Baked Breaded Cauliflower with Roasted Red Pepper Marinara

        Well! It's been over a year since I've posted on here, but I feel inspired to get back into it and post more often. I'll be posting mainly healthy recipes, with the odd indulgence. I want to use this blog to help keep track of healthy meal options. One important area I need to work on is eating more veggies. As the experts say:

        So on to my dinner tonight! What I've been taught is that a plate of food should consist of 50% veggies, 25% grains, and 25% protein. of course that's just a rough plan, and realistically dinners don't end up looking like pie charts. 

   

        I started out with a craving for potatoes and cauliflower. Baked potatoes and Baked Breaded Cauliflower. I decided I should probably have something green too, so I settled on a spinach salad. Here's what I came up with before cooking:

        I know white potatoes aren't the healthiest choice, but I want my dinner to be nutritious AND satisfying. I ended up only using three. Anyways. You might be wondering where the protein is. Well I later added cooked quinoa to the salad, and there is egg in the cauliflower breading. 

So on to cooking! I won't go through all the steps of each component. You can google a thousand recipes for grilled potatoes and spinach salad. I'll just tell you about the cauliflower, because that was really the centerpiece. 

Baked Breaded Cauliflower:

Section roughly 1 cup of cauliflower into bite sized pieces, as pictured above

Beat 1 egg

Mix together approx. 1/2 cup bread crumbs, a pinch each of paprika, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper, and approx 2 tablespoons of parmesan cheese.

Dip the cauliflower sections first into the egg and then the breadcrumbs.

 Lay on a foil lined baking dish and bake at 350F for 25 minutes.  

I made what I'm calling a roasted red pepper marinara sauce to add more flavour and more veggies to the dish. It was only four ingredients: red pepper, olive oil, salt, and oregano. 

Roasted Red Pepper Marinara:

Char 1 red pepper in a 400F oven (around 10 mins) and cover with plastic wrap in a bowl. Leave for another 20 mins or so and the skin should come off SUPER easy. 

Yank out the stem and seeds, and then pulse in a blender or food processor with a splash of olive oil, some oregano, and salt (to taste I suppose- I didn't measure)

In the end, here was my dinner:

        I'm not the person who is going to look up the nutrition information and calorie content. But here's what I know:

• I ate at 4 different kinds of veggies in all different colours at this meal- probably totalling 3-4 full servings
• I used very little of the 'bad stuff'- salt, oil, cheese, wheat, white potatoes
• I had a satisfying and delicious dinner

Til next time!

Butternut Squash Soup

Sorry I don't have a photo for this one, but this recipe was so easy I thought I'd share:

First peel and dice 1 butternut squash. I found this video helpful to learn how:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbecyb7TgDE

Then Chop 1 onion. I actually used about half of a very large white onion.

In a pot on medium heat melt a few tablespoons of butter, and add the onions. Season with salt and pepper (not too much salt though, unless you are using salt free stock). Let the onions cook for a bit until they are getting translucent. Then add the diced squash.

I let this heat for a bit and then added 2 boxes of vegetable stock, or about 6 cups. You could use chicken stock if you prefer, or if it's what you have on hand, but with veggie stock you can also feed the vegetarian's in your life! (**If you use oil instead of butter to cook the onion, this soup is VEGAN!**)And trust me you aren't compromising flavour.

Bring this all to a boil, and then turn it down to a simmer until the squash is nice and tender. To test this, just take a chunk of the squash and stick your knife in it: it should be like a hot knife through butter!(nut squash).

Now you have a couple options:

Either put the soup in your blender or food processor in batches to make it all smooth, (use batches, and even let the soup cool a bit so you don't have a hot soup explosion)

OR

Use an immersion blender right in the pot, which is what I did.

Done! The soup was delicious. With only the onion, salt, pepper, and squash, the flavour of the butternut squash really shines through. If I had rosemary on hand I would have added some at the same time as salt and pepper, which I think would be DELICIOUS with the squash.

After blending, heat the soup through again.

Enjoy!

OREO STUFFED CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES!!

Yes, you read that right! My sister has been posting a link for these tasty treats on my wall for months, and finally I decided to give them a try! It was very simple: I just took my favourite-of-all-time chocolate chip cookie recipe and shaped it around oreos, then baked them for 10 minutes. So, I guess you want to know my amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe.. well, here it is! This is the recipe my mom always made, the first thing I ever baked,and it's the only recipe I have been using ever since, minus about a year and a half where I love the Cream of the West (flour brand) cookbook that it comes from, and I went CRAZY looking for a recipe that lived up to this one, and found NOTHING.

Cream together:

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar

Beat in:

1 egg
1 tsp vanilla

Mix in:

1 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Fold in:
1 cup chocolate chips
* You can also add 1/2 cup chopped walnuts if you desire. Also, for this recipe I used mini-chips so that they would be easier to shape around the oreo's.

Drop on to a greased baking sheet, and bake at 350F for about 9-11 minutes. Or, as mentioned above, for these tasty treats, wrap them around oreo cookies first.

Chocolate Coconut Haystacks

Who doesn't love this delicious treat? A nostalgic goody for me, I grew up calling them haystacks, but they are also known as macaroons. One of the simplest, no bake cookies out there, full of texture and chocolatey goodness. Here's the recipe I use:

Bring to a boil:

2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
6 tbsp cocoa powder

Let boil for 3-4 minutes, then remove from heat.

Stir in:

3 cups oats
1/2 cup shredded coconut

Drop onto a greased cookie sheet

Yep! It's that simple. Just wait for these puppies to harden, and enjoy!

Carrot Cupcakes with Pumpkin Frosting

So they are DEFINITELY autumn cupcakes, but they were requested for a bonfire, and I love a chance to experiment. Actually, what was requested was 'a batch of carrot cupcakes, and a batch of pumpkin'. I really didn't want to do 2 different kinds, so I decided to mix them.

Here is my go-to carrot recipe. It's super moist. A bit on the sweet side, but VERY delicious. As cupcakes they got made the wrappers a little oily (I never said they were healthy) but they are SO GOOD.

http://cakecentral.com/recipes/7567/old-fashioned-carrot-cake

The frosting was pumpkin-cream cheese. Oh yeah. You heard me. And it was DELICIOUS! I used my cream cheese frosting recipe I usually do, but I added pumpkin. Here it is:

CREAM TOGETHER
~ 1 cup butter (salted cuts down on the sweetness- not tons, this is very sweet, but a little)

~ 1/2 cup vegetable shortening (adds stability)

1 8 oz. package of cream cheese

ADD:
2 tsp vanilla extract

and..
This is tough... I'm not really sure how much pumkin I ended up adding in the end. I added about 1/4 cup and tasted, then kept adding more about 1 tbsp at a time until it was pumkin-y enough. My guess is that in the end I added 3/4 cup. All this liquid made the frostins a bit runnier than I like, bu for these cupcakes it worked.

After that is all blended, add 1 bag of powdered sugar, or 8 cups.


Last of all, I added a garnish of candied carrot strands to be fancy. This was really simple. I just took peeled a carrot, and then kept peeling off strands. I added this to a sauce pan with approx. 1/2 confectioners sugar and 1/2 cup of water. I let this boil and simmer until the carrot strands started becoming translucent.

Soo.. I think that's it! I will DEFINITELY be making these again. They were a big hit at the bonfire, and a new personal favourite of mine.

Fettuccine Alfredo

Today I just had a sudden craving for some fettuccine alfredo. We had these spinach fettuccine noodles (which I don't think add a lot to the taste, but they look so pretty!)and I wanted to use them. So, on I went to the grocery store to get some real parmesan cheese and try my hand at a homemade alfredo sauce. I used a really simple looking recipe that turned out SO delicious. I found it here

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/alfredo-sauce-2/Detail.aspx (Note, I left out the parsely)

Just to add some vitamins (to balance out the cream sauce? No? Oh well...)I sauteed some of my favourite veggies (a.k.a. whatever wa already in the fridge) and threw that on top.

Not much else to say about that, except it was delicious! My and my dad finished our plates in silence, which I think says a lot. For instance, that we were hungry.

Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

The thing about baking is that when you try a new recipe, it's always a gamble. Baking is a science; there isn't a lot of wiggle room for ingredients and measurements and so on. Not to mention there are so many versions of recipes for the same thing that is usually takes at least a few tries for me to find the recipe for standards (things I will bake a lot, like a simple white cake).
What I'm getting at here is that this isn't the best oatmeal cookie recipe I've ever used. I just did a google search, and picked the top one. The problems I had with it are as follows:

1. There seemed to be a lot of dry ingredients (2 cups of flour and 3 cups of oats) for the amount of wet (1 cup butter and 2 eggs). It was extremely hard even for my Kitchen Aid to mix the very very thick batter, and even after underbaking them, they turned out a bit dry. Considering these were advertised as soft cookies, that's kind of lame.

2. It asks you to chill the batter for at least an hour before baking. I couldn't think of a reason that this would be necessary for simple oatmeal cookies, (so I just didn't do it). To double check I googled the possible reasons why you might have to chill cookie dough, and the top reasons were to make them less sticky (not a problem with the dry batter) and to let the flavours rest and meld. Well I'm not that fancy. I think that in this recipe the chilling may be so that the cookies cook less in the same amount of time, and are therefore soft, but there are plenty of recipes out there that combined with a slight under bake can produce soft cookies, which is WAY easier.

3. It asks you to roll the batter into balls to bake. They did not flatten out while baking, so they turned into little oatmeal domes. Didn't look at all like the photo, or like homey, yummy cookies. My second batch I ended up just dropping rather than rolling, but the batter is so stiff, I actually had to shape them to look rustic, instead of looking like the shape of the spoon.

Some things I liked about the recipe:

1. The ingredients were in very simple quantities. 1 cup here, 2 cups there, 1 tsp, 3 cups, etc. Not that it's terribly complicated to measure out 1 1/3 cups of something, or 3/4 tsp of something else, but it's just nice to only dirty 1 measuring cup and 1 measuring spoon.

2. The peanut butter chips work well, though I nearly pulled a muscle trying to mix them in. Even though they are crispy-er than my preferred cookie, they did taste yummy.


Well, if I were to turn that into a pro-con list, it's obvious that I should move back to the drawing board for an oatmeal cookie recipe. There is one I used to make all the time when I was young, I wonder if my mom still has it..

And here is the recipe:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/soft-oatmeal-cookies/Detail.aspx