Kitchen sink pasta salad

I love sweets and creamy, full fat food, don't get me wrong. I want caramel rolls and creme brûlée on the table just as much as the next girl. But in my family I'm also usually the one pushing to have at least one healthy dish on the table. Bonus points if it's a vegetable! 

So when grilling out for Mother's Day meant brats and potato salad and my mom's signature dish, beans Janeen, I ipted for add a pasta salad loaded with veggies to the table. 

My style of cooking involves a process that goes something like this: What do I have in the fridge? What do I have in the pantry? Okay let's make something out of that. Here's what I ended up with:

Kitchen Sink Pasta Salad

1 pound pasta, cooked and rinsed

5 carrots, shredded

1 medium zucchini, shredded

1 red onion, diced

1 yellow pepper, diced

Handful of green olives, chopped

1 can black beans, drained and rinsed

20-30 pepperoni slices, chopped

1 bottle ceaser vinaigrette

Plop it all in a bowl and let sit for at least 30 minutes. Serve and enjoy!

Easy peasy, healthy and very yummy! 

Hidden Veggies: Kale Muffins

I love eating things that are both healthy and tasty and I think this combo that comes together as kale muffins fits that description to a T! It started out as an experimental recipe, adapted from a spinach muffin recipe I had made before. As I"m typing they are out of the oven, and a couple are in my belly.

It's September and there is still a lot of kale in my garden. I do like to freeze some to add to soups throughout the winter, but I have a lot. For some reason my mom and I are really good at growing kale. Peppers never turn out so well for us, but we can raise kale with the best of them. This year we had both curly and dinosaur kale in the garden. For this recipe I used curly but I'd swap out any variety any day and bet it wouldn't make much difference.

The muffins turned out just how I like them. A little sweet, with a hint of banana. I recall teh spinach ones being a little brighter green, but the slightly more dull color doesn't bother me. If you're looking to "trick" kids into eating a green muffin, I might go with the spinach instead. Swap it out, tit for tat, no problem.

Here's how I made them...

Ingredients:
6-7 cups fresh kale leaves, washed and roughly chopped with stems removed
1 cup almond milk
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted just enough to be a liquid.
2 ripe bananas
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup quinoa, cooked and cooled
2 cups whole wheat flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup slivered or chopped almonds, walnuts or pecans (optional)

Preheat oven to 350°.

Using a stick blender in a large bowl, puree kale with milk and oil. (This part starts off slow but picks up speed as more kale turns to liquid. Regular milk is just fine if you don't have almond milk.) Add bananas and vanilla and continue blending to combine. Add quinoa, stir to combine and set aside.

Combine next six ingredients in a separate bowl and whisk or stir to combine. Add dry mixture to the kale mixture and stir until just combined. (If batter is very thick and dry, add an additional splash of milk.) Add nuts and stir gently to combine.

Drop 1/4 cup batter into greased muffin tin. Bake for 18-20 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Expect about 20 muffins.

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

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!

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!