friday: lentil tacos

Happy second Friday in Lent! Tonight's dinner wasn't quite as hard for me to dream up because we've had lentil tacos before and loved them! Good old HyVee! Our daily shopping trips there always bring more good than just groceries! Ryan went shopping about a month before Lent and the dietitian had made up these tacos and was giving away samples plus the recipe, originally from Allrecipes.com. They are super yummy, cheap to make, and you won't miss the meat at all! Even Eliza loved them!

I followed the recipe, except it called for chicken broth. I'm not sure if that counts as "meat" on Fridays, so I opted to use vegetable broth and it was just as good!

Saute 1 cup finely chopped onion and 1 clove minced garlic in 1 tsp canola oil until onion is tender. Add 1 cup dried, rinsed lentils, 1 tbsp chili powder, 2 tsp ground cumin and 1 tsp oregano to the skillet and stir until fragrant.

Add 2 1/2 cups vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 25-30 minutes, until lentils are tender. Cook uncovered 6-8 more minutes, until thickened.

Stir in 1 cup salsa and remove from heat. Serve in tortilla shells topped with lettuce, cheese, sour cream, and tomatoes.

Happy Friday!

Love, K

friday: pad thai

Happy first Friday of Lent! I decided I would post what we've been having for dinner on Fridays this year for a little inspiration! (Heaven knows I need all of the inspiration I can get when it comes to deciding what to cook for dinner!)

So it's around 3pm on Friday and I have no ideas. At all! In fact, all I can think about are Chef Chole's vegan chocolate cupcakes! Oh dear... This is the result of giving up dessert for Lent! ;)

Then I remember, oh duh! Chef Chole is vegan and I bet she has some wonderful ideas! So I went to her website and made this delicious vegan pad thai! So yummy! The only thing I changed is I added 1 lb of shrimp (because I am not vegan and I could)!

So good! Enjoy!

Love, K

uh oh mama!

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Last year Eliza didn't even notice when the priest placed the ash cross on her forehead, but this year was a different story! When we got up to the priest for ashes, he tried to place them on Eliza, but she swatted his hand away. (Congregation began to chuckle.) Then he put them on me and made a quick dot on Eliza's forehead. As soon as she saw my ashes she started saying "Uh oh, Mama!" (loudly) over and over and over again, trying to rub the ashes off of my forehead. The congregation was laughing loudly at this point and Eliza and I took a trip to the hallway.

Oh those babies!

Love, K

vegan valentines

Happy Valentine's Day! Eliza and I had some more adventures in vegan cooking today as we made sugar cookies and royal icing. Our neighbor's daughter in allergic to milk and eggs, so we wanted to make cookies that she could enjoy as well. I used to have a negative opinion about vegan desserts until I tried Chef Chloe's vegan chocolate shortbread cupcakes. A-mazing! They were the first vegan cupcake to win Food Network's cupcake wars. They are super easy to make and super delicious, so I don't even try to make any other chocolate cake anymore.

Anyway...commercial over.

So I tried this cookie and royal icing recipe from Food.com, mostly because they were the only recipes I could find that had been reviewed. They were good. Not quite as good as sugar cookies with eggs and milk in them, but still good. I think I rolled them a little too thin as well, so next time I'll have to try them thicker so they turn out softer.

Here's the recipe:

Vegan Cut-Out Sugar Cookies

2 cups sifted flour
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ cup applesauce
1/2 cup oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
1 dash cinnamon

• Preheat oven to 350F.
• Mix dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately.
• Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix well until a soft dough forms.
• Roll out dough on a floured surface until 1/4" thick and cut out shapes with cookie cutters.
• Place on parchment paper lined cookie sheets and bake at 350F for 10-12 min.
• Cool 1 minute and transfer to wire racks.

Eggless Royal Icing

2 cups powdered sugar
4 tsp water
4 tsp light corn syrup
1/2 tsp almond or clear vanilla extract
Food coloring
Sprinkles and sugar to decorate

• Mix sugar, water, corn syrup, and vanilla/almond extract in a small bowl until well combined. Icing should be thick, but able to drip from a spoon.
  
• If icing is too dry, add water, 1 tsp at a time, mixing well after each tsp of water is added.
• Divide icing, if more than one color desired, and tint with food coloring. Gel or powdered food coloring is preferred so it doesn't change the consistency of your icing.
• Place 1/3 of your icing in a piping bag with a small round piping tip.
• Pipe an outline on your cookies with the thicker icing and allow to dry.
• Return unused icing to bowl and add water, 1 tsp at a time, until a more runny consistency has been achieved.
• Use piping bag to fill in the icing between the piped on lines already on the cookie.
• Decorate with sprinkles or sugar and allow to dry for several hours before enjoying.

Hope you enjoy it!

Love, K

almond butter

I had never heard of almond butter until last week. Wow...had I been missing out! I wanted to make some protein bars for Ryan for after his workouts and it called for 1 cup of nut butter (almond, cashew, sunflower seed, or peanut). I was almost out of peanut butter, so I thought I'd try something new.

So glad I did!

It is so good and super easy to make!

Toast 2 cups of almonds in the oven at 350F for 10-15 minutes. Then I put them into the food processor for about 10-15 minutes more.

About halfway through it will look like this. At this point I added 1 tsp salt and 2 tbsp honey.

Then I ran it until it was smooth and creamy. If it seems too dry just run it for longer and the natural oil in the almonds will break down a little more and make the almond butter creamier. 2 cups of almonds makes about 1 cup of almond butter. Jar and store in the fridge for 1 week.

Enjoy it on toast with some honey...so so so good!

Love, K

the best mac & cheese

I usually don't like restaurant and/or homemade mac & cheese. It's hardly ever actually cheesy and usually is more rubbery than creamy. However...about a month ago, our family went to Tartine and Eliza got the mac & cheese and it was A-mazing! So (of course) I've been trying to make up the recipe for it and I think I'm pretty close!

Warning: This recipe is SUPER delicious...but not so healthy! Please make it in moderation!

Entertain your child. (Hint: This is the most essential step!)

Boil enough noodles for 4 people.

When you begin to boil your noodles, in a large skillet, melt 6tbsp butter, 3/4cup heavy cream, 3/4 cup parmesan cheese, and 1/4 cup gruyere cheese. You can add about 1/4tsp pepper and 1/2 tsp salt if you'd like.

It should take about as long as it takes the noodles to cook to melt everything. Let the sauce thicken until it starts to bubble then remove it from heat. If you cook it for too long the sauce gets grainy and starts separating.

Mix cheesy sauce with the drained noodles and enjoy! Doesn't it look so good?!

Eliza thinks it's wonderful!

Love, K

kachumber

Before Kim & I went to India, way back when, our roommate at the time, Meggan, introduced us to a lot of delicious Indian recipes. She had been to India twice and spent a lot of time getting recipes when she came back. One of the first foods she made for us was chucumber, or Indian salsa. Now, apparently we'd been saying it wrong for the past 6 years, because it's really called kachumber. Oh well.

Super delicious! It's basically diced veggies + lime juice and salt with amazing spiced peanuts on top. My friends and I can't get enough of it! After making it a few hundred times, I decided I should probably share the secret. Hope you enjoy it!

• Chop about 2 cups of raw Spanish peanuts using a food chopper.
• I like to put them in a colander or fine mesh strainer after I chop them to get rid of
  some of the peanut dust. (See how much dust I got rid of this time?!)

• Peel, seed and dice 2 large cucumbers. Pick cucumbers that are firm and still have some bumps on them, that way the seeds won't be too big. To seed, I like to quarter the cucumbers, stand them on their ends, and slice all of the seeds off with one cut.
• Seed (or de-gut, as I like to say) 3 large roma tomatoes and dice.

• Dice 1/2 a red onion (I forgot to buy one, so I used a yellow onion)
• Chop 1/3 cup cilantro
• Optional: You may seed and dice a green chili if you want some spice (I never do because I'm a weenie)
  

• Mix veggies and cilantro in a large bowl.
• Add juice of 1 lime (~4tbsp) and 1 tsp kosher salt and mix well.
• Refrigerate until ready to eat, up to 24 hours.
  
  

• Heat 1tsp peanut oil in a large nonstick skillet and add chopped peanuts.
• Fry peanuts until warm, about 5 minutes.
• Add 2-3tbsp chat masala (Indian spice blend) to taste and 1/2 tsp kosher salt, stir well.
• Remove from heat and place peanuts in a bowl.

• Plate a scoop of veggies and top with a scoop of peanuts. Serve when peanuts are warm.
• Enjoy with an outrageous amount of tortilla chips.
  

Love, K

kale chips

Kale?

So my friend Chrissy has been trying all sorts of new foods and I'm very proud of her for it. Recently she made kale chips and said they were irresistible. So...copycat that I am...I decided that it would be a good snack for Eliza and I to make.

Wash and dry your kale

Cut/tear the kale from the thick stem and tear the leaves into bite-sized pieces.

Put the kale into a bag, drizzle 1 tbsp olive oil and 1 tsp salt over the top

Close the bag and shake it all up!

Put parchment paper into a cookie sheet and bake at 350F for 5-15 min.
(Mine took 12 min.) Until the edges are browned and the leaves are crispy.

Mmm...looks good!

Enjoy. And eat them all at once...they don't store well.

Eliza approves. :)

It was a lot of fun making them. My only three disclaimers:
1. You should use the whole batch of kale if you're going to use the whole tbsp of oil and tsp of salt. I didn't use the whole thing and they were pretty salty. Still good, but I had to drink a lot of water with them.
2. I would like the call them kale crisps instead of kale chips. I had envisioned myself replacing tortilla chips with veggie chips for my salsa, but that, sadly will not be the case. The kale "crisps" are pretty delicate once their cooked. Enjoy it like you would enjoy popcorn.
3. Leave them uncovered and eat them all the same day. I tried to put them in a plastic bag and they lost the crispiness.

And...apparently kale is one of the healthiest veggies you can eat, so I'll be buying it more frequently in the future! Enjoy!

Love, K

smoothies

Well hello there! Don't worry, I'm still alive! Just been very busy with life and work and baby Eliza for the past year and a half!

Brief life updates:

1. I went PRN (as needed) at work and am now working 4 hours every Monday night so I can stay home with Eliza!

2. Ryan is now working for Zirous and loving it! He's working on his PhD after he gets home from work at night. Hopefully another year (or so) and it will be completed!

3. Eliza is 19.5 months old now! She's such a funny little thing and I really enjoy being able to stay home with her!

4. I have been crafting in my spare time and have decided to open my own Etsy shop! My shop is called Vow of Sparkles and I sell things that I sew, knit, crochet, etc! Stop by and check it out!

And that's about it!

Ok, so maybe this is a silly reason to blog after 1.5 years, but I was pretty impressed with myself for thinking of this and had to share my idea!

We really love smoothies in our house. And I also am a horrible judge at how much to put into the smoothie to make 2-3 cups. So I usually end up with about 8 cups of smoothie by the time I'm done.

Not that this is a problem...but I have never thought of a good way to save the leftovers before. In the fridge it all starts to separate and looks too nasty to eat the next morning. In the freezer, I usually put it in a tupperware and it was hard to blend back up when I wanted some again.

So as I looked at the remaining 6 cups of smoothie that I'd made the other day, a brilliant idea suddenly came to me...individual frozen smoothie portions! Let me show you what I mean...


I did it again...made WAY too much smootie!


Stuff a freezer bag into a cup.


Pour the smoothie into the "cupped" bag.


Now you can freeze your smoothie for later! (Am I a genius, or what?!)


Stack them in your freezer and blend whenever you want a delicious smoothie! Enjoy!

Love, K

life updates

So it has been a while (again), but much has happened! Ryan and I just celebrated our first anniversary yesterday! We spent the day at the zoo with Joe, Ruth Ann, Tony, and the boys. It was a really fun day! It feels good to say that we are no longer newlyweds. It means that we are now marriage experts. So if you have marital questions...ask away!

Other exciting news this summer; we were so happy to welcome baby Eliza into our lives on May 21^st! She weighed in at 6 lb 14.6 oz and was 20” long. I took 12 weeks for maternity leave, which is up next Monday. :( But I suppose I have to go back to work sometime.

Life with Eliza has been really fun! She has been smiling since 5 weeks and is now on the verge of laughing. She loves to read and play and listen to us sing at her. I can’t believe that I’m a mommy now!

Also in my spare time I’ve gotten a bit creative. Eliza was born with a good head of hair, which of course means that she needs to wear hair bows every day! My hope is that when she is old enough to realize that hair bows are not a natural part of her, she will be so used to them that they will stay in. We’ll see.

Anyways, I had been spending all of my money at the hair bow store, when I realized that I could easily make these things, rather than pay $5+ for them. So of course now I am making hair bows like crazy! I also really want to start sewing. There are so many creative things you can do if you know how to sew! And anytime we have $1200 to spare, I want to get a GO! cutter.

Maybe I should start with getting my sewing machine cord back from my aunt…