Whole Wheat Penne with Italian Sausage, Spinach and Broccolini

I have to admit that this pasta was not exactly what I intended to make tonight.  I really intended to make pasta with Italian sausage and broccoli rabe, but it appears that either I bought the broccoli rabe and left it behind at the store, or I never actually bought it in the first place and only thought that I did.  I'm not sure which option is better.  I guess the latter because while it might make me delusional, at least I didn't waste any money on vegetables that didn't make it home with me?

This is the perfect type of pasta to really fill you up and stick to your ribs, without making you feel heavy and gross.  I was absolutely, positively starving when I got home from work today.  It was one of what I call my "insatiably hungry" days where I can't help but eat everything in sight.  Granted, this time my insatiable hunger is probably due to the amount of time I have spent tromping around in the snow with the dog the past few days.  Who knew that playing in the snow could be such a work out!  This pasta was exactly what I needed - simple, hearty, delicious, and filling.  It also didn't take a lot of time and effort to cook, nor did it require any unusual ingredients or extra shopping trips.  Instead it is something of a fridge clearing pasta that you can throw together with almost anything you have in the fridge.  Because we used whole wheat penne and lots of vegetables (we substituted broccolini and baby spinach for the missing broccoli rabe), I didn't even feel that guilty about eating going back for seconds!  I guess we could also have substituted turkey sausage for pork, but that might be taking things entirely too far.

Recipe after the jump!

Two-Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style

After spending most of the time leading up to Christmas gorging with Alex and my mother, I wanted something light, but hearty for dinner tonight.  Over the course of a few days, we had lobster rolls at Luke's, amazing seafood at Il Pesce (the seafood restaurant at Eataly), really tasty noodle soups and dumplings at Lanzhou Handmade Noodle in Chinatown, and global tapas at Tolani.  So I immediately thought seafood.  And when I looked in the freezer I saw we had some calamari in there.  While I never tried this dish the one time I ate at Babbo, it has become the calamari go-to recipe in our apartment.  I first stumbled across the recipe online on the Food Network website and then realized that it was also on my bookshelf in The Babbo Cookbook.  I'm not sure what the name is supposed to mean, or if it is supposed to mean anything at all, but it doesn't do the dish justice.  It almost seems like ordering a dish on a Chinese takeout menu - where "Phoenix Rising Shrimp" turns out to be fried shrimp with pineapple chunks in a variation on sweet and sour sauce.  What is that all about anyway?  I am not sure what I would call this dish, except that I think the name should be more descriptive of what is on the plate.  Perhaps that's a little simplistic of me, but that's how I feel.

Moving on!  This calamari is something like a stew.  It has a wonderfully spicy and flavorful broth.  There is something about the mix of the spicy red chili flakes, the sweet currants, the briny caperberries and the buttery pine nuts combine to create what the cookbook calls a "sweet, hot and sour Arabic kiss."  I dunno about that description either, but it is delicious nonetheless.  I do play with this recipe a bit from time to time.  I love the brinyness of the caperberries so I tend to add more than the recipe calls for, but that's just me.  I have also substituted fregola for the Israeli couscous in the past and that works well, but you have to cook it a lot longer than the couscous.  This time we used a Trader Joe's Harvest Grains Blend, which contains Israeli couscous, orzo, red quinoa, etc.  It was wonderful and perhaps my favorite adaptation yet.  If you make the Basic Tomato Sauce in advance, the entire dish takes less than 30 minutes to create, including prep time!  One warning - be careful not to overcook the calamari or you're going to end up with little white rubber bands in your lovely broth.

Recipes after the jump!

Lemon-Almond Pound Cake

My husband is something of a citrus fiend.  If we need freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice while cooking, chances are that I will turn around to and find him sucking on the remains of the  lemon or lime he just squeezed.  Actually, chances are that he will suck on it, Brady will come to find out what he is eating and then Brady will try to steal it and run away with it.  But since Brady doesn't particularly like citrus he tends to spit out the lemon or lime, pick it back up, spit it back out again, then give it a last lick, before finally giving up.  Anyway, Alex loves lemon poppyseed muffins so I decided to give this Lemon-Almond Pound Cake recipe a try.  I'm always the one who decides that I want to bake and then what I will be baking, so this time I decided to pick something that I knew he would like.  I borrowed this cookbook from a friend awhile ago and I copied down a lot of recipes from it before I gave it back.  I have been sitting on this recipe for some time, but decided to make it last night because it was SNOWING outside (which makes me feel like baking), plus it was Brady's second birthday, which makes me feel like cake.  So we got ourselves a bottle of champagne and I baked a cake, and Brady got some new toys to play with (including a ball shaped like a frog whose toes he has already eaten off).  Sounds like a win for everyone, doesn't it?

This cake is lovely and lemony and light.  It has just the right amount of sweetness to balance out the tartness of the lemon, without turning the whole cake sugary sweet.  I also love the crunch of the almonds.  I think I might prefer the crunch of the sliced almonds to poppy seeds, but I just don't know.  I was a little worried about the lemon glaze, and we did use it sparingly, but it's really nice too.  It would make a fantastic breakfast, a really nice snack and a wonderful light dessert.  Granted, it's not your typical birthday cake, but that's just fine with me!

Recipe after the jump!

Deviled Eggs

I know that deviled eggs are as old school as them come.  The next thing you know I might be posting about jello molds and Waldorf salad.  Only my mom used to make deviled eggs for my family around the holidays.  So they are totally nostalgic for me.  She never made a jello mold.  So no worries there - we won't be whipping up any in our kitchen anytime soon.  As for Waldorf salad, she did make that for me occasionally, but as much as I enjoyed it at the time, I can't see myself making Waldorf salad for Alex and I at any point.  Any salad involving mini-marshmallows just seems wrong, no matter how delicious I remember it being.

While I thought about mixing it up and making an exotic twist on deviled eggs, but that just seemed to miss the point.  If you're making something due to nostalgia, why not make it the way you remember it, rather than going crazy with it and trying to make the dish fun and new?  So I made these deviled eggs just the way I remembered them.  I thought about putting in a call to my mom to find out exactly what she puts into her deviled eggs, but I decided that I could wing it pretty well based on memory.  I know that Mom puts mayonnaise, very finely minced onions, dijon mustard, and very finely minced ham in her eggs.  She also sprinkles a tiny bit of paprika on top.  I didn't have any onions or shallots, so I used chives instead.  And I decided that paprika was unnecessary because I preferred the fresh green of the chives to the red of the paprika (which adds almost no flavor anyway).  I also thought that a little more fresh onion flavor is never a bad thing to serve as a counterpoint to rich egg yolks and mayo.  Yum.  These aren't my mom's deviled eggs, but they sure are close.

Recipe after the jump!

Chicken and Vegetable "Cobbler"

My first chicken pot pie was a Marie Callanders version fresh out of the freezer at the grocery, heated up in the microwave.  It left a little to be desired (as all frozen meals do), but it was still quite good. Since then I have tried a few versions, including one I made myself last fall.  Unfortunately, my filling was more than a little soupy.  So it was chicken soup topped with puff pastry...  Since that version I have been meaning to make a new version topped with biscuit dough.  Then I stumbled across this recipe for "Chicken and Vegetable Cobbler" on Mark Bittman's NY Times blog Bitten several months ago.  And it used a homemade biscuit dough as the topping.  So I bookmarked it to make it once the weather got a little colder.  Since it was cold and snowy outside today, it seemed like the perfect opportunity.  So Alex and I trudged down to the grocery store in the snow and bought all of the ingredients and then came home and whipped it up this evening, after romping in the snow with the puppy for an hour.  Did I mention it's his birthday today?  Brady is two!

As with many of the recipes that I find online, I modified this one a bit.  Neither Alex, nor I, are huge fans of peas and cooked carrots, but we do love corn so I cut down on the amount of frozen peas and carrots and added in some frozen corn.  I wish I had also increased the amount of chicken stock because by the time the cobbler stopped cooking, there was no "juju" left.  So while the filling was flavorful, it was a little dry.  Actually, it was very dry, even with chicken thighs instead of breasts.  And the biscuit topping was a little thick and doughy, rather than buttery, light and flaky.  I think it is safe to say that if we make another chicken potpie, it won't be this one.  Moreover, I think we will use pre-packed puff pastry for the pot pie topping.  Because it turns out that I'm more of a pot pie person than a cobbler person.


Recipe after the jump!

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Buckeyes

Oh yum.  These things are delicious.  And addicting.  Apparently peanut butter buckeyes are named after the nut of the state tree of Ohio.  And they are named that after the tree because they look like the nuts.  If you Google buckeyes you will eventually see what I mean.  I found one picture here on Serious Eats where the resemblance is quite obvious.  Anyway, I decided to make these chocolate-covered peanut butter confections for two reasons.  First, my dad is from Ohio so it just seemed appropriate.  Second, I love the combination of peanut butter and chocolate.  I guess there was a third reason - they just looked so easy to make!  So I made them and omg.  So good.  I brought like 30 of these bad boys into work and they were gone in minutes.  And Alex and I combined ate far more of them than was probably wise, but I just couldn't stop myself.  I loved the salty-sweet combination and the smooth and creamy peanut butter center.  I'm glad that I used a mixture of dark and semisweet chocolate to dip the buckeyes in because I think milk chocolate would have been far too sweet, but dark chocolate alone might not have been quite sweet enough.  I also found that my favorite way to eat these candies is right out of the freezer.  I love them when they are frozen (hence the ice crystals you can see on the buckeyes in the picture - they were fresh out of the freezer).  You can't leave them out for long because they will melt (due to the high butter content), but they are worth the hassle.  Promise.

I think we might have found a new Christmas tradition!

Recipe after the jump!

Adobo-Marinated Chicken Quesadillas

I love good Mexican food.  And I have found that truly good Mexican food is hard to find.  So I have started making my own, although I don't claim that my version of Mexican is authentic.  I basically just make it up as I go along, sometimes with a little help from Google, a restaurant I have eaten at or a cookbook.  For instance, for tonight's dinner I got the idea from the chicken mole quesadilla at our local Mexican joint, The Great Burrito.  And then I looked online and in Rosa's New Mexican Table by Roberto Santibanez.  Then I sent Alex to Zabar's to pick up some dried chilis and we improvised like we always do.

Our past two meals have been smashing successes (which is exciting).  Last night's Pork Vindaloo was delicious, but I might have preferred these quesadillas for a variety of reasons.  First, while this chicken has a brief marinating period, the entire dish comes together much more quickly than the pork did.  One problem with braising pork is that it takes forever, whereas sauteing up some chicken strips takes less than 10 minutes.  Both dishes were very flavorful and tender.  I just feel like this dish is one that everyone will like, whereas the pork is only going to appeal to some.  So I'm not sure that I necessarily preferred the flavor of these quesadillas over the flavor of the vindaloo, but I think as an overall dish and experience I preferred the quesadillas.  There was a tiny bit of heat from the chilis in the adobo, and a bit of tang from the apple cider vinegar.  I'm glad we used apple cider vinegar instead of regular white distilled vinegar, because that gives the chicken a tiny bit of sweetness which works really nicely with the cinnamon and cloves.  I think this chicken would make a really nice topping for a taco salad, tacos, or a tostada.  You can use the marinade to create all kinds of different Mexican dishes and I bet they would all be delicious.

Recipe after the jump!