Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Dinner straight from the garden.

To me one of the best things in life is eating a meal made from food homegrown in my own garden. My mom and I did just that with this simple and super healthy pasta.

Like a lot of the things I make, the so called recipe for this meal is very flexible. Add what you have from your garden or farmers market or grocery store. You can't screw it up! Try to eat the rainbow!

Here's what we came up with:
Candy stripe beets and their greens
Yellow squash
Kale
Cherry tomatoes
Yellow onion
Frozen peas
Chives
Basil
Oregano

Other than the peas, tomatoes and onion, we picked all the veggies and herbs from the garden just before eating them. Perfect!

We sautéed them in some olive oil with just salt and pepper before tossing them with pasta and a couple pads of butter. Done. Voila! Super yummy.

Ingredients:
1/2 large yellow squash, or one small one
3 small beets (peeled) and their greens
1/2 large onion
6 large kale leaves
A dozen or so cherry tomatoes, halved
1/2 cup frozen peas
Small handful of chives
Couple sprigs of each basil and oregano
1/2 pound dried pasta
2-3 Tbsp butter
2-3 Tbsp olive oil

Prepare pasta according to package directions and save some of the cooking water before you drain. Meanwhile, chop all veggies into bite size chunks. Chop up the herbs as well. Then heat a big drizzle of olive oil in a sautée pan. Add veggies from hardest to most tender. For me the beets and onions went in first. Then the squash and greens. Salt and pepper to taste. After a minute or two we turned off the heat and threw in the tomatoes, peas and herbs. Add the veggies to drained pasta with the butter and another small gulf of olive oil. Add 1/4 cup of the cooking liquid or so to make a very light sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy!

Friday, July 11, 2014

Baby bump!

Some people have (daringly) asked if I had a baby bump these days. Well it is true! My husband, Bryan, and I are so excited to let everyone know that we are expecting our first little one in January. The due date is January 9th to be exact so that puts me at 14 weeks today.

Answers to the obvious questions...
Yes we are planning on finding out the gender.
And yes we have a couple names picked out for either a boy or a girl but we aren't telling those! 

Mmmm. Double chocolate banana peanut butter muffins

So I woke up this morning to the sound of thunderstorms. A very welcome sound since they were in the forecast! The baby and I decided we were going to make muffins for breakfast. A quick scan of Pinterest gave us these:
http://www.averiecooks.com/2014/05/flourless-double-chocolate-peanut-butter-mini-blender-muffins.html

We used a kitchen aid mixer with the whisk attachment instead of a blender but otherwise followed the recipe just like it says. And oh yummy are they good!! They came out of the oven about 10 minutes ago and I've eaten 4 already.


My batch made 23 total mini muffins. I predict the remaining 19 won't make it through the weekend. Maybe not even through tomorrow!

P.S. I guess the my energy really is coming back now that it's the second trimester. Even just a couple weeks ago I never could have imagined scraping up enough energy to cook or bake anything! This is very good news!