Dairy Free Quiche

Hello!  So yesterday and today I have had to stay off my feet because I recently got a tattoo on my left foot.  Here's some pics of my new culinary tattoo. . .

So anyway, because I have had to stay off my feet, I figured I should write a blog.  But what to write?  This week I've made mostly easy recipes, last weekend I was on a float trip and I'm not going to blog about cooking hamburgers and hot dogs on the camp grill (especially when I didn't make the hamburgers).  So I settled on the dairy free quiche I made for my in-laws last week.  A little background real quick, my brother-in-law is an ovo-lacto-pescatarian (vegetarian who eats fish, eggs and dairy) and my sister in law is lactose intolerant.  Needless to say, I had a bit of a challenge figuring out what to make that both my in-laws could eat.  So I decided to make dairy free quiche for brunch one day: )  Here's the recipe!  (Basic recipe that I added to can be found here)

Dairy Free Quiche - makes 2, 9 inch quiche

- Dairy free frozen pie dough (if you can find one. I couldn't so I made one crustless quiche for my lactose intolerant sister-in-law and one quiche with crust for the rest of us)

- 9 large eggs

- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

- 3.5 cups unsweetened almond milk

- 1/4 cup nutritional yeast

- 2 teaspoons salt

- 10 oz package frozen spinach

- 3/4 cup onion, chopped

- 1 small garlic clove, minced or pressed

- 3/4 cup mushrooms, chopped

- olive oil (enough to cook veggies in)

Preheat oven to 375.  Grease one 9 inch pie pan (for the crustless quiche) and set out frozen pie dough for other quiche. Cook mushrooms, onions and garlic in olive oil until onions are tender.  Add spinach and cook for 2-3 minutes.  Remove from heat and set aside.  Beat one egg in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and frothy.  Add flour and beat until combined.  Add remaining eggs and beat until frothy and mixture has increased in volume by about a third.  Gradually add milk, nutritional yeast and salt and beat for 2 more minutes.  Stir in spinach, onion, mushroom and garlic mixture.  Pour into prepared pans and bake for 40 minutes or until quiche is no longer jiggly. 

Well I hope you enjoy the quiche as much as we did!

Veggies, Chicken Pasta and Wine

Hello again!  Two blogs in one day...I'm on fire!  So this past Sunday I decided to make Angel Chicken Pasta (recipe to come later in this blog) and was looking in my fridge for ideas for a side.  I wanted something fairly healthy to pair with the pasta and what did I happen to have in my fridge?  A bunch of uncooked, diced up veggies I had leftover from making veggie kabobs at my BBQ!  Awesome.  Roasted vegetables it is: )  Even more awesome, the chicken pasta recipe included wine so guess what the Hubby and I did while fixing dinner?  Lets just say I love to cook with wine...sometimes I even put it in the food: )

The wine may or may not have made it to dinner...oops.  Also, the beautiful wine coasters and jeweled decorations are courtesy of my awesome sister Audra.  Great birthday present sis!


Veggie Kabobs 

Your favorite veggies, diced or cut large enough to skewer on a kabob stick
Olive oil (how much you need depends on how many kabobs you are making, I made 22 kabobs and used about a half cup of oil)
2-3 garlic cloves
Your favorite herbs and spices


Instructions
The day before you want to make the kabobs (or at least several hours before), mince the garlic and add to olive oil.  Then add any seasonings you want to the oil.  I used some thyme, oregano, crushed red pepper, salt and black pepper.  Let the oil sit with seasonings overnight to flavor the oil.  Assemble the kabobs.  I used butternut squash, zucchini, red, yellow and orange bell peppers, and pearl onions.  I put roughly equal proportions or each veggie on each kabob.  (Actually, the wonderful hubby assembled the kabobs for me, I just did one example and he did the rest)  Using a silicone basting brush, brush the flavored oil onto the assembled kabob.  Grill kabob until veggies begin to brown and are heated through.


Roasted Veggies


Your favorite veggies, large dice (I added turnips and shallots to the leftover butternut squash, bell peppers and zucchini)
Your favorite herbs and spices (I used thyme, garlic salt and ground cayenne pepper)
Olive oil (enough to lightly coat veggies)


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Toss cut up veggies in olive oil in a large bowl.  Sprinkle herbs and spices over veggies and toss again.  Arrange veggies on baking sheet in a single layer and bake for 45 min, or until veggies are cooked through and browned.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper and enjoy!

Roasted veggies on the left and Angel Chicken Pasta on the right.  Sorry, the plate is a little messy.  I forgot to take a picture until I had already cut up the chicken and mixed up the pasta and sauce.



I also have an idea for the leftover cooked veggies.  Honestly, they don't reheat too well and I hate to waste food...what to do?  Well the reason they don't reheat too well is because they get mushy...mushy veggies?  Ugh!  Who wants those?  I thought about this for a while and finally had a sudden burst of inspiration.  Pureed veggies would make a great base for a spaghetti sauce!  So I pureed the veggies with some tomato sauce and later this week I will make a spaghetti sauce from that. I will let you all know how it turned out: )

Oh!  I almost forgot the recipe for the Angel Chicken Pasta.  It is actually a recipe from Allrecipes.com.  You can find it here.  It is a great recipe but I do make a few small changes.

1) Double the amount of sauce.  It is a great sauce and you will want a lot; )
2) I use 1 can condensed golden mushroom soup and 1 can condensed cream of chicken soup.  This is only because I am not a huge fan of mushrooms.
2) I use half the amount of wine and replace the other half with water.  You can also use all wine or all water depending on your personal tastes.  I feel using the full cup of wine gives the sauce too much wine flavor and it overpowers the other flavors of the dish.
3) I also flatten and tenderize the chicken before placing it in the baking dish.

I hope these recipes work as well for you as they have for me: )  Enjoy!

Bell Pepper Dice-up

Bah!  I'm a bad blogger. . . I promised last time that my blog would include instructions on the easiest way to dice a bell pepper and an onion.  Well, I have the bell pepper instructions but for once in my cooking life, I did not dice an onion recently and therefore could not take pictures.  Craziness!  Anyway, sorry faithful readers...I can only fulfill half of my promise.

Start by getting out your cutting board and favorite knife.  Personally, I use my chef knife to do all my chopping, dicing and other knife activities, but you should use whatever knife you are most comfortable with.  Also, if you find that your cutting board slips on your counter, put a damp washcloth underneath.  Your cutting board definitely won't slip anymore: )


Cut the top of the pepper off, like this:

If the whole top of the pepper comes off, stem and all, that is okay too.  Next, place the knife on the top of the pepper and slice in between two of the "veins" (white pith that attaches to the center of the pepper).

Repeat until you have cut between all the veins.

Then cut the pepper pieces into equal size strips, then cut across the strips into an equal size dice.  Make sure to keep your fingers curled under and your thumb tucked behind your fingers so you don't cut yourself.  I cut the pepper pieces into a large dice because I was using the peppers in a roasted veggie dish.

Hope this helps!  I know when a friend showed me this technique for dicing bell peppers, it made the process a lot easier/faster!


Also, big thanks to my wonderful husband Mike for taking the pictures: )

Veggie Burger Bliss

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day Weekend!  Thank you again to everyone that has served/is serving our country: )

I had a bit of a challenge this past weekend.  I wanted to throw a rockin party where I could utilize my grill and new fire pit to their full potential.  That would not usually be a challenge...except that I have several vegan and vegetarian friends.  I don't know if you realize this but BBQ cookouts are not exactly vegan/vegetarian friendly.  What to do, what to do? Hmmmm...tofurky?  No.  Vegan "chicken" drumsticks?  I don't think so.  Grilled tofu and cauliflower?  Too smelly.  Wait!  I know!  Veggie burgers!  I've been wanting to try and make veggie burgers...this is perfect!  Anyway...enough silliness, on with the veggie burger recipe. This recipe is based on a Food Network Magazine recipe in the June 2011 issue.


Blissful Veggie Burgers, Makes 8 burgers

1.5 cups cooked barley
 olive oil (enough to cook veggies in)
1 cup medium dice onion
3 small stalks celery, med. dice
1 red bell pepper, med. dice
kosher salt, to taste
2-3 cloves garlic, pressed or minced
3 tablespoons barbecue sauce (if you're serving vegans, make sure the sauce you use is vegan friendly!  I used Sweet Baby Ray's)
1 tablespoon chili garlic sauce (again, make sure its vegan friendly, I believe most chili garlic sauce is: )
2, 15 oz cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
salt, pepper, parsley, thyme and oregano to taste


Saute celery, onion, red bell pepper and pinch of salt in olive oil until golden brown, 12-14 minutes.  Add garlic and cook for 2-3 minutes longer.  Place veggies, breadcrumbs, barbecue sauce and chili garlic in food processor and pulse until combined and finely ground.  Here you would normally add 1 cup barley and black beans to the food processor and pulse again until combined and finely ground.  Unfortunately, my food processor is not big enough, so I removed the veggies, pulsed the black beans and barley together and then combined with the veggie mixture in a bowl.  After combining all ingredients, add the other half cup cooked barley and your seasonings.  Form into 8 patties and grill (I used my griddle because my grill was full of hamburgers and hot dogs).

Serve with your favorite hamburger buns ( I found vegan ones for the vegan friends) and condiments.  I put provolone cheese, romaine lettuce and some basil pesto on my veggie burger.

So what was the result of my foray into vegan cooking?  Well...they tasted fantabulous (yes I needed a fake word to describe their ridiculously awesome flavor) but the texture wasn't firm enough.  They were slightly mushy and I don't think I could have grilled them even if my grill wasn't full of meat: (

So again, what to do? What to do?  I talked to one of my lovely and wonderful vegetarian friends and between the two of us we came up with a couple ideas for future endeavors.
1)  Instead of pulsing some of the barley with the black beans, add all barley, whole, after everything else is combined
2) Add some steamed potatoes to burger mixture.  Starchy potatoes would probably yield the best results.
3) Do not rinse the black beans.  My wonderful friend had an excellent point that the liquid the beans come in has starch in it and would help thicken the mixture.  I will definitely still drain the beans because I don't want a lot of the starchy liquid.

I will try these changes and let you all know how they turn out.

Oh!  And I promise next blog will be about the easiest way to dice onions and bell peppers.

Chocolate Cookie Dough and Apple Stuffed Pork Tenderloin

Hello again!  The semester is finally over and I am going to get back on track with this blog!  I tried out two of my new recipes this week and I think they are pretty fantastic.  I forgot to take pictures, of course (sorry!  I am going to try to be better about that: ).  Anyway...here we go!

Chocolate Cookie Dough- makes 4 dozen cookies

3 and a half cups semisweet chocolate chips
2 sticks margarine or salted butter ( I use salted butter)
2 cups packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 large eggs
4 and a half cups all purpose flour, sifted
2 pkgs 3.4 oz instant chocolate pudding mix
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt


Cream together margarine/butter, brown sugar and vanilla.  Melt the chocolate in a double boiler pan or in a metal bowl sitting over boiling water.  Beat in eggs and melted chocolate.  Make sure to let the chocolate cool (but not set) before combining it with the batter or the hot chocolate will cook the eggs (no one wants scrambled eggs in their cookies!: ).  With a wooden spoon, mix in flour, pudding mix, baking soda and salt.  I found that after a little while it was easier to mix the dough with clean, wet hands.


I think this dough would probably be fine on its own, but mixing in things is so much more fun!  When I made the dough this week I divided it in half and made two different varieties.  I put slivered almonds and butterscotch chips in one and macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips in the other.  Both delicious!  You could also try walnuts, pecans, dark chocolate chips, whatever you want!

Okay, on to recipe number two!

Apple Stuffed Pork Tenderloin

1 pork tenderloin

fresh rosemary

fresh thyme

salt

pepper

2 granny smith or your preferred baking apples ( tart apples work the best ), cored and cut into 1 inch pieces

1 small red onion, diced medium or julienned

1 box pork stuffing

The night before you want to make the tenderloin, rub fresh rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper on the tenderloin and let sit overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Prepare stuffing as directed on box and let cool.  Saute onions in a small amount of olive oil and let cool.  Mix stuffing, onions and apples together and set aside.  Butterfly the pork tenderloin (don't know how?  This video should help!  Either method will work.  I used the first).  Place stuffing mixture in the pork tenderloin and fold.  Place in a baking dish sprayed with nonstick cooking spray.  Reserve any extra stuffing (I had a bunch).  Bake for 45 minutes, remove from oven and place extra stuffing mixture around tenderloin.  Bake for another 45 minutes or until the internal temperature of the tenderloin is 165 on an instant-read thermometer.

Enjoy!
 




 

Bored and decided to blog: )

Wow!  What a beautiful day here in Virginia (I'm in Virginia right now visiting my husband who is here for 14 weeks to take a class for his job).  Its 80 degrees and gorgeous!  So what did we decide to do?  Grill!  Lucky for us, the hotel Mike is staying at has two gas grills, two tables and some chairs on a lovely little covered patio behind the hotel.  The property even backs up to a pretty little forest: )  Perfect!

So what did we make for our alfresco meal?  Turkey smoked sausage sandwiches with green peppers and onions! Here's how. . .

Cut one package turkey smoked sausage (or your personal favorite similar product) and cut into four pieces.  Then cut each piece in half lengthwise for easier grilling.  Cut 1 green pepper (large dice or medium size strips, whatever you want) and one half small white or yellow onion (again large dice or strips) and place on a large piece of aluminum foil.  I cut 1 tablespoon salted butter into four pieces and placed them among the green peppers an onions.  Also, I sprinkled some seasoned salt, pepper, oregano and garlic powder on the veggies to give them a little kick.  For an even bigger kick, add some cayenne pepper, chili powder or your favorite spice: ).  Fold up the foil to create a veggie packet you can stick on the grill.

Now time to heat up your grill and get cooking!  The veggies will take a little longer to cook than the sausage because the sausage is already cooked and really just needs to heat up and get those gorgeous grill lines: ).  About 5 minutes after you put your veggies on, put your cut up sausage on the grill.  Cook both until desired doneness is reached.  Remember to check on the veggies periodically and give them a little stir to mix up butter and seasonings.  Shortly before sausage is done cooking, place buns (hamburger, hot dog or sub buns all work) on grill to toast them a little.  Then assemble sandwiches (we put some ketchup on ours) and enjoy!  Makes 4 sandwiches.  Simple and delicious...just the way we like food: ).

Hope anyone that tries this recipe on a nice spring day enjoys it as much as we did!  I really need to start remembering to take pictures of what I'm making...process and final product.

One final note...well question really....would anyone benefit from a how to blog about cutting up veggies?  For me, the hardest veggies to learn how to cut efficiently were onions (dicing them specifically) and green peppers.  I would definitely post pictures with this blog....let me know!

Ham and Beans!

Hello!  Sorry it's been a while since I last posted.  I wish I had a good excuse.  Alas, no.  I have just been lazy.  Anyway, I made ham and beans with cornbread a couple weeks ago and meant to post the recipe.  Better late than never I guess: ).  This recipe makes about 5 or 6 servings.

Ingredients
- 20-25 oz hickory smoked ham (I buy a 40 oz pkg hickory smoked boneless ham and use 1/2 to 2/3 of the package)
- 2 cans pinto beans (drained)
- 1/2 cup ketchup
- 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
- 1.5 tsp chili garlic sauce (can be found in the Asian section of a supermarket)
- 6 tablespoons brown sugar
- 1 tsp garlic salt
- 1/2 tsp onion powder
- 1-2 tsp honey
salt and pepper to taste
- cornbread


Method
    Place ham in a large sauce pot or a stock pot.  Cover with water then add an additional cup of water.  Add all other ingredients except for beans.  Place pot over medium to medium-high heat and cook until water reduces down and no longer covers the ham.  Add beans and another cup or so of water.  Cook down again until ham and bean mixture is desired consistency, similar to canned ham and bean consistency.  The overall cooking time is probably around 1.5-2 hrs. Serve over cornbread and enjoy!


I hope this recipe makes sense.  If not, you can always leave a question in the comment area. Also, if you have any recipe requests or general cooking questions, feel free to leave a comment!