Foodie Friday

Today I thought I'd make you all jealous and share some of the awesome food we've been enjoying as of late because CSA season has started in our house and that means tons of fresh veggies and awesomeness!  Here are a few favorites of the last couple of weeks!

Nate made us an Ecuadorian style meal for date night this week.  He marinated a pork chop in some spices.  Then he took some of the vitamin greens, kale and spinach that we received from our CSA and turned that into a pureed green sauce mixed up with garlic scapes, onion and jalapeno.  He also added in some turnip that also was in our CSA.  On the side he gave us a little bit of rice with a fried egg on top, because most Ecuadorian meals include an egg and we are getting fresh eggs with our CSA this year too.  This meal was AMAZING.  

Next up is a meal so simple it was actually made by yours truly!  I can't take credit for the idea, the recipe came from our CSA's blog.  But it seriously so simple.  We are getting a cheese share with the CSA this year and one of the cheeses was a soft cheese called Quark - it's a similar texture to a cream cheese and is even sweet like one.  They suggested putting the quark on a baguette and then topping with a slice of radish (also in our CSA box).  My in-laws tried the recipe and said they used Wheat Thins instead of bread, so we decided to do that too.  So there you have it - a little cheese spread on the cracker, top it with a radish slice and garnish with just a little salt and pepper.  OMG.  To die for. I realize you may not have access to quark - cream cheese would probably be a fine substitute or even a soft goat cheese spread would probably be tasty too!  We added a little leftover fried steak for some extra protein, but I seriously could have been satisfied with these little cracker treats all on their own!

And last up pizza.  I know I talk about how we make our own pizza here on the blog a lot.  This last one however was extra awesome, because we topped it with our own homegrown basil and Nate actually grilled it!  It came out with the crispest, most delicious crust ever!  We're having another one for dinner tonight and I can't wait!  Until we make it to one of the pizza farms, doing it up at home will definitely work for now!

So there you have it!  Did I make you hungry?  Or jealous?  What are some of your favorite foods in the summer?  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

February Monthly Eats

Happy Friday and Happy almost end of February!  Today I'm linking up with Shea Lennon to share some recipes we ate this month.  Apparently we were all about getting healthy this month, we were definitely on a salad kick!
We decided to recreate a salad bar at home one night.  We started with romaine lettuce and some carrots.  We added a hard boiled egg and some diced ham for protein.  We added a little bit of cheese and then my favorite - Nate's homemade croutons and finally tossed it all together with a little Western dressing and a little Ranch dressing.  It's silly, but this might be my favorite meal of the month.  Delicious, semi healthy (I say semi only because of all the things we added!) and easy.

Next up, for our at home date night this last week Nate made us some grilled shrimp and scallops with steamed broccoli on the side.  YUM.  He keeps it pretty simple when he grills seafood, he only adds olive oil, salt and pepper before throwing it on the grill.  Nothing is really needed, it comes off the grill tasting like butter.  It just melts in your mouth.  We steam our broccoli in a steamer basket for about 20 minutes and also just have that with a little bit of butter and salt and pepper as well. Again, a simple meal, but very tasty.

And finally, we have another salad.  Nate wanted to recreate a salad he's been enjoying from a coffee shop near his work right now, so he picked up some supplies to attempt it at home and let me tell you, it sounded like an odd combination, but I ended up really enjoying it.  It has spinach, feta cheese, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries (think Craisins), honey nut granola (that is where it started to sound odd to me at first) tossed together with both poppyseed dressing and a balsamic vinaigrette.  It was so good and so filling!  The sweet items and tangy items went really well together.  I think this will be a go to for us, especially coming up this summer.

So there you have it!  We've really been making efforts to eat a little healthier and I think we did pretty good this month - and I think we've also found that eating healthy things like salad doesn't have to be boring or bland!  Have you tried anything new and different lately?  And check out Shea Lennon's blog for other food related posts!  Have a great weekend!

Currently in February

It's time again for one of my favorite link ups of the month, Currently with Anne of In Residence and Jenna from Dearest Love.  I love this monthly check in of what we're up to!
--Currently I am--
Hearting - My Boys.  Always.  I could not love them more - especially when Ollie drags a book over to Nate and hands it to him and is like "Read?" And my sweet patient husband reads Mr. Brown Can Moo about ten times in a row.  I heart them both so much.

Reading - Gone Girl.  I have every intention of finishing it before I watch the movie.  I am enjoying the book, I am not enjoying that I'm not making the time to read it as much as I want to.  Lately I am just crashing at night instead of taking even ten minutes for reading and I'm sure part of that is we're not turning the TV off as early as we could or should be.  I need to change that!

Pinning - Lots of recipes and outfit ideas as usual.  I made a dessert I had pinned for the Super Bowl this weekend - S'mores Cookie Cake.  It was very good - but VERY rich.  They recommend serving it warm because of all the marshmallows and I can understand why.  I did enjoy it but it was so sweet it almost made my teeth hurt, not sure if I'd make it again.

Eating - Other sweets besides my S'mores dessert - I totally had to go buy the Red Velvet Oreos yesterday.  And they're pretty darn good.  I think my heart still belongs to the Birthday Cake flavor as far as the "special" Oreos go, but the Red Velvet ones are pretty dang good.  I also found Strawberry Cupcake Boom Chica Pop.  It might sound weird, but oh my goodness....new favorite flavor.  I think I might need to join a gym...ha.

Anticipating - SPRING!  I am just not a winter girl, sorry.  And we're not even having a bad winter this year, but I just miss all of our outdoor activities pretty hardcore right now. I can't wait for walks, disc golf, eating on patios and just being out in the fresh air.  It will be here before I know and I'm sure I'll lament about how fast time is going!
So that's what I'm up to this month!  What are you currently doing?  And make sure to check out Anne and Jenna's blogs for other Currently posts or to link up your own!

Friday Eats

For fun today I'm linking up with one of my favorite bloggers, Shea of Shea Lennon, to share some of our weekly eats.  I have talked often on the blog about how Nate is an amazing cook.  He pretty much makes all of our meals and he is not afraid to experiment and make recipes his own.  Today I thought I'd share two examples.

First up we have Bechamel Asparagus Pizza.  Nate uses both the pizza dough recipe and bechamel white sauce recipe from the blog Food Wishes for his base.  From there though we've kind of made this creation our own.  We add some blanched asparagus and some Colby jack cheese.  You could stop there, especially for my veggie friends.  We often times leave it there in fact.  But this week we decided we wanted a little protein so we added some prosciutto as well.

The result is a delicious, rich flavored white pizza.  I wouldn't go overboard on adding toppings if you were to try this one because it is pretty rich.  Ollie loved the extra asparagus with a little bit of the sauce mixed in, so you could do it without the pizza crust at all if you wanted!

Next up is homemade chicken caesar salad.  We used to go the lazy route and do the bag mix of caesar salad whenever we wanted one.  Then we started doing a semi homemade version where we got fresh lettuce, but still used store bought dressing and croutons.  Then Nate decided, heck, let's just make the whole thing from scratch.  So he started making the Original Cesar Cardini salad recipe after he found it over here on Food.com.  He also makes homemade croutons when he can, we often will make this salad when we have had bread with a wine and cheese night, he'll use the leftover baguette bread and turn it into croutons with a little garlic, Parmesan cheese and olive oil.  He also seasons the chicken breast and fries it up in a cast iron skillet in winter or grills it in the summer and then we add that to the salad as well!

It is so delicious, it has pretty much ruined me for making caesar salad any other way.  We tend to eat this more in the summer because it's a nice light meal for a hot day, but we had it this week because we had the bread to make croutons and it just sounded good!
So there you go, two unique things that Nate likes to make for us on occasion.  I am so spoiled by a man who loves to cook, I never take that for granted!  I am a good wife who takes on the fun things like clean up then, aren't I sweet?  Figure if he feeds me the least I can do is take care of the mess!
Have a great weekend!!

Good Eats - S'mores Bars

I made a new recipe over the weekend from a pin on my Pinterest page.  I haven't always had extreme luck with my pinned recipes, so when one turns out, I'm happy to share about it!  I needed a dessert for a get together and I didn't have much time to shop or pick up a ton of ingredients.  I realized I had all the items to make S'mores and we still haven't had a bonfire to have actual S'mores, so I decided to see if I could do a S'mores themed recipe.  I found this recipe I had pinned for Easy Milk Chocolate S'more Bars.  I had everything I needed to make this - win!

So when it says easy - it is definitely easy.  You need an 8 x 8 pan, some Hershey bars, Graham crackers, marshmallow fluff, butter, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, baking powder, flour and an egg.  And that's it.  You start out making dough that sort of seems like cookie dough at first - melt a stick of butter, add sugar and brown sugar and blend.  Add egg and vanilla and blend.  Then in a separate bowl you mix your crushed Graham crackers (they said to put them through a food processor, but I just crushed mine with a rolling pin in a Ziploc bag) with your flour and baking powder and then slowly add that to the wet dough.  It makes a nice thick dough.  Half goes on the bottom of your greased baking pan.  Then you layer in your chocolate bars, followed by a layer of marshmallow fluff.  The last part is the only tricky part, you need to put the other half of the dough on top of the fluff.  Nate helped me roll out the dough on some wax paper and then we just turned it over and peeled it off.  Then we just patted it down, filled any holes and it was good to go.  You bake it for a half hour at 350 and then let it cool before serving.

Oh-em-gee.  It's rich and decadent and delightful.  Gooey.  Sweet.  It was a hit!  I don't think I could eat more than one piece of this bad boy, it was so rich it almost made my teeth hurt, but I'm also not super used to milk chocolate these days.  I would like to try making this again with dark chocolate actually, I think I'd like it even better - but even with as sweet as it was I still really enjoyed it!

I think this would also be good with Reese's Peanut Butter cups as your chocolate base too, I know some people enjoy making S'mores out of those!  This would also go nicely with a small scoop of ice cream on the side!  Overall it was a winning recipe and I am so excited to have an option for extra S'mores fixings if I end up with some again!

Foodie Friday - Nate's awesome enchiladas

Happy Friday!  Today I thought I'd do something a little different and share one of Nate's awesome recipes! He is seriously an amazing cook which is good because while I can cook, it's not my favorite thing to do and I am much more like "Semi Homemade with Sandra Lee" than anything else, but Nate will go off book and create and experiment and it always turns out so great!  So, today I'm going to share his enchilada recipe.  He sort of created it last summer when we were in the thick of CSA veggies and it quickly became one of our favorites! So here we go!

Step One: Finely chop an onion, half of a red pepper and half of a green pepper.  We like to mix the red and green peppers for a nice blended flavor, the sweet from the red and spice from the green, but if you prefer one over the other, than use one whole pepper of your choice.  We use the food processor because later we end up needing it to puree the veggies into a sauce, but you can chop by hand if you prefer.  We also add in 1-2 jalapenos.

Step Two: Add in diced tomato and some minced garlic (we just use the stuff in a jar).  When we have fresh tomatoes we use them, but right now tomatoes are not in season yet, so we just used one can instead.  The garlic is as much as you like for taste.  Puree until it's still a little chunky, but somewhat blended.  

Step Three: Put this mixture into a pot, simmer on low for a while (pretty much as long as it takes to get the rest of this put together) - add in chopped cilantro (can be fresh or from a shaker jar) and some salt and pepper to taste.

Step Four - Make margaritas.  This step is extremely important.  We have a great recipe for these too, but I will share that another day.

Step Five - Peel and slice zucchini.  Yes that is right, there is zucchini in these bad boys!  And this zucchini just happened to be fresh from our CSA box this week!  You can pretty much use any kind of filler you want, but this is one we stumbled onto last year that we really enjoyed.

Step Six - Chop up your meat - we use whatever leftover meat we have, be it steak or pork chops, you could probably do chicken as well, but we like something a little less light.  This week we used steak.  Put about a tablespoon of butter into a skillet (we use a cast iron skillet) and add your meat and veggie to the skillet.  Fry up until soft and warmed through.

Step Seven - Drink some of your margarita.  This is important.  Do not skip this step.

Step Eight - Prepare tortillas.  We use corn tortillas and we warm them in the skillet with just a little butter, less than a minute on each side.  Then layer sauce, meat/veggie mixture and cheese.  Roll up and place into baking dish - we use an 8x8 Pyrex.  You also do not need to grease the dish since the tortillas were warmed up in some butter already.

Step Nine - Once all of the enchiladas are rolled up and placed into the baking dish, top them with more sauce and more cheese. Place in a 350 degree oven and bake for about 15 minutes.

Step Ten - Take out of oven, scoop out of baking dish and put onto your plate and then into your belly!  And drink more margarita.  Ole!!

I may not be much of a chef, but I love being Nate's sous chef, there is something that is just more fun about cooking when you do it together. I've been enjoying being able to help out more now that Oliver goes to bed pretty easily at night.  We put him to bed and then we cook our dinner. When Oliver is over we'll make him our junior chef and it will be a family affair!  Do you enjoy cooking?  What's your favorite recipe?