BLT Pasta Salad

We made this for dinner over the summer and it was just delicious. Since we're still watching our carbs at dinner and not eating more than 3oz. at a dinner, I have to admit it wasn't that much and I wish we could have had more pasta - but it was still delicious! In order to make it a complete meal for us with our protein, I also added some shredded chicken to this. I have to say, having that chicken really helped us not feel so deprived from having less pasta.


This will be a great recipe you'll want to make this upcoming spring or summer for your cookouts and parties. Thanks to Skinny Taste for this great recipe!
4 oz. dry ditalini, boiled and drained
4 slices bacon
10 oz. cooked, shredded chicken
12-16 cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
4 tbsp Mayo
Pepper
1 bag baby spinach


BLT Macaroni Salad with Realistic Eat Changes


Cook your bacon on the stove top and drain on paper towel.

When the pasta is boiled and drained, the bacon is done, and the chicken is shredded, toss all ingredients together and plate. In order to ensure the proper amount on each plate, we prepped this in two separate bowls with the proper oz. of pasta and chicken. So each serving got 2 T of the low fat mayo, 2 slices of bacon, 3 oz. pasta, 5 oz. chicken and half a bag of spinach and half the tomatoes.

So yummy!

So Simple, yet so Delicious!

One of the things we love to eat for dinner in our house is salads. But when we do salads, we always mix it up. Most of the time, it ends up being a bed of mixed greens with our entree on top. It bulks up dinner, adds some veggies, and is really a filling meal.

We made this dish this past summer and it was so fresh and flavorful and good that we keep talking about making it again.

This dish will certainly get your taste buds ready for spring/summer!

Green Bean Salad with Egg

1 pound of green beans trimmed and cleaned
4 hard boiled eggs, sliced
2 tomatoes chopped
6 oz. cooked Yukon gold potato or other potato
homemade vinaigrette
green onion or chives

Steam your green beans and let cool a bit. Plate the beans with the hard boiled egg - two per dish - 3 oz. of potato, tomato and drizzle with your dressing.Sprinkle green onion or chives on top. ENJOY!

Karena's Irish Soda Bread

Two years ago at my office we had a young lady, Karena, on our AmeriCorps staff who had Irish roots through and through.

For St. Patty's day that year she brought in a loaf of her Irish Soda Bread, a recipe she grew up with and has been made in her family for years.

I have never found a good Irish Soda Bread recipe, and it's one of my favorite things! After some begging, I convinced Karena to share the recipe with me - which she gladly did.

I'm so happy she did - it's just fantastic - it makes a ton, but that just means you get lots so eat and share with other people.

And yes, being how far behind I am in blogging, I made this last St. Patty's day - and it's almost that time again - so figured I should share it with all of you!

Karena’s Irish Soda Bread Recipe

Ingredients:

4 cups All-Purpose Flour
1 cup white sugar
2 ½ Tablespoon Baking Powder
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
1 Teaspoon Salt
2 Tablespoons Caraway Seeds
¼ cup butter (melted)
2 cups raisins
2 cups Buttermilk
1 egg

(1 ½ cup Milk and 2 Tablespoons lemon juice can be substituted for buttermilk-pour milk in separate bowl and add lemon juice—let sit for 10 minutes and allow curdling.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, sugar, and caraway seeds. Mix buttermilk with egg and pour in with dry ingredients. Mix well—add up to ½ cup more flour if needed for bread like consistency. Knead in raisins and melted butter. Let rise for 15 minutes and shape on baking pan.

Bake for 45-60 minutes at 350 until center is cooked and top is browned.

A Side Dish Transformed to an Entree

First off, I want to apologize for neglecting my blog since August.  But between work, working many weekends, a hurricane, some vacations, and the winding down of one job to start another, things have been a little chaotic - leaving very little time for blogging. Or let's be honest, very little interest in blogging.

But I have a folder filled to the brim on my computer with pictures of dishes we've made that I'm just dying to share.

For Christmas a year ago, my mom gave us the Guy Fieri Food: Cookin' It, Livin' It, Lovin' It book. She sent it because that fall (in the fall of 2011) we road tripped and made a point to visit as many as the DDDs we could.

Really, everything we've made out of this cookbook as been fantastic. But this is one of my favorites. It's actually meant to be a side dish, but we turn it in to an entree by lightening up the cooking process a bit and then adding some tofu to make it a full meal.

The recipe that Guy uses calls for frying the beans in oil, 2 cups of oil. I just can't imagine using that much for a dinner, so instead of deep frying the beans in oil, we just pan sauteed them. So I'm writing the recipe below how we make it. But the recipe as Guy makes it can be found on the Food Network site here.

Szechuan Green Beans with Realistic Eats Changes to make it dinner!

• 1 T canola oil1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger1 tablespoon minced garlic1/4 cup soy sauce1/2 T Siracha1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
  2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
  1 tablespoon mirin or white wine1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
  1 - 2 T chopped fresh cilantro leaves
• 1 container mushrooms1 pound green beans, cleaned and trimmed2 tablespoons chopped peanuts
• 1 brick extra firm lite tofu
• 1 avocado sliced or diced

Directions

Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silpat. Dice your tofu in to small cubes and place on the lined baking sheet. Bake in the oven at 350 for approx. 30 minutes - or until the tofu is dry and has a light brown color.

While the tofu is baking...

In a large skillet, add 1 T canola oil and heat it up.  When the oil is hot, add in the green beans and mushrooms and cook them until they are tender but start to brown a bit.  

In another skillet or a small pot, spray with PAM, then add in the ginger and saute until you can start to smell it. Add garlic and cook for 1 minute or until it turns light brown; add soy sauce, siracha, rice wine vinegar, hoisin, mirin, sesame oil. I let this simmer a bit to get the flavors blended then turned it off..

When the green beans are done, and the tofu is done, place in a big bowl or pot and toss with the sauce that you made.  Then toss with some fresh chopped cilantro and the chopped peanuts, which I admit I did toast up first.  Plate that and top with the avocado. 

While I know the meal has enough fat between the peanuts and fried green beans, the avocado makes this recipe with the cool creaminess in contrast to the great salty flavors in the dish.

I did serve this with a 3oz. side of rice noodles as well.

Boar...It's What's For Dinner.

At our local farmer's market a few weeks back our favorite farmer had boar sausage and ground boar for sale. He has a fantastic farm that we've visited with lots of produce but then tons of livestock as well - chickens, ducks, turkeys, boars, pigs, cows, you name it.

We decided to try the Mild Italian Boar Sausage Patties. I decided to make it how I've made one of our favorite dishes featured on this blog before from a Whole Foods Recipe.

This time I tweaked it a bit with the boar sausage and put the whole thing on a bed of fresh spinach leaves, also from the farmer's market.

I will say the boar is probably one of the most fantastic things I've ever eaten. It was incredibly lean, flavorful and tender. Since then, we've bought more of the sausage pretty much every week to stock in our freezer to have throughout the winter time.

If you can find a local farmer with boar, do try it! You won't regret it. And if not, still do make this dish and use a good Italian Sausage, you won't regret it!

Where's My Chopsticks?

I found a recipe I was dying to try on Pintrest from Life as a Lofthouse for baked Sweet & Sour Chicken. And while it sounded fantastic, I didn't like the idea of frying the chicken first for a couple of reasons. One, I never have luck with a cornstarch breading to fry and two, I didn't want the added fat of frying the meal.

So I made this a lighter way and it was SO easy and so fantastic. We coupled it with our favorite homemade hibachi style fried rice I make and some stir-fry veggies.

This had such a fantastic flavor and was so easy to make. It has already been made a few times in our house. It also certainly is a great substitute for the fatty real Chinese take out - you know, when you want to be bad but you know you should be and need to be good?

Realistic Eats Baked Sweet & Sour Chicken, The Light Version

In a dish, mix

1/4 cup sugar (this is down from the 3/4 of a cup the recipe I went off of used. I couldn't justify that much added sugar)
4 tbs ketchup
1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp garlic powder

Mix the sauce together and set aside. Spray a large baking dish with cooking spray and toss in your pieces of chicken, then toss the sauce on the chicken and mix around and place in a single layer. Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the sauce is sticky and sweet.

Realistic Eats Hibachi Style Fried Rice
In a non-stick skillet, scramble 2-3 eggs and set aside in a bowl.
In the same skillet saute green onions fresh garlic. Once it's lightly browned, add in your precooked rice - about a cup or two, whatever you have on hand. Then toss in your egg. You can add in some shredded carrots here or peas, or just go with onion and garlic.  As the rice is steaming warm with the egg and onion, add in 1 T butter and 2-3 tsp. garlic powder. Then add in 2-3 T soy sauce, depending on how much rice you're making. It tastes just like the rice you get at a hibachi restaurant!

How do you do your favorite leftovers?

I love cooking with leftovers and then turning them in to something new and exciting. Our favorite meal in our house is our Kalua Pulled Pork that we make, probably every other month. In fact, as we speak a pork shoulder is on my counter defrosting for tomorrow's pulled pork!

One of our favorite things to make with this leftover is lettuce wraps. Really no recipe, just place the pork in the lettuce with some fresh carrots, cucumber, bean sprouts, whatever you have, and top with a little Hoisin Sauce and enjoy!

Playing in the Kitchen

For Christmas, the hubs got me a tortilla press - which yes, I did ask for this!

Well so far I've made one attempt and it didn't go so well - I blame the recipe. So I need a good and fool proof homemade tortilla recipe.

The Dough, resting

We did have fun with it though, making tortillas, we baked up some tortilla chips, and had some great shrimp fajitas with the too thick tortillas - we just couldn't get them thin enough!

SMOOSHED!

This was a better smoosh - the hubs did this one.

Cooking up on the little cast iron skillet that came with the press

Mmmm baked homemade tortilla chips - actually they were quite good!

Shrimp fajitas, onions and mushrooms, and our homemade tortillas!

We'll have to try again with a different recipe I guess.

My Thankful Duh Moment!

The hubs and I spend a LOT of money on broth - like way more than we should. When it comes down to it, we don't eat that much chicken that I have enough to use the carcasses (Hmmmm I love that word) to make broth out of. So we end up buying broth in boxes and cans anytime we find them on sale.

Then, about a year ago, I had an A-Ha moment! I had a weekend where I was making, God knows what, and had so much veggie waste it was ridiculous. And let's be honest, since our yard is not really conducive to easy composting, it all goes down the garbage disposal. I figured there had to be something I could do with all of this waste - which it's veggies, so it's not really waste!

So I got out a big storage bag and put in the ends of broccoli, carrots, some mushroom stems, celery heart and leaves and onion ends that were otherwise going to be trashed and tossed the bag of the veggie bits and pieces in my freezer. Slowly but surely, I filled the baggie up when I prepped veggies with the ends and stems and stalks and pieces of what I was using. And before you know it, I had two whole bags of veggie bits and pieces.

Frozen bag of veggies boiled - carrots, broccoli, asparagus, celery, onion, mushrooms

I then took all of those veggie pieces and placed them in a big stock pot, covered with copious amounts of water, added in some fresh onion, garlic cloves, peppercorns, a pinch of salt and some bay leaves and let it boil for a good hour or two. When it was done I was left with this - the most wonderful, glorious, flavorful, rich and cheap/free vegetable broth I've ever had!!

I tossed the soaked mushy veggies at this point and let the broth cool. I then froze the broth in to one cup measurements and froze them. Once they were frozen, I popped them out of the containers and wrapped in parchment paper and stored them stacked in a freezer bag. Now when I need broth, I go to the chest freezer, grab one or two cups out and defrost and voila! Free broth, on hand, all the time!

I highly recommend doing this, if you aren't a composting family. It gives those ends and odd pieces of veggies one last hope before just tossing and gives you a great result in the end. I think this past year alone we've probably saved about 50+ bucks on broth - and I"m not lying when I say that!

Look at that rich, hearty broth that would have otherwise gone down the drain - literally!

It's so easy - just keep a bag going in your freezer of veggie pieces - add anything - I've done tomatoes, onions that were about to go that I salvaged what I could, carrots, celery, spinach on its last leg, mushrooms, you name it. It's always turned out so hearty and rich!

If you try it, let me know how it works for you in your house!

A Pintrest Review

A long time back I found something on Pintrest that was just so cool I had to try it. And although we were skeptical about it working, we are excited to say we were proven wrong. IT WORKS!

Thanks to Homemade Serenity for this helpful tip of how to regenerate your green onions/scallions to have an endless supply on hand.

It's easy, use the green on your scallion and then leave the root portion and a little more of the white, place in a container with water and watch it grow! We change our water about once a week in the glass and always have one, if not two or three going at a time. It's so nice and they still taste flavorful and delicious.

You may note that sometimes you should rinse off the roots and the bulb part, this gets rid of any slimyness and things that may be moving in. And you'll know when it's time to toss one out, it's pretty obvious!

But try it - it works, and it's a fantastic money saver!!

Hmmm, the picture isn't this direction on my computer! But you get the idea. No my scallions are not lying sideways on a windowsill - don't do that!!!