Alfredo Pizza

We got this courtesy of Aaron's brother Jared.

Ingredients

1 loaf french or Artisan bread
1 can Alfredo sauce
1 lb. pork sausage
2 halves different colored sweet bell peppers, chopped
½ sweet onion, chopped
1 can fresh mushrooms, chopped
1 cups shredded cheese (yellow or white, whatever you like better)

Preheat oven to 350. Cook and drain sausage. Add peppers, onion and mushrooms to sausage. Sautee for a 3-5 minutes. (adjust time depending on how cooked you like your veggies) Add Alfredo sauce. Simmer 1 minute. Cut the bread lengthwise, then into desired chunks from there. (We generally make ours pretty big, but with kids, you might make some smaller) Lay cut side face up on baking sheet and cover bread with sauce. Cover sauce with cheese. Warm in oven to melt cheese and warm bread, 10-12 minutes.

You can see with this one, we used a white cheese, the sauce is more of a tannish color. Anyhow, we've used cheddar too and it works great too. Sometimes we like to sprinkle some parmesan ontop before baking too. It adds a nice flavor.

Garden Fresh Quesadilla

This was a random creation I made last summer whilst enjoying the fresh yumminess out of the in-laws garden. I don't recall if the tomatoes were garden fresh. I don't think so, but the asparagus and spinach were. This was so delish, I can't wait til next summer so I can make it again!

Ingredients

1 handful of fresh spinach

1-2 stalks of asparagus (depending on your supply and desire)

1 roma tomato (again, use as much as you want)

one warm quesadilla (I bet you all know how to make that)

1 tsp. Oregano

1 tsp. Onion powder

1 tsp. Garlic powder

Chop your asparagus and tomato. Put in a pan with seasonings. Cook to desired doneness. After washing fresh spinach, layer on plate and put quesadilla ontop. Put freshly cooked garden veggies ontop. Enjoy!

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Made it a few times last summer. It's easy to tweak and change per your liking. Perhaps this will inspire some of you to garden!

Alfredo Add-in

Here's a small variation on our alfredo we love so much. This ended up being so darn tasty, I had to share how easy it is to spice up your meals.

The original Alfredo recipe is here.

All we did was steam some broccoli on the side and add it in. It was so yummy and such a great addition. It's so easy to spice up simple dishes.

Roasted Asparagus

This is one I found on Food Network's website a long time ago. It was super simple and went something like this.

Ingredients

1 pound asparagus, trimmed

1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Snap or cut the dry stem ends off each asparagus and place on a heavy baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toss. Roast until the asparagus is tender, about 15 minutes. Cool slightly and serve warm or at room temperature.

I was using garden asparagus, and it wasn't as thick and they weren't all the same size. So some of ours got crispy, like in the picture. But honestly, I kinda liked it. Made them kinda taste like french fries. I'm sure if you used a bunch from the store they'd all cook up real uniform though.

Guacamole

This is my mom's guacamole. I absolutely love it. Eat it with her homemade chips and you might not be able to stop before the whole bowl is gone.

Ingredients

2 avocadoes peeled and pitted
1 medium onion finely chopped
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp salt
½ tsp coarsely ground black pepper
½ tsp ascorbic acid mixture (optional)
1 medium tomato peeled and sliced

Beat avocadoes, onion, lemon juice, salt, pepper and ascorbic acid mixture until creamy. Fold in tomato. Cover and refrigerate. Stir before serving. For a chunkier guacamole, mix avocadoes with a fork.

I make mine chunky and mash it all up with my fork. We LOVE it.

Homegrown Green Beans

These are just some green beans from the garden we have at my in-laws. I'm not a big green bean eater, and certainly don't know exactly what to do with fresh garden vegetables. I'm still learning. The only ones I really remember eating from childhood are corn on the cob. And that is pretty obvious as to preparation. Anyhow, For those like me who don't really know what to do with fresh stuff like this, this is what I did.

 After washing my freshly picked beans, I prepped a pan by melting butter, and then popped my green beans in the pan. Stir fried vegetables always taste good to me. Maybe top with a little bit of salt. Nothing fancy. You can also steam fresh veggies for a fresh, crisp taste. I'm super new to this, but wanted to open the arena for fresh grown foods.

What is your favorite way to prep garden veggies?

Pico de Gallo

I posted a pico de gallo recipe with the Applebee's Santa Fe Chicken Salad but I have another one that I ate growing up. It's not quite as flavorful, having less ingredients, but I could see some people liking it's simplicity still. It's still delicious.

Ingredients

1 bunch cilantro

6 medium tomatoes

1 onion

Salt

Garlic Salt (You could easily substitute with real garlic. Maybe 3 cloves.)

Chop cilantro, tomatoes, and onion. Combine in a bowl. Add salt and garlic salt.

This recipe is to a pretty big scale. You could easily cut it in half.

Teriyaki Chicken with Cabbage

Hi again.  My wonderful sister Julie has invited me to be a regular contributor to her blog.  Well; she didn't invite as much as I asked.  As I've expanded my repertoire in the kitchen I've realized how much fun it is to cook and now have a desire to share that with everyone else.  And so here I am. 

I'm going to start with one of my favorite easy recipes.  I know what you're thinking after reading the title.  "Are you serious lady?  Uh-uh.  No way.  Chicken and cabbage do not belong in the same dish."  Well, that was what I thought, too, the first time my sister-in-law served this.  And now I love it.  It's one of those dishes that's not really an exact science.  You take the ingredients and cook however much your family needs.  So I'm not giving quantities, just ingredients.

Ingredients:

Chicken pieces.  I prefer thighs; tonight was breasts
Teriyaki Sauce
Cabbage
Vegetable Oil
White Rice

Instructions:

Marinate the chicken in teriyaki sauce.  The original recipe says to marinate for 2 days, but let's be serious here...  I rarely think about my meals that far in advance.  I've marinated it for as little as 2 hours.  The flavor isn't as rich, but it's still good.  Cook the chicken in an oven-safe casserole at 375 for 35-40 minutes.

Put some white rice onto boil.  I like to rinse it first when doing this recipe because I like the sticky texture it gets.  Everyone has a method for making perfect rice, and here's mine:  Add 1 part rice and 2 parts water to the pan.  Cover it, and start the flame on high until boiling, then turn it down to as low as it will go.  When pocks form in the rice, turn it off and let it sit until you're ready to eat.  I like using my glass-lid pot for making rice.  That way I don't have to keep lifting the lid to tell if I have pocks yet.

Next, cut your cabbage into strips.  (I do about 1/4 -1/3 an average cabbage for my husband and I; the kids refuse to eat it.)  Put a little oil in the bottom of a frying pan.  Add the cabbage.  Add salt and pepper.  (I tend to be liberal with the pepper.)  Cook it down until the cabbage is wilted but still has a little bite.  It will continue to soften after you take it off of the heat, so don't let it cook too much. 

When your chicken is done, shred it with two forks. 

Serve with the rice on bottom, then the cabbage, and then the chicken. 

I forgot to take a picture until the end of dinner; hence the haphazard look to the pile of food.  I had been trying to convince my son that it really is chicken, which he loves, and that he can eat the chicken without eating the green.  But no such luck tonight.

Since I only used about 1/3 of the cabbage tonight, I'll be sharing another cabbage recipe soon.

Stress Tip

So, this may be kinda silly, and mostly funny, but it really worked for me and ultimately made a veggie packed dinner!

The other day I was having a rough day with the kids and had started snacking. I didn't do bad, but got frustrated since I've been working real hard lately to lose a few pounds. So I wanted to find something to do that wasn't snacking. So I decided we were having stir fry and started chopping vegetables.

First it was carrots, then celery, bell peppers, and garlic. By that point I was so into the veggies, that I started to add canned veggies and other things we had around the house. Needless to say, the stir fry was a little heavy on the vegetable side. But it was really good for us and better that than cookies or candy, right?

Sheila Salad

This salad is named for our good friend Sheila who used to make this for us all the time in Missoula. After living in Kalispell for a while, she came up here to visit her sister and we all had lunch together and she made her classic salad. We realized how much we missed it and started making it for our family too!

Ingredients
Lettuce - I like using spinach and a spring mix. But you can use Romaine, or even Iceberg if that's your thing.
Tomatoes, chopped - If I could, I'd always use cherry tomatoes, quartered.
Cucumbers, chopped
Bell peppers, chopped
Colby Jack Cheese, cubed
Carrots, chopped
Optional: bacon bits, green onions, croutons, cubed ham, hard boiled eggs, etc.

This is a real, make it how you like it salad. What we love most about it is the variety of things to put in it, and we make it quite chunky. This way the flavors are a lot stronger. We're also fans of the colby cubes. We just had this for a birthday dinner with a medium-sized group of family and had everything in separate containers so everyone could literally create their own salad with the fixings they like best. This salad's a big hit with our family, and we just love it.

Lemon Broccoli

My sister gave this to me and I was too excited to try it. I love sharing good recipes. (Can you tell?)

Ingredients
1 large bunch broccoli cut into spears - Don't leave out the stems either. There's so much there, but if you only use the trees, you lose a ton. When you're taking bites of it, you can't tell if it's mixed in with stems, and then you get so much more broccoli taste.
1 medium onion, halved and thinly sliced - Mine was red, which you can see in the photo. I normally use yellow.
1 cup thinly sliced celery
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel - Don't forget about this lovely tip when it comes to lemon zest!
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Steam broccoli until crisp-tender. Rinse in cold waster; drain and set aside. In a large skillet, saute the onion, celery and garlic in butter for 5 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.  Add the lemon peel and juice, salt, pepper and broccoli. Heat through. 

So please excuse my photo, aside from the blurriness, my broccoli is most obviously overcooked! It is the saddest shade of green. I had it steaming above my rice in the cooker and totally forgot about it. I was seriously in mourning over the sad color of this broccoli. But let me tell you that the broccoli tasted great. It was a wonderful side dish. I love good veggie dishes that I can eat with a plain rice, and just mix together. This was mixed with a little bam chicken, that I believe will be posted next. So stay tuned!