Spinach and Artichoke Orzo

I saw this beautiful little bag of organic whole wheat orzo at the store last week and just HAD to get it.  And tonight it was the perfect accompaniment to my fresh-out-of-the-oven batch of eggplant parmesan.  I'm a happy girl.


Spinach and Artichoke Orzo
Made up recipe based on what was in my pantry/freezer

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole wheat orzo
• 1 can (14oz.) artichoke hearts, quartered
• 1 handful frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
• Tastefully Simple Roasted Garlic Infused Oil
• Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt
• juice of 1/4 lime

Directions:

• Prepare the orzo to al dente, per package instructions.  Drain.
• In a large skillet over high heat, combine the orzo with the artichokes, spinach, a couple tablespoons of oil, and seasoned salt to taste.  Toss for a few minutes until everything is piping hot.
• Remove from heat and squeeze on some fresh lime juice. Toss.
• Serve immediately.

If you don't have any Tastefully Simple Roasted Garlic Infused Oil, just sautee a clove or two of crushed garlic in some olive oil before adding in the orzo and veggies.

Crunchy Buckwheat Granola

Love love love this recipe!  Love the crunch.  Love that it's not overly sweet.  Love that it's healthy.  And oh, did I already mention that I love the crunch?  :-)  The tangy dried cranberries go perfectly with the slightly sweet crunch.  It's great as a yogurt topping, or with milk in the morning in place of your normal cereal, or just eaten straight from the container.

I can't seem to find my 9"x9" square metal pan -- I think it's still in one of our storage boxes somewhere.  So I just used my bundt pan; worked just fine.  I could have used my sheet pan, but opted against that since it would have been a little difficult to stir thoroughly without the stuff going overboard the shallow sides.

Crunchy Buckwheat Granola
From this recipe here.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups uncooked rolled oats
• 1/4 cup whole almonds, roughly chopped
• 3/4 cup uncooked buckwheat groats
• 3/4 cup raw sunflower seeds
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/4 cup honey
• pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
• In a large bowl, combine all the ingredients except the dried cranberries.
• Spread loosely into a 9"x9" metal baking pan (or in this case, a bundt pan)
• Bake for 1 hour, stirring thoroughly at 30 minutes.  (I stirred again at 45 mins.)
• Remove from oven and stir in cranberries.
• Stir occasionally while cooling to reduce clumping.
• Cool completely before putting into an airtight container.

Tip: After you add the oil, use the same measuring cup for the honey.  The residual "lube" from the oil will help the honey slide out of the measuring cup much better, no scraping required.

Cucumber and Mango Salad

This salad is best made with baby/persian/pickling cucumbers and green mangoes.

Baby/persian/pickling cucumbers because they're crunchier than regular cukes, have thinner skin, and have no seeds (well, technically they do have seeds but they're tiny and not as noticeable as the ones in regular cukes).

Green mangoes because of the tang and crunch. Pick a mango that has dark green and red skin, but most importantly, make sure it's FIRM. 

Cucumber and Mango Salad

Ingredients:

• 3 persian cucumbers, diced (about 2 cups worth)
• 2 medium green mangoes, peeled and diced (about 2 cups' worth)
• balsamic vinegar
• salt & freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

• In a large bowl, combine the cukes, mango, and enough balsamic vinegar to liberally coat everything.
• Add salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste.
• Toss well and let sit in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.
• Serve and enjoy.

This salad keeps well in a tightly sealed container in the fridge for a couple of days, but any longer than that and it loses its crunch.  It's actually quite delicious if made the day before and left to marinate overnight in the fridge.

Crockpot Roast

This is a spin on pot roast that's cooked in the crockpot. I've done many different variations on this, but here's tonight's version.

Crockpot Roast

Ingredients:

• 2 pound chuck roast, all visible fat removed
•  Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt
• olive oil
• 5 medium carrots, thickly sliced
• 6 medium red potatoes, cubed (omit if you are strictly following the SBD, or use sweet potatoes)
• a few generous dashes of Worcestershire sauce
• 2 6-oz. packages sliced mushrooms
• 2 15-oz. cans diced tomatoes, drained, reserve 1 cup of the juice

Directions:

• Liberally season both sides of the chuck roast.  Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and sear the meat on both sides.
• In a crockpot, place the carrots and potatoes.  Season with TSSS.
• Place the seared meat on top of the veggies and add a few generous dashes of Worcestershire sauce.
• Add the mushrooms, diced tomatoes and reserved juice.  Season with TSSS.
• Cook on low heat for 8 hours.  Towards the last hour, stir the veggies with a wooden spoon.

In the past, I've also added a large sliced onion, celery, as well as peas.

Ahi Tuna Sandwich

Another way to prepare and eat fish. I love fish. :-)  The goat cheese gives this sandwich a lovely zing that goes really well with the tuna, but goat cheese is pretty mild, so you'll have to be rather generous with it.

In hindsight, I guess I should have seared the sides of the tuna just for photo presentation purposes.  If you look closely, though, you'll see I did get a nice brown crust on the top of the fish (and on the bottom, too, I promise), if not the sides.

Ahi Tuna Sandwich

Ingredients:

• Orowheat 100% whole wheat sandwich thins
• goat cheese
• olive oil
• fresh Ahi tuna fillets cut into patty-size pieces
• Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt
• baby spinach, washed and dried
• tomato slices

Directions:

• Spread goat cheese generously (generously!) over the bottom half of each sandwich thin.
• Place the sandwich thins in the toaster and toast until desired crispiness.  The goat cheese will soften but won't necessarily melt.
• Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil on medium high heat in a large pan.
• Lightly season both sides of fillets.  Place in pan and cook 2-3 minutes on each side until fish is nicely seared on the outside and fully cooked on the inside.**
• Place fillet patties onto the cheesed sandwich halves.  Add spinach and tomato slices and top with the other halves of the toasted sandwich thins.

**Note: unless you are purchasing sushi-grade tuna, please cook your fish all the way through for safety reasons.  This includes all fish purchased at mainstream supermarkets.  If you like seared tuna, where the fish is raw/rare inside, you'll need to buy sushi-grade tuna at specialty stores.

Sauteed Kale and Tomato

Kale.  It's my new favorite green.  Seriously.  It's robust, flavorful, and chewy and crunchy at the same time.  I had some beautiful tomatoes today so I thought I'd sauté them up together.  I loved it.  Hubby didn't care for the tomato part, so I'll try this again another time without the tomato (maybe with mushrooms?).

Sautéed Kale and Tomato

Ingredients:

• olive oil
• 3 medium tomatoes, sliced and seeded
• A big bunch of kale, chopped into bite-size pieces, washed and drained
• Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt
• Tastefully Simple Onion Onion

Directions:

• In a large pan, drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil.
• Add the tomato and sauté on medium-high heat until soft (approximately 5 minutes).
• Add the kale, a few dashes of TSSS and a few dashes of TSOO. 
• Sauté until the kale is soft but still slightly crunchy/chewy (approximately 3 minutes).
• Serve immediately.

We had this tonight as a side to some Simple Snapper and yams.

Roasted Pork Tenderloin

I normally would make this with a few cloves of freshly-crushed garlic, but I don't have any on hand at the moment, so I just used garlic powder (I'm also out of Tastefully Simple Garlic Garlic - gasp!). Ghetto, I know. My apologies. :-)

Roasted Pork Tenderloin

Ingredients:

• 2-3 cloves of fresh garlic, crushed (I used 1 tablespoon of garlic powder today)
• 2-3 teaspoons of dried rosemary
• a few dashes of Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt
• a couple tablespoons of olive oil
• 1.5 lb pork tenderloin, all visible fat removed

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
• In a small bowl, combine the garlic, rosemary, seasoned salt and olive oil so it forms a paste.
• Rub the mixture all over the pork.
• Place pork on a sheet pan and roast until a meat thermometer registers 155 degree F (45 minutes to 1 hour).
• Let the pork rest for 15 minutes before slicing.

I like to add veggies to the pan about 20 minutes before the end of cooking time, so they can roast alongside the pork and soak up any of the yummy juices.  Today's green of choice: Brussels sprouts.  YUM!

Simple Snapper

I think I'd mentioned before that my favorite way to prepare light fish is just with a dash of seasoning and then pan fried on the stove. It's easy, it's quick, and it's tasty. And it adds more fish to my diet.

Simple Snapper

Ingredients:

• fresh red snapper fillets (or other flaky white fish such as tilapia)
• Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt (or your favorite seasoning)
• PAM

Directions:

• Lightly sprinkle Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt over each side of fish fillets.  Let sit for 10 minutes.
• Pre-heat large pan on medium-high.  Spray with PAM.
• Cook fish (in a single-layer) for a couple minutes on each side until cooked through. If it doesn't have a nice light sear to it, turn up the heat a little bit.

That's it.  How quick and simple (and delicious) can it get?  :-)

Turkey Meatballs

Pasta is the quick and easy go-to meal in most households.  Made with the proper ingredients, it can be very nutritious as well as yummy.  I always use whole wheat pasta, I switched from the white stuff years ago and have never gone back.  Whole wheat or whole grain anything used to be difficult to find at the grocery store, but nowadays everyone carries at least a couple of options.

I also like to make turkey meatballs instead of beef.  When I do use ground beef, I make sure it's from a leaner cut, like ground sirloin.  And I normally like to add extra veggies to my sauce.  Diced zucchini and carrots work really well, and also button mushrooms.  I'll just throw these into the pot while the meatballs are simmering (earlier for carrots, which take longer to soften, and in the last 15 minutes or so for zucchini or mushrooms, which cook much faster). 

Turkey Meatballs
This is a compilation/adaptation of different recipes I've read over the years.
































Ingredients:

• 1 lb. ground turkey*
• 1/4 cup whole wheat bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan
• 1 egg, beaten
• a couple teaspoons of Tastefully Simple Italian Garlic Bread Seasoning (or any other Italian seasoning)
• a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce
• olive oil
• 1 jar Trader Joe's Organic Marinara Sauce

Directions:

• In a large bowl, mix together the first 6 ingredients above (without the oil and marinara sauce).
• Form into 1.5" balls.
• In a large skillet, add a couple tablespoons of olive oil and brown the meatballs on medium-high heat, turning them a few times to make sure each side is nice and brown.
• Once the meatballs are brown on all sides, reduce heat to low.  Add the entire jar of marinara sauce and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.

*Today I used a 1 lb. package of Foster Farms ground turkey.  I sometimes use a package of Jennie-O turkey, which is actually 20 oz., or 1.25 lbs., so if you use this brand, just slightly increase the amount of bread crumbs, grated parmesan and seasoning.  The single egg is still fine.

Roasted Garbanzo Beans

I do apologize for my long blogging hiatus. I was also on a cooking hiatus since school got really hectic as we're rolling towards the end of the semester. We ate out way too much and I can totally feel it in my waist. :-( So even though finals are only a couple weeks away and life is as busy as ever right now, I've decided to get back to cooking and eating healthy.

The challenge with this blog is not necessarily the cooking part, I think I've got that down, it's the cooking new foods part. I love trying new recipes and cooking methods, it's just that when I'm busy and crunched for time, I tend to fall back to my old favorites which are quick to not only think up and shop for, but to prepare as well since I don't have to research and refer to other sources. But I do have a long list of new items I want to prepare and try, so I will do my best to cycle through them on a more regular basis. :-)

I was baking a double-batch of kale chips tonight when my mind started to wander. Hmmm, I wonder what else I can roast up to a crisp? When I opened up my pantry, I saw a lonely can of garbanzo beans (AKA chickpeas) amidst cans of black, kidney and great northern beans. So over to the computer I went to search for a recipe. Ta-Dah! Roasted Garbanzo Beans! So easy and so yummy!

Roasted Garbanzo Beans
Adapted from this recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 (15 oz.) can of garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
• PAM
• Tastefully Simple Seasoned Salt

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
• Dry the garbanzo beans with a paper towel and place them onto a baking sheet in a single layer.
• Roast in the preheated oven for 40 - 50 minutes or until golden brown and crunchy, tossing the beans with a wooden spoon every 15 minutes or so to prevent sticking.
• When beans are nice and crunchy, remove from oven.  Spray the roasted beans very lightly with PAM and sprinkle with seasoned salt.  Toss and enjoy!

Ok, so one can of these suckers isn't nearly enough for a family of 3 plus Grandma.  I'll need to at least double it for next time.  ;-)