Avocado & Tomato Pasta... Hello there, Summer!

Yum. There is just something about avocado that makes everything better. 

This is one of those recipes that doesn't even count as a recipe. I took whole wheat pasta, sliced up a carton of grape tomatoes (over the bowl so I kept the tomatoey juices), and an avocado. Drizzled with a TINY bit of olive oil, dashed with some salt and pepper and, ta da.

Yummy clean eating. 

I am going to California for the week so, I'll be off the grid/no posting (again). 

Also, thanks to all of you who were supportive when I was sick last week. I got better just in time to go to Cali but, I am not allowed any alcoholic drinking due to the antibiotics I am on for the throat. I scratched it apparently which caused an infection which caused the death cold which required crazy powerful drugs that I am still on for the moment. 

Always an adventure, right?

Happy April! Talk to you guys in May! :)

Halloween Partay: Mac & Meat and Pepperoni Rolls

Not the prettiest picture, sure but, one of the most delicious spreads out there.


Gosh, I love cheese. And meat. And carbs.


Look at those pepperoni rolls! And mac and meat! Which is just like hamburger helper from what I understand of hamburger helper. But this one uses the blue box and your own ingenuity. 

Mac and Meat!

Pepperoni Rolls!

A truly perfect pairing.

So, I am having a huge halloween party at my house today. Huge. Hugest party I have ever had. So, there is a lot to do and stress over and pick at. 

Luckily I have comfort food like this to munch on and chill with. 

Also, I will try and post pics of the party/food and drinks sometime next week. Maybe as my Friday post. 

We'll see how together and adult I can be ;)

My Aunt Tootsie is a dietician and one of the best "throw things together" cooks I know. 

You know what I mean. One of those people who just tosses things together and they are just randomly deliciously perfect. 

These are two of her classics that she would make for us kids when there were seven of us and just 2 moms. 

I've been thinking lately of updating the Mac & Meat Recipe even further by adding some cooked veggies. Some more color and taste. It's just sooooo good and comforting as is that I am tentative to mess with it t all. Let me know what you think.

Mac & Meat

-1 box family size kraft mac and cheese

-1 can cream of mushroom soup

-1 lb ground beef

Prepare the mac and cheese and brown the meat. Once both are cooked, throw all ingredients together and enjoy.

Pepperoni Rolls

-4 packages biscuts

-1 package pepperoni 

Take a piece of pepperoni, fold a biscut in half around folded pepperoni piece. Lay out on cookie sheet, bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes.

Battlefield Squah Lasagna

So, this was my favorite thing made. Look how pretty it looks non-geeky.

I found the recipe from Martha. It was SOOOOOOO good.

And I found the LEGO characters and ship at target.

It turned out delicious and SO SO fun. Please make this. I love it. I am going to make it again once I find a butternut squash that is already diced up. It was a horrific trial to cut it up. I hate squash now. Working with it made me want to die.

So. I'll make it again when I find some butternut that I can work with. This is amazing tho. Try it out.

Tauntaun Spaghetti Guts

This is a garlic bread Tauntaun that is sliced open and bleeding spaghetti...

I personally think it'd be a very cozy place to spend a frozen night.

Mushroom vodka sauce, angel hair pasta, and mushrooms pan fried with garlic butter. I loved the simplicity of this dish, it was just jars and boxes, but I adored it. The Tauntaun itself was a huge success. 

PW's Lemony Pasta

So, in case this hasn't been made clear by my track record here, I am relatively obsessed with the blog Pioneer Woman Cooks. This is yet another recipe provided by her web site, one among the many I plan on making and have been working through slowly but surely.

SO! Lemon pasta. It looks just as fresh and delicious in the pics as it does in person. And the taste is phenomenal.

It's zesty and also savory. I am a big fan of cheesy lemon pastas, usually with chicken in them as well. I would love to try this recipe with some chicken added into the mix. Or perhaps served next to some fish.

Oooh, yum. That actually sounds like a winning combination. White fish or shrimp with lemon pasta? Can't miss.

If you feel like you are being called to make this then, you should bite the bullet and just go make this. If you like, I could suffer through having some more. Especially if we are trying it with a protein. And if I don't have to do the dishes.

But, in simpler terms. This recipe is delicious, a snap, and reheats well. A fantastic weeknight meal, served with some kind of meat and perhaps a salad, you'll flip. Promise.

Enjoy :)

Ingredients

-1 pound Thin Spaghetti

-4 Tablespoons Salted Butter

-2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

-2 cloves Garlic, Minced

-1 whole Lemon, Juiced And Zested

-2 cups Sour Cream

-½ teaspoons Kosher Salt, Or More To Taste

-Plenty Of Grated Parmesan Cheese

-Flat-leaf Parsley, Chopped

-Extra Lemon Juice

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cook spaghetti until al dente.

In a skillet, melt butter with olive oil over LOW HEAT. When butter is melted, add minced garlic. Squeeze lemon juice into the pan. Turn off heat.

Add sour cream and stir mixture together. Add lemon zest and salt. Taste, then add more salt if necessary. Pour mixture over drained spaghetti and stir together, then pour spaghetti into an oven safe dish.

Bake, covered, for 15 minutes. Then remove foil and bake for an additional 7 to 10 minutes. (Don’t bake too long or the pasta will dry out.)

When you remove it from the oven, squeeze a little more lemon juice over the top. Top generously with Parmesan cheese, then chopped parsley. Give it a final squeeze of lemon juice at the end.

Classic Carbonara

One of the best things that I ever ate while in Italy was their authentic Carbonara recipe. Lots of flavor even though it's a very simple recipe.

I cannot begin to express how delicious I find this dish and am unsure what else to add to this post to get that point adequately across. You want to make this. You probably need to make this. Now, today.

Cheesey, creamy, with the yum flavors of pancetta and then peas to pull everything together. If this is the Italian version of bacon and eggs, America simply pales in comparison.

Pasta alla Carbonara Recipe

-1 tsp olive oil

-8 oz pancetta cut into 1/4-inch cubes

-1 medium onion, 1/4-inch diced

-2 cloves garlic, minced

-3 whole eggs

-2 egg yolks

-1/2 – 3/4 cup grated Pecorino or Parmesan cheese, or a combo of both

-1 pound dried linguine or spaghetti

-1 cup frozen green peas, thawed

-salt/pepper

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and add at least a tsp of salt. Heat olive oil in a large saute pan over medium heat. Add pancetta and cook, stirring often until it is well browned and crisp. Remove to a paper-towel covered plate. Lower heat to medium and add the diced onion and saute until caramelized, (5 minutes-ish). Add the garlic and saute til browned. Remove pan from heat and set aside. Cook the pasta. When the pasta is al dente, reserve about 1/2 cup of the pasta water and then drain the pasta. In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, egg yolks and cheese until well combined. Add 1/4 c of the hot pasta water to the bowl and whisk well to temper the eggs. Add the hot pasta and toss, adding more pasta water as needed to make a creamy sauce. Toss with the peas, onions, garlic, and cooked pancetta. Serve with a smile :)

Corned Beef and Cabbage...Pasta

With my lovely left over corned beef and cabbage from St. Patrick's day, I decided to make some yummy corned beef and cabbage pasta.

Yep. Again, welcome to college. 

The pro of college here would be that I try my darndest not to throw out any food if I can help it. Sure, it backfires sometimes, for example, when I made this dish and it yielded more pasta then I could manage as a single body in a week and had to toss it eventually. BUT! Whenever possible, my broke self tries to make the most out of my ingredients handy and comes up with new creations.

Here is one such creation. The recipe is pretty basic and the "sauce" is my family's world famous (or at least famous within the Midwest/branches of the family) corned beef sauce. If you don't feel like the pasta dish, make your corned beef and just top it with this divine sauce.

Corned beef and this horseradish sauce are the perfect pairing :)

Corned Beef Sauce:

-1 envelope chicken gravy mix

-2 tbls prepared horseradish

-Measure 1 ½ cups cooking liquid (water/gravy)

Put cooking liquid-- (by using leftovers, I didn't have any gravy so it was all water but, it turned out just as well)-- in small sauce pan on stove. Stir in mix, stir until dissolved. Stir in horseradish. Bring to boil. Simmer back down and serve.

To make the leftover Pasta:

Dice up your corned beef and cabbage left overs until bite size. Cook a package of egg noodles according to directions. Mix all together in a large bowl, top with sauce.

Seriously worth trying. Delicious spin on tradition.

Green Pesto Carbonara Tortellini

In keeping with the green theme, I bought this lovely spinach tortellini stuffed with three cheese and decided to make an experimental carbonara to mix it with. I was heavy on the eggs because I wanted it to be more...protein like and a bit thicker and it turned out nicely. When I blended it with the pesto, it combined into a more eggy-creamy-pesto which was perfecttttt.

Turned out to be a delicious lunch. Hope you can enjoy it as well.

Pesto Carbonara

-2 packages tortellini

-1 lb bacon

-1 jar basil pesto sauce

-1 cup cream

-salt/pepper

-4 eggs

-1/4 cup parmesan

Cook bacon til crisp. Cut into bite size pieces. Whisk together the egg and parmesan, add with the cream, salt and pepper to a pan and simmer to reduce until thick and creamy. Cook the pasta and drain it. Add pasta and bacon to the cream sauce and stir in the pesto. Serve and enjoy! 

Baked, Breaded, and Seasoned Eggplant Over Pasta

...this dish was just. Really good.

It was one of those times when, I had a lazy afternoon of studying and, got hungry. Decided to throw some pasta together using the produce in my fridge that was nearing toss time.

And it exceeded my expectations. By delicious miles.

For those of you who don't know, these are both egg plant. The cute little one is aptly named "baby eggplant". I don't know how they grew these fully flavored egg plants in miniature size but, it was so cute I could not resist. And that long, funky looking one, I just have never had nor seen before and therefore needed to try.

This one is called "japanese eggplant". 

So! I decided to make something with eggplant in it just so I could try these two out. I'd had egg plant before and cooked it before but, I decided to go into the experimental, no recipe, territory.

Turned out fun and yummy as I said. One of my new favorite ways to add to the classic spaghetti and tomato sauce.

These are the two eggplants chopped up! The left side is the baby eggplant (which ironically, look bigger) and the right side has the japanese, which seemed to have more seeds and a slightly more bitter flavor. 

When everything was cooked up though, the playing field seemed to level and it was just one pasta bowl of delicious. 

Baked Eggplant Pasta

-1 to 2 Eggplants (depending on size/amount of people you are trying to feed)

-1 cup bread crumbs

-Basil

-Garlic Salt

-Oregano

-Pepper

-Parmesan

-Olive oil

Slice the eggplant into discs. Drizzle a lipped cookie sheet with olive oil and smear, (essentially, grease the sheet with olive oil). Lay the sliced discs out on the sheet and drizzle with oil. Sprinkle each disc with bread crumbs, I used a pretty heavy hand. Then add spices and cheese to taste. I used a good amount of garlic salt and then went lighter on everything else. 

Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes or until the breadcrumbs appear toasted and the eggplant discs are soft. Depending on how thick you slice, it could take more or less time.

Chicken in a Garlic White Wine Sauce... & Promise it's a Cinch.

Midwest weather seriously just sucks in February.

Seriously. It's a blustery but sunny day one minute and then the next, it's freezing winds and torrential snow and you find yourself slipping on ice and snow constantly and soaked within moments of stepping outside the door.

Or at least, I find myself in that situation rather consistently.

On one such particular day this week, I got fed up with the chill completely and decided that I wanted a warm and delicious dinner to make me feel more cheered.

This dish was just the trick to make myself and my roommates feel the winter chill evaporate and the delicious flavor of garlic seep into our taste buds.

Garlic Chicken and Wine Sauce

-3 large chicken breasts, cut in 1/2

-1 bottle dry white wine

-1/3 cup milk

-1 head garlic
-Assorted Veggies (Or not) To taste (I used spinach, tomato, & mushrooms)

-Salt/Pepper

-Olive Oil

-Butter

-Breadcrumbs

Put deep pan on stove. Saute' garlic in butter. Roll chicken in bread crumbs, add to butter/garlic. Cook outsides slightly before adding remaining ingredients. Simmer on low heat for 45 minutes, stirring frequently. Serve over RICE.

Yes, I realize I took the picture served over pasta. Which is ALSO delicious. It's up to you, but I would go with rice because it soaks up the flavors much better. Either way, you'll enjoy it, promise :)

Rainy Day Lunch: Mac & Meat with Pepperoni Rolls

My Aunt Tootsie is a dietician and one of the best "throw things together" cooks I know. 

You know what I mean. One of those people who just tosses things together and they are just randomly deliciously perfect. 

These are two of her classics that she would make for us kids when there were seven of us and just 2 moms. 

I've been thinking lately of updating the Mac & Meat Recipe even further by adding some cooked veggies. Some more color and taste. It's just sooooo good and comforting as is that I am tentative to mess with it t all. Let me know what you think.

Mac & Meat

-1 box family size kraft mac and cheese

-1 can cream of mushroom soup

-1 lb ground beef

Prepare the mac and cheese and brown the meat. Once both are cooked, throw all ingredients together and enjoy.

Pepperoni Rolls

-4 packages biscuts

-1 package pepperoni 

Take a piece of pepperoni, fold a biscut in half around folded pepperoni piece. Lay out on cookie sheet, bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes.