I went a little crazy last week baking all day on the President’s Day holiday…the prettiest creation? Mardi Gras cupcakes!! The frosting is wonderful cream cheese frosting from a can, but I made the cupcakes from scratch! Fun! It was a simple yellow cake recipe from my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. Fairly easy (would have been easier with a stand mixer!) and very tasty. I went a little crazy with the frosting colors and played around for a bit…the batch made two dozen, so by the time Matt got home from work, the kitchen was covered in cupcakes and the other food I’d been working on (chili, mac & cheese, apple bars). Very exciting!
Why all the excitement??? Big huge enormous wonderful news!
Matt proposed!!!! AHHH!! So, it’s been almost 2 weeks since then, but it happened on 2/13 and I am still sort of reeling. We aren’t in any hurry to start planning, but are really enjoying the love….lots of love to go around. Plus, Santana is so happy! Look at her excitement: 
Of course, we put the ring on the pup…she was not very happy about this, but it made for a funny picture:
Here’s the ring on me 🙂
I LOVE it! The diamond was a gift from my grandmother for my undergrad graduation and it means a lot to me that we could take that diamond and get it set in the perfect ring. Especially with someone I’m so crazy about. LOVELOVELOVE 🙂
In attempts to eat sans meat for weeknight dinners, we’ve really come to appreciate non-American cuisines. Almost any other country/region’s cuisine can easily be made deliciously vegetarian. This meal was one we made on a non-vegetarian night, but the leftovers from the veggie curry made a vegetarian-friendly dinner a couple nights later.
Vegetable Chickpea Curry
This recipe comes mostly courtesy of Cooking Light (I halved the recipe to fit in our smaller crock pot and mistakenly forgot to halve the liquid portion…solved this with some creative straining and re-seasoning).
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
Small chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped carrot
1/2 tablespoon curry powder
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon grated peeled fresh ginger
1 minced garlic clove
1 serrano chile, seeded and minced
1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 potato, peeled and chopped
Small green bell pepper, diced
1/2 cup (1-inch) cut green beans
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper (or more for spice)
1/2 can diced tomatoes, undrained
7oz. vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups fresh baby spinach
1/2 cup light coconut milk
- Sauté onion and carrot in olive oil for a few minutes until tender. Add seasonings (curry powder through serrano) and cook for another minute.
- Toss all of this into the crock pot, add everything else, through the broth.
- Cook on low for 10-11 hours (Cooking Light says High for 6 hours, but I had more time to work with).
- Add spinach and coconut milk and heat until spinach wilts. This can sit and stew on Warm for a while until you’re ready to eat.
We used some chicken breast and a jar of Tikka Masala sauce from Whole Foods to go with this. Plus some basmati rice and whole wheat naan.
This was really satisfying as a whole meal, and the curry was much more enjoyable as leftovers. The flavors build up and the vegetables really absorb the curry to make a delicious dinner all on its own.
Matt and I are experimenting. Our lunches are pretty much the same thing throughout the week—he takes a sandwich or a wrap with deli meat along with a snack of some sort, I take leftovers from the weekend. On the weekends we like to indulge in lots of meat…for example, this past weekend we managed to eat two meats that come from a pig, one that comes from a cow, and one that comes from a bird. It was delicious, but also very overwhelming. It will make for wonderful leftover lunches throughout the week, and I had a wonderful time cooking up some new recipes and some old favorites. However, meat can be expensive…especially if you are trying to purchase meat of any decent quality…and I find that the more meat we put in a dish, the less veggies we end up consuming during the meal.
With our CSA box coming every other week and random cravings for vegetables lately, we came to the conclusion that we’d try to take our Monday-Friday dinners meat-free. We made it through week one and are just starting week two. The first week was pretty easy, since we had a crockpot full of sweet potato soup leftover to start us off on Monday, and we went out for Thai on Tuesday (Thai is one of the easiest cuisines to go meat free with). Thursday, our planned risotto was a bust when I was off my feet with a lingering back pain and really just wanted a big plate of stir fried veggies…Buddhist Tofu from the Chinese place across the street it was (so delicious and simple!).
However, I imagine it will get a little more challenging in the coming weeks. To prepare for this, we started a list of things that we love that can easily be meat free. We have a long list already…and most of the things so far didn’t even come off of that list! One stipulation: we aren’t going to make meaty things with meat-like products….the point of this experiment is for us to eat more veggies, not to eat more fake meat.
This is a dish we actually made a couple weeks ago, but I just realized that it’s not one that’s on our list…adding it now! I first made this before Christmas for a couple friends and it might be the new favorite Italian dish in my repertoire. Special thanks to our Kentucky friends Bob & Shannon, who sent us two jars of homemade marinara sauce. AMAZING. We still have one left because I want to save it as long as possible. We shot through the first one with this dish and then a mini-meatball sub and salad dinner a couple nights later.
Zucchini Parm for Two
- 1 large zucchini sliced lengthwise into four strips
- 2 Tb flour
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1/2 cup seasoned breadcrumbs
- marinara sauce
- a handful of your favorite italian cheese
- Heat 1/4 inch vegetable oil in a deep pot over medium heat
- Bread each slice of zucchini by dusting in flour, dipping in egg white and then dredging in breadcrumbs (you could also use cornmeal and it would probably be amazing)
- Fry in hot oil, about 2-4 minutes per side, depending on heat of oil and thickness of zucchini. Flip when crust in deep brown in color.
- Drain on paper towels.
- Place zucchini slices in a small baking dish in one layer.
- Top with marinara and cheese.
- Broil or bake until sauce and cheese are hot and bubbly.
I served with roasted broccoli and shallots and some orzo tossed in some additional marinara (which I was eating right out of the pan while waiting for the zucchini to fry…very classy).
This is ridiculously easy and made a fun and easy dish to serve to company.
Love it.
So we are still around…I know I have been way off schedule with this blog, but there has been a lot going on and I have been putting way too much energy into watching football lately (how did that happen!?).
Anyway, we’ve had lots of delicious things going on. I’ve got a few recipes and more detailed things to post, but for now, here’s a breakdown of some really wonderful things we’ve been eating.
Root Vegetable Chowder, thanks to Emeril (with lots of additional veggies tossed in)
Cheddar Garlic Chive Scones topped with pan-fried ham and sunny side up eggs for breakfast:
Cuban-inspired panini: ham, turkey, thin-sliced pickles, onion, tomato mustard—all on garlic bread. 
Chili Mac Casserole, made with ground turkey and topped with a corn tortilla chip crust (plus cheese, sour cream and salsa, obviously).
Roast chicken with kale pesto rubbed under the skin, with green beans and potatoes and a Caesar salad. 
Amazing breakfast scramble with bacon, spinach, potatoes and onions….plus Beecher’s flagship cheddar. This was our treat breakfast for the week and was so so spectacular. 
Spinach, onion and garlic english muffin pizzas with italian and feta cheeses. Plus a side of broccoli. 
And I’m still celebrating this amazing Christmas present from Matt: 
Love <3
This is almost directly from a Cooking Light recipe. Ridiculously easy with really interesting flavor combinations.
1.5 pounds golden beets
1/4 cup crumbled feta
1/4 cup sour cream
2 Tb milk
2 Tb mayonnaise
1 1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
1/8 tsp salt
1/8 tsp black pepper
lettuce/greens
thin sliced red onion
- Roast beets. I used the Cooking Light recipe to do this—425 degree oven, scrubbed clean, roasted for 45 minutes. Slightly cooled, trim roots and rub off skins.
- Slice beets into wedges (about 8 per beet, if you’re using medium-sized). Some of mine were huge.
- The feta cheese (yummm) gets mixed with everything down to the black pepper and blended with a whisk. It was really thick and difficult for topping the salad, but so worth it.
- Top greens with beets, red onion and dressing. The recipe called for fresh parsley at this point. I left it out.
Gorgeous plate. :)
We made these poppy seed pan-roasted turnips, but I was not a fan. The recipe was a bit strange, but this was mostly am experiment to see if turnips will be one of our regular veggies…the answer: NO. I’ve had a few things with turnips in them that we fine, and I loved the Winter Vegetable Stew with Maple Glazed Tofu we made last year, but this was not good. If you love turnips, maybe you will appreciate this recipe from Mario Batali, which clearly uses far less poppy seeds than I did (although I followed the recipe exactly, so who knows).
