Foodie Friday

It's time to make you all jealous again.  Here are some more of our goodies as of late with our CSA veggies!  I've been so spoiled this summer!

Ecuadorian style lamb chop with vitamin greens, rice and egg.  Nate took the vitamin greens and mixed them up with tomato and spices so it turned into a nice side dish that he describes as kind of a Mexican "stew".  He cooked the lamb on a cast iron skillet with just some oil and salt and pepper. And then the rice was simple and we put an egg on top of it again as that is frequently done in Ecuadorian cooking.

Chicken fried steak with grilled cauliflower, carrot and fennel.  This one was pretty easy.  We got the chicken fried steak from an Omaha Steaks pack we recently ordered (got a really good deal in the mail and took advantage).  Nate whipped up a pretty simple white gravy.  He tossed the veggies with some olive oil, salt/pepper and a few Indian type spices and then grilled them until they came to a nice crispy perfection.  SO yummy.

Stir Fry!  This was pretty basic, but so yummy.  We took some sirloin and stir fried it with broccoli, summer squash, zucchini, green pepper and mushrooms and put that on top of some rice noodles.  It was pretty much perfection.  When all else fails and we don't know what else to do with our veggies for the week we stir fry them!

This next one is another of my favorites.  It's a homemade chicken and basil ravioli we make.  We make the dough from scratch and then fill it with chicken, ricotta cheese (which also came from our CSA!) and basil.  Then we boil it up and when it's done we toss it with a light sauce made of olive oil, lemon zest and more basil.  It is sooooo good.  Nice light meal in the summer too.

And this last one is cheating, no prep required other than washing it.  Sugar snap peas.  We only got them once this year and I'm still sad they're gone.  These made a fantastic snack one afternoon while Nate was brewing beer.

So we are making the most of our veggies.  We have a ton of cabbage on hand right now and can only make so much coleslaw, so Nate's going to attempt making his own sauerkraut.  We have some green beans and I think we just might make green bean casserole for the summer because why not?  I just love CSA season!!  I'm not the main chef on these items, but if you want more specific recipe information just let me know and I'll be happy to email more details to anyone!

Have a great weekend!  We're Duluth bound for All Pints North and I can't wait!  I'll be sure to share all about it next week!

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!

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!!