Awesome Alfredo

November 3rd, 2012 by Brent


For my wife’s birthday this year I decided to make her a nice homemade pasta dinner. Experimenting years before with Alfredo and diced tomatoes I thought it would be fun to try to make a creamy, garlicy Alfredo pasta again but with chicken mixed in the sauce… I came out hella good.

Awesome Alfredo

1 lb Rigatoni
Rotisserie Chicken (~2 cups of any precooked chicken breast)
Pint of heavy whipping cream
3 cups of parmesan cheese
2 cloves of garlic minced
1 stick of butter
15oz can of diced tomatoes
Black Pepper to taste

Directions

Get water boiling for the pasta… don’t forget to salt the water. While the water is boiling mince your garlic and remove the breasts from the rotisserie chicken and chop up into small pieces. If you are not using rotisserie chicken, any cooked chicken should work.

Once water comes to a boil, toss in the rigatoni and begin creating your sauce.

In a big sauce pan put in the garlic and stick of butter. Over medium heat, melt the butter and saute the garlic making sure not to overcook. You just want the garlic to release its oils into the buter.

Once the garlic is sautéed, pour in your pint of heavy whipping cream and saute for 5 minutes.

After 5 minutes begin whisking in your parmesan cheese. The sauce will get thick almost right away. Just make sure to keep whisking so that the cheese melts and gets incorporated.

Once the cheese is incorporated, pour in your 15oz can of diced tomatoes and whisk in. This will turn your sauce a little pink and smooth it out.

Now toss in your chicken, incorporate and pepper to taste.

Once the pasta is cooked, drain the pasta saving a little water just in case the sauce is a little too thick.

Lower the heat on the sauce and toss the rigatoni in the pan with the sauce and incorporate. Pour in some of the pasta water if it seems a little too thick.

Plate and serve. Goes great with roasted garlic bread.

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Balsamic Glazed Salmon

December 31st, 2011 by Victoria


The new year is around the corner and this is a recipe I know I will try to eat more of this new year. I love salmon, and I know salmon is healthy and good for the body. And we have to try to get our omega-3 fatty acids and all that, but this salmon recipe makes it really easy to increase my salmon intake! I have eaten this recipe many times this year and it is always good even my husband who isn’t always interested in salmon loves it. The recipe is simple but delicious and also easy to clean up. That is perfect for a week night meal since everything doesn’t take long to cook up.

Balsamic Glazed Salmon
adapted from foodnetwork.com

2 center-cut salmon fillets
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and black pepper

3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 clove garlic, peeled and smashed or chopped

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Lay parchment paper on the bottom of your baking pan. Place pieces of salmon drizzle with olive oil and salt and pepper on both sides, lay the salmon skin side down. Cook for 8-12 minutes in the middle of the rack. Once done cooking let stand for 5 minutes before serving.

While the oven is preheating start your glaze. In a small sauce pan add your balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, dijon mustard, garlic. Bring the sauce to a boil stirring occasionally and then reduce the heat to low so the sauce will simmer and cook for 12 minutes. Let the sauce stand for 5 minutes before serving.

Drizzle balsamic glaze sauce over salmon, and I also bring some to the table to drizzle on your vegetables. I serve this salmon with green beans and brown rice, but anything will go great with this recipe. Enjoy.

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Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

Chicken Adobo

October 1st, 2011 by Victoria

I love chicken adobo. I can’t believe I haven’t thought of making this sooner!! Chicken adobo is a filipino dish that is simple and oh so tasty and totally a comfort food. It’s the perfect marriage of chicken, soy sauce, vinegar, and rice. Growing up I had this dish while over my friend’s house and I always wanted to ask what the recipe for adobo was. They would always say how easy it was but I never got around to getting the actual recipe. I thought about it randomly the other day and I just had to cook it that night. My husband who also had adobo growing up said it was just liked he remembered so I know this recipe is a keeper. I looked around online for some recipes and came up with my own, it’s easy, as well as cost and time effective!! Seriously a great week night dinner!

Chicken Adodo

Ingredients

1 lb. chicken legs
1 lb. boneless chicken thighs
8-10 garlic cloves crushed
2 bay leaves
1 cup white vinegar
1 cup soy sauce
1 cup water
1/4 tsp black pepper (cracked or whole)

Rinse chicken and put in a large pot or dutch oven.

Add the rest of the ingredients into the pot and let marinate for 1-3 hours on the stovetop or bring to a boil right away.

When ready, bring to a boil over med-hi and then cover. Boil covered 35-40 minutes until tender and cooked through. Remove lid and let liquid reduce a little bit, about 5-10 minutes.

Serve over steamed rice preferably jasmine. We used a little over 2 lbs of chicken, but you could go up to 3 lbs with this recipe for sure. Hope you enjoy.

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Rating: 3.5/5 (2 votes cast)

Homemade Savory Cheese Waffles

September 25th, 2011 by Brent

I love waffles. I grew up with my Dad making us pancakes and waffles almost every weekend, so I was pretty excited when we got a nice waffle iron for our wedding a couple years ago. The only problem is I could never create an awesome waffle. Our waffle iron is the classic belgian style, really deep and requires a batter that rises well or else you end up with weird half waffles where the bottom looks awesome but the top is this weird flat pancaky thing… because of this I pretty much have given up on the store bought waffle mixes. I decided to look online for good alternative. I ended up trying a recipe from allrecipes.com because it had a good rating and contained ingredients I had on hand. They actually came out awesome! The only problem was that they just seemed to be missing something. I had big thick beautiful belgian style waffles but they required a ton of syrup and butter to enjoy and left you kind of eh, when you were done. This gave me an idea, why not add try adding stuff to the batter to kick up the flavor. That way I don’t have to drown my waffles in syrup and butter. So the next couple times I tried the recipe and added random stuff in the mix to see what happened. I tried a cup of chocolate chips, a cup of frozen blueberries and finally a cup of shredded cheese. All of these came out awesome but the cheese waffles really stood out from the rest.

Adapted from Classic Waffles on allrecipes.com

ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups warm milk
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup of shredded cheese
– Don’t like cheese? Try –
1 cup of chocolate chips
or
1 cup of frozen blueberries

Now this recipe is pretty easy to put together just make sure that you don’t get lazy and not heat up the milk or melt the butter first. If you don’t you end up with really dry and tough waffles…

Start heating up your waffle iron

Take all the dry ingredients and mix together in a bowl and set aside.

Pop your milk and butter in the microwave and warm/melt.

In a smaller bowl crack your eggs and blend. Then slowly add in your milk, butter and vanilla and continue to mixing.

Once mixed slowly pour into your dry ingredients blending them all together. Don’t worry about trying to perfectly blend it all together. Just make sure all of the dry ingredients are incorporated into the batter.

Finally add your cheese or if you don’t like cheese, chocolate chips or fruit and give a few turns to make sure it is evenly distributed.

Ladle your batter into your iron and cook away.

Enjoy.

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Spicy Korean Chicken Wings

September 18th, 2011 by Brent

I love me some spicy wings and last week when the wifey picked up some chicken wings from our local Filipino super market. I thought hey, we should try to make an Asian inspired spicy wings! So we decided to take the wings bake them and toss them in a sweet and spicy Korean sauce to see what happens. The result was pure awesomeness!

Chicken

12 chicken wings
1/2 cup flour
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
dash of cayenne
salt
pepper

Sauce

1 Tablespoon gochujang (korean hot pepper paste)
1 Tablespoon sugar
4 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar
2 Tablespoons Tabasco sauce
2 Tablespoons honey
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon fresh garlic minced
1/2 teaspoon korean red pepper powder (red pepper flakes are ok too)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Rinse and pat dry chicken wings.

Rinse and pat chicken wings dry with a paper towel. Then take flour, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne, salt and pepper in a large zip lock bag. Add chicken wings to the bag, seal. Make sure there is air trapped inside so the chicken wings can bounce around and get coated. Shake the bag until wings are completely coated.

Line a baking sheet with tin foil and spray with cooking spray so the wings wont stick. Place wings on the foil making sure they don’t touch or overlap. Bake for 20 minutes, flip the chicken wings and bake for approximately 20 more minutes until the chick is crispy and cooked through.

Sauce

Put all sauce ingredients into a small pot, stir and bring to a boil on high heat until thickened. Make sure not to cook it down too much because the sauce will thicken as it cools.

In a large bowl, add cooked chicken wings and sauce and toss to coat.

Garnich wings with sesame seeds and sliced fresh green onions.

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Shrimp Ceviche

September 4th, 2011 by Victoria

There is nothing as refreshing and delicious as shrimp ceviche. You could be starving hungry and here comes this light, citrusy delight that can satisfy you just as equally as a burrito. Well a burrito sounds really good right now too (at 6:50 am). Really though I have gotten to love shrimp ceviche, there is a place a few miles down the road and their shrimp ceviche is amazing, since then I began to crave it regularly. I wanted to try my hand at making it myself so one day I found some frozen shrimp on sale and tried it out, and I was a little scared of the cooking in lemon juice thing, but really there wasn’t anything for me to be scared about. I know your wondering about me using frozen shrimp and not fresh, well people it is fresh, fisherman freeze the shrimp for transport, so it is still fresh!!! Believe me, the shrimp does get cooked by the lime juice, they really did cook and they were amazing.

Ingredients

1 pound large shrimp, peeled, deveined and chopped
3/4 cup fresh lime juice
5 roma tomatoes, diced
1 small white onion chopped
1/2 cup cucumber diced
1/2 of a fresh jalapeno seeded and diced, more if you like spicy
1/2 cup cilantro chopped
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 Tablespoon ketchup
1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (I use tabasco)
1 avocado, peeled pitted and diced
salt and pepper to taste

Directions

In a large bowl add the lime juice, and shrimp and stir to coat. Let the shrimp stand for about 6 minutes or until shrimp are opaque. You will be able to see the shrimp turn pink and firm up.

Mix in tomatoes, onion, cilantro, cucumber and jalapeno into your shrimp bowl, cover and refridgerate for at least 1 hour.

After your ceviche is chilled remove from the fridge, mix in Worcestershire, ketchup, hot sauce, avocado, salt and pepper to taste.

Serve your ceviche over tostada shells, with tortilla chips or in small serving bowls with saltine crackers. Accompany your ceviche with extra lime wedges, hot sauce, ketchup and worcestershire sauce for guests to customize their ceviche to their liking.

Recipe adapted from allrecipes.com

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Lamb Chops with Feta, Tomatoes and Spicy Onion Slaw

August 17th, 2011 by Victoria

My husband loves lamb. But me, I think lamb is ok, it has grown on me over the past few years, but lately I have been able to really enjoy it. By lately I mean like the last 6 months. This recipe has been the second time I have ever made lamb and I have to say it was easy and really really good! The recipe has so many nice flavors and textures going on that it can impress anyone who is on the fence about lamb. The lamb chops were on sale at the grocery store so I decided on a whim to just buy them since my husband loves it. Then I found this recipe from epicurious when I got home and I made some adjustments to what I had in the house. We have our own tomatoes growing in the backyard, and we have been adding jalapenos to everything since our plant is growing a bunch right now. We ate the lamb with some quinoa, it would also go perfect with rice, cous cous or sauteed vegetables.

Ingredients

2 lamb blade chops
1/2 cup olive oil, 2 Tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
3 garlic cloves minced
1 Tablespoon dried oregano divided
3/4 teaspoon cumin
1 pint cherry tomatoes or any other small tomatoes
1/2 cup feta cheese crumbles
1/2 red onion sliced thin
1 Tablespoon fresh jalapeno diced small, use more if you like hot!
salt and pepper

In a bowl add your 1/2 cup of olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice, garlic, and oregano. Add salt and pepper to taste.
On a large plate pour half of this mixture on your lamb chops make sure the lamb chops are coated evenly. Let the lamb marinate for 30 minutes.
Put tomatoes and the rest of the dressing into another bowl and set aside.
After the lamb is done marinating, heat a large pan on medium high heat with the last two tablespoons of olive oil. Add some salt and pepper to the lamb chops. Brown the lamb chops until cooked about 4 minutes each side for medium, I did about 5 minutes each side, my chops were pretty thick.
After the lamb is done cooking and resting on your plate, add your tomatoes to the same pan, use a slotted spoon if you need to because we are reserving that dressing! The tomatoes will cook slightly and get wrinkly, about 2 minutes.

In a separate bowl add your feta, red onions, jalapeno and the rest of the reserved dressing. Top your lamb chops with the onion slaw and serve your roasted tomatoes on the side or also on top.

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Garlicky Roasted Bell Peppers

August 7th, 2011 by Victoria


My husband loves this roasted bell pepper side dish. Growing up his Italian family members would always serve this as a side dish during family meals. This recipe goes great with grilled or roasted meats and spicy Italian sausages or with just some rice and veggies. The vinegar and garlic really make this recipe amazing. There are many ways to roast your bell peppers, whichever way you prefer works is fine, I will describe them below. If your short on time you can use this recipe with jarred roasted bell peppers but seriously if you roast the bell peppers yourself you will definitely be able to tell the difference!

Ingredients

3 bell peppers, red, yellow or orange, mix them up!
2-3 Tablespoons garlic chopped
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoon red wine vinegar
salt
pepper

Wash and dry your bell peppers, and lightly coat them with some olive oil. Char your bell peppers by either grilling them on your grill until the skin on your peppers has grill marks and the skin begins to blacken. Or put your veggies on a sheet tray and put them under the broiler. Or if you have a gas oven, you can do this stove top just be careful!

Once your peppers are charred and blackened, put them in a bowl and cover them with plastic wrap to let the peppers steam. Or put them in a paper bag and fold the top of the bag down to keep the steam in. About 10-15 minutes later take the peppers and put them on your cutting board until they are cool enough to handle. Now it’s time to scrape off the skin. I find a fork and my fingers work best. Remove the stems, remove the seeds best you can, it’s ok if you can’t get them all off and sliced up the pepper in even strips. Do this with all three peppers and add them into a your serving bowl.

Add your chopped garlic to the bowl of peppers then add your olive oil, and vinegar, and stir gently. Add salt and pepper to taste, if you want it a little more garlicky or are not a fan of raw garlic you can add garlic powder. You can make this in advance and store in fridge, just let the peppers come to room temperature before serving.





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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Nutella Crunch Brownies

August 3rd, 2011 by Victoria


I love nutella and I love brownies, this recipe pairs them together and they make a perfect match. I have always loved homemade brownies, but I get a little intimidated with the “from scratch” thing. But when I stumbled across this blog post from La Casa De Sweets, I just had to try them. The creamy chocolate hazelnut spread with the crunch of the rice cereal is so addicting while the brownie is dense and chewy. My husband said these reminded him of 100 Grand candy bars, without the caramel. I brought them to a barbeque and everyone really enjoyed them. Especially one of my friends who is a brownie master! So I know they are pretty darn good. These are really easy to make, the use of the microwave makes things a lot easier! I cannot wait to make them again!

Ingredients
Makes 16 brownies

Brownie Layer

1 cup semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 3/4 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup flour

Nutella Crunch Layer

1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup Nutella
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups rice cereal

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9×13 pan with lightly greased foil. ( I used spray oil).
Now lets start to make the brownies! In a large glass bowl, microwave the chocolate chips and butter at 30 second intervals until melted. (About a minute and a half). Stir until smooth.

Next, add the sugar, eggs, vanilla, and flour. Add each ingredient one at a time, stirring each until combined before adding the next ingredient.

Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes, or until the edges are completely set and the middle is not completely set. ( I check this by the toothpick comes out dry on the edges but still a bit moist in the middle). While the brownies are cooking I wash and dry my glass bowl for making the frosting.

Take the brownies out to cool and then start make the frosting. In your glass bowl, microwave the chocolate chips, Nutella, and butter for 30 second intervals, until melted. Stir until combined, then stir in the rice cereal.
Spread the frosting evenly over the brownies.
Let the brownies cool completely before enjoying, you can also put them in the refrigerator to speed this up.



After you whisk in your dry ingredients batter should be smooth and thick



This is a freaky looking box of generic crispy rice cereal!




Mmmmsoooogoood!

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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Grilled “Whole-eeee” Mackerel

July 23rd, 2011 by Brent

I recently discovered the joy of grilled mackerel after going to this really good traditional Japanese restaurant in Santa Clara with the wife. Since then I’ve wanted to try my hand at doing it myself. Luckily a couple miles from us a really cool Filipino shopping mall sprung up with a Seafood City in it that has an awesome selection of whole fresh fish. For around 3 bucks we got a nice 2 pound mackerel. They clean it there for you which is also really cool. This recipe is our attempt at recreating a Japanese style grilled mackerel. We found a few recipes online but none seemed to be exactly what we were looking for. We ended up with an amalgamation of a couple recipes and user comments from users who tried those recipes and offered feedback. What we ended up with was a really subtile and delicious grilled mackerel.

Ingredients

1 Mackerel cleaned
4 tbsp table salt
– Ginger soy marinade/dip –
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup of mirin (Japanese sweet wine)
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tbsp grated fresh ginger

Wash the mackerel inside and out with cold water and pat dry

Cut slices into the whole mackerel at a slight diagonal about an inch apart on both sides. Cut down until you hit the backbone. You will feel when you hit the backbone.

Begin covering the fish in table salt inside and out. Make sure to get the salt into the slices you just made. Salting the fish is supposed to toughen up the fish for grilling and intensifying the flavor by wicking out water in the flesh. Let the salted fish sit on on the counter anywhere from 15-40 minutes. We let ours sit for about 25.

After you are done salting the fish wash off all traces of salt from the fish. Pat dry.

Pour over about half of the marinade on the fish. I make sure to get inside and all of the slices. It doesn’t take that long to marinate the fish, about 20 minutes. We flipped our fish over at 10 minutes to make sure the marinade penetrates the fish.

Grill the fish on high on your outdoor grill for about 10-12 minutes depending on the strength of your grill and the size of your fish. I grilled mine 6 minutes per side. Be careful when flipping your fish because the skin can stick to the grill. You can also use a grilling basket to make it easier for you. When cooked the mackerel will be flakey and moist.

When you serve you can use the rest of the marinade as a dipping sauce.

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Rating: 4.0/5 (2 votes cast)

Chevy’s Salsa

July 23rd, 2011 by Brent

I love me some salsa and I’ve always wanted to learn how to make my own so I decided to research what it takes to make a great salsa. I ended up learning that making salsa is pretty easy. Like, really easy. After pouring over – pun intended – a ton of recipes I ended up finding one that seemed really tasty. The recipe was for a “Chevy’s Original” salsa. I thought yeah right, but it required roasting tomatoes and jalapenos and onion and being that I love to cook on my grill I thought it would be really cool to try it out. Turns out this salsa really does end up tasting like Chevy’s salsa and is super good.

Ingredients

4 tomatoes (about two pounds)
1 large white onion sliced
2 jalapeno peppers
2 teaspoons garlic, minced
1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
2 teaspoons salt
1 Tablespoon pepper

Grill the tomatoes, onion, and jalapeno peppers on high (you can also broil the veggies in the oven). Remove when the vegetables are slightly charred and the tomatoes soften and split. Remove the veggies from the grill and let cool. While the vegetables are cooling chop up your cilantro and garlic. Then remove the stems from the jalapenos and core the end of the tomatoes. Put all ingredients into a blender and blend for about 10 seconds. Pour salsa into a container and let chill in the fridge about 15-20 minutes. Serve with your favorite chips.

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Rating: 3.3/5 (12 votes cast)

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

July 23rd, 2011 by Victoria


I think sweet potatoes are one of my favorite vegetables. They taste so good, and are so good for you. We don’t always need to eat sweet potatoes as french fries or covered in sugar and marshmallows, we can cook them up in a simpler healthier way to enjoy on a regular basis. This recipe is adapted from Ellie Krieger, I doubled the recipe so I baked the sweet potatoes in two pans, and I added some Herbes de Provence seasoning to one tray to have some variety. I think any spice blend would go great, next time I think I’ll sprinkle some cajun seasoning. The sweet potatoes came out really good! I could eat these as a meal in themselves, or as a side to dinner, but instead I let them cool and kept them in the fridge to add to my lunches. This is a great way to cook sweet potatoes and ensure you have a healthy side dish or lunch snack for the week!

Ingredients

3.5-4 pounds red skinned sweet potatoes
3 Tablespoons olive oil
3 Tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon herbs de provence or any favorite spice blend

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Peel and cut the sweet potatoes into 1-inch pieces and put in a large bowl. In a small bowl whisk together olive oil, honey and lemon juice. Pour mixture over potatoes and toss to coat. Spread potatoes equally on two baking trays lined with foil. Sprinkle both trays evenly with the salt, and one tray sprinkle herbs de Provence or any seasoning you like, bake, stirring occasionally, for about 1 hour, until potatoes are tender.



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Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

Potatoes Au Gratin

June 28th, 2011 by Victoria


Growing up I always loved scalloped potatoes…I loved them out of a box. It is something I completely forgot about for years actually, until one day I saw them as a side on a menu or something, I remembered that I really liked those potatoes. Last year sometime I went out and tried to recreate my childhood favorite and make boxed scalloped potatoes. Unfortunately my palate grew up and the boxed thing just wasn’t doing it for this 30 yr. old. About a year ago I tried to make this recipe from Tyler Florence and I cut my potatoes too thick and they took forever to cook and basically the dish was a failure. So last week when I was craving scalloped potatoes I looked around for a good recipe and I went back to this recipe from Tyler Florence because it still just sounded so good. So I tried again with this recipe and tweaked it for what I had in the kitchen and it came out beautifully. Better then I could have imagined really. I should just call this dish potatoes alfredo because that is what I was thinking the whole time as I scooped up large forkfuls of this stuff into my mouth. Seriously, this is creamy potato goodness.

Ingredients
Makes 4-6 servings

3 large yukon gold potatoes
3 cloves garlic chopped
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup pecorino romano or parmigiano reggiano cheese, grated
1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
salt and pepper
5 green onions sliced

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F. Rinse, scrub and dry your potatoes. Slice potatoes very thin about 1/8 inch thick, you can also use a mandolin. Heat your cream in a small sauce pot over medium low with your dried thyme, nutmeg, and chopped garlic. While your cream is heating up, (don’t let it boil over), butter your casserole dish, I usually just spray it with some spray olive oil. Make one layer of potatoes slightly overlapping each other, like when dominos all fall over. Yes I did just say that. Pour some cream over your first layer of potatoes, sprinkle salt, pepper about two tablespoons of pecorino cheese on top. Repeat two more layers. Bake uncovered for about 45 minutes until the top is browned and cream is bubbly and the potatoes are cooked. Let stand for about 10 minutes and top with green onions.

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Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

Black Bean and Edamame Pasta

June 4th, 2011 by Victoria


I am always on the look out for pasta salad recipes. I love how convenient they can be for when you bring your lunch to work or school. I can make a batch on a Sunday and eat it for the next few days. This pasta salad is simple, kind of mediterranean in ingredients, so it’s light, refreshing and good for you. The edamame in the pasta salad really gives it some color and great nutty flavor in contrast to the black beans. So much great vegetarian protein! I am not a vegetarian but I can appreciate my vegetables thank you very much. I also added some chopped kalamata olives at the last minute, and the saltiness of the olives goes so great with the lemon zest, mmm so good.

Ingredients

1 lb. whole wheat or multigrain penne pasta
1 cup shelled edamame frozen or fresh
1 15 oz. can black beans drained and rinsed
1/2 cup crumbled feta
1/2 cup kalamata olives chopped
1/2 cup green onions sliced
1/4 cup fresh italian parsley chopped
4 garlic cloves chopped
2 Tbsp lemon zest
3 Tbsp lemon juice
3 Tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Bring a large pot of water to boil, add some salt, then pasta to cook. The last few minutes of cooking time add frozen edamame, if you have fresh edamame skip this step. While the pasta is cooking I chop my parsley, garlic and olives. I also zest my lemon and slice my green onions. When the pasta is done I drain the noodles and edamame and then give the noodles a quick rinse with cold water to stop the cooking. I add the pasta to a serving bowl, add all ingredients, and salt and pepper to taste. Toss and serve. So good and even better the next day.



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Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

Sweet Potato and Quinoa Salad

April 10th, 2011 by Victoria

Every Sunday I make the lunches for me and my husband to take with us throughout the week. I found this recipe a few weeks ago and didn’t get a chance to make it until this weekend. This quinoa salad is so good for you and on top of that it tastes really delicious, way better then I expected actually! I love sweet potatoes and I really enjoy quinoa but I don’t know a lot of recipes for it and this one is a keeper. The recipe is easy and simple, I got it off Mark Bittman’s site here, I increased the portions and modified it to what I had in the kitchen. This recipe works as a great base recipe. You can customize this dish to your tastes, add some reduced fat feta cheese, add some chopped fresh parsley and a squeeze of lemon, or as Bittman recommends you can even add some fresh avocado. I highly recommend this delicious vegetarian recipe!

Ingredients

5 cups cooked quinoa (follow directions from box)
4 cups sweet potatoes diced (about 3-4 potatoes)
1 bell pepper, yellow or red diced
1/4 cup shallot
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 green onions sliced
salt
pepper

Cook the quinoa if you haven’t already done so, and set aside. Bring a medium pot to a boil, add some salt to water. While the water is coming to a boil, peel and dice the sweet potatoes. Add them to boiling water for about 15 minutes or until done.
Finely chop the shallot and dice your bell pepper. Slice your green onions. When the sweet potatoes are done drain and add them to a large bowl. Add quinoa, bell pepper, and shallot to bowl.
Whisk the olive oil with the red wine vinegar in a separate bowl. Once combined add the olive oil and vinegar mixture to the rest of your ingredients. Garnish your salad with chopped green onions and add salt and pepper to taste.
I also added more dressing the next day, but start with this amount first to suit your tastes.




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Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
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