutmeg come together very nicely and they are moist and hearty without being too dense.  Also, Beatrice enjoyed them quite a bit. The blessing of being a baby is that she doesn’t know that muffins aren’t generally green, so the color is not off-putting to her. I made a few without the almonds so she could try them. Here she is enjoying one of them last night: