Vegan Whole Wheat Noodles with Pistachio Lemon Pesto

Every year my gradeschool girlfriends and I get together for "Girl Camp", a multi day food/blab/dance/relax fest. When I came home I was craving some clean food after all of the rich foods we ate.

This pasta dish totaly fit the bill, and is just as tasty served cold, so leftovers are perfect! The pisctachio pesto would also be a great filling for phyllo dough and served as an appetizer.

1/2 cup unsalted pistachios, shells removed
1 shallot, peeled and chopped into 8ths
1 lemon (Meyer if you can find them), washed and cut into 8ths (peel on)
3 Tbsp E.V.O.O.
1/2 lb whole wheat spagetti (I bet Soba would be good too)
2 cups bitter / baby lettuce
1 cup cherry toms, washed and halved
S&P to taste

1.) In toaster oven, warm/toast pistachios until fragrant. Place in food processor bowl.
2.) Bring large pot of salted water to boil
3.) Add shallot to pistachios and pulse until chopped, add lemon and make paste. Transfer to serving bowl. Stir in 2 Tbsp olive oil.
4.) Cook pasta until al dente. Before draining, use glass measuring cup and collect 1/2 cup pasta water.
5.) Add pasta to serving bowl with pesto, toss, adding pasta water as needed to make sauce. Season with S&P.
6.) Toss with lettuce, top with tomatoes and serve.

Mini Cornbread Pizzas

I love to cook - I love to explore new (and slightly scary) recipes and to feel like a mad scientist, using what feels like every utencil and pan I own and spending hours by myself and my experiments.

Sometimes, though, I don't want to cook at all - I just want to eat - and yet I find I am so picky about quality and nutrition that I can't bring myself to get take out or fast food. So, I have a number of "cheater" or "week night" recipes that I can make quickly and yet still want in my mouth.

Cornbread pizzas are fun because the require (in my opinion, at least) that one abandons the typical "Italian" red sauce and come up with more sweet / savory flavor combos. I used to make my own cornbread dough, but then I found that my local heath food store carries a two pack of high quality, organic frozen doughs for less than $5 and I quickly abandoned the thought of making mine from scratch. (Also, theirs is much better...a more moist mouthfeel and better overall texture - it is a "win - win"!)

As there are two, and my husband doesn't always like my "unconventional" combinations, I make two different pizzas:

Cornbread Pizza with Bacon, Blue Cheese, Carmelized Onions, Apples and Fig Sauce
1 x mini cornbread pizza dough, still frozen (or your own from scratch)
1/2 x a white onion, sliced thin, lengthwise
2 x slices of bacon (Applewood if you can find it - thick sliced), cut into 1" pieces and browned (I just use my kitchen shears and cut)
2 x Tbsp fig jam - (the best I have found is from The Girl and The Fig
1 /2 x Granny Smith or other crisp, tart apple, thinly sliced
2 oz. crumbled (Blue Costello) blue cheese (or more or less to taste)
S & P


1.) Cook bacon until brown, remove from pan and drain on paper towel
2.) Drain all but 1 tsp of bacon grease (* you can use evoo, but saturated fats always make onions sweeter) and cook onions, stirring occasionally until golden brown (5-10 mins)
3.) Spread slices of apples in radial circle over sauce
4.) Cover with carmelized onions and place in a 325 degree oven for 5-7 mins, until the apples are soft enough to bite
5.) Remove from oven, add blue cheese and bacon, return to over and bake until blue cheese is warm and soft. (You can add these at the same time, so long as you don't mind more of a hard melted cheese.)
6.) Cool and eat. :)

Serves: 2
Cost per serving: $5.25

Cornbread Pizza with BBQ Chicken, Cheddar Cheese, Onions and Bacon
1 x chicken cutlet, baked in e.v.o.o. and coated with sauce (I always freeze a little when we gril some so I can skip this step)
2 x strips of bacon, cut into 1" pieces and browned
6 oz. shredded cheddar cheese (or jack)
1 x Tbsp BBQ sauce for pizza
1 x Tbsp BBQ sauce for chicken
1/2 x onion, thinly sliced
S & P

1.) Bake chicken cutlet in e.v.o.o. at 325. Let cool, shred and toss with BBQ sauce (you can chop if you like meat cubes.)
2.) Cook bacon until brown, remove and drain on paper towel
3.) Spread remaining BBQ sauce on dough
4.) Spread onions on sauce
5.) Sprinkle cheese over that
6.) Add shredded chicken
7.) Add bacon crumbles
8.) Bake. Cool. Eat.

Serves: 2
Cost per serving: $3.75 (cheaper than McDonalds)

I would love to hear more ideas .........

Happy Eating! Emily

Victoria's (Gluten Free) Birthday Meal: Chicken and Cheese Enchilades with Verde Sauce

My pop's wife Kathy always made a point of creating a special meal for each of us on our birthdays, and it always made me feel so special that she 1.) took notice of what flavor combinations I loved and 2.) would take the time to make several dishes featuring those ingredients from scratch.

Now that I am a 'grown up' I try and do the same for my dear ones on their birthdays. My dear friend (and West Coast Wedding Photographer) Victoria recently decided to eat a "Gluten Free" or low gluten diet - so choosing her menu was a challenge for gluten-loving me. So, almost a month after her actual birthday we ate the following menu in the garden:

Brown Sugar & Traditional Margaritas
Blue Corn chips with Mango Salsa and Cilantro Lime Crema
Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas with Jalapeno and Tomatillo sauce
Vanilla Ice Cream with Cointreau Butterscotch Sauce

Here is the recipe for the enchiladas - and I am happy to post the others if you would like them, just let me know!

1 x package of fresh tortillas
4 x boneless skinless chicken breasts
1/2 lb jack cheese (or cheddar, or jalapeno jack, or cojito)
1 lb tomatillos, peeled and washed
1 x white or yellow onion, chopped
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, washed and chopped
3 x cloves of garlic, peeled
2 jalapenos, washed and chopped in quarters - keep some seeds if you like it hot
5 limes, washed with 2 cut in half and 3 cut in wedges
brown sugar
olive oil
salt
pepper

Sauce:

1.) Preheat oven to 350, rub chicken breasts with olive oil and back until cooked through. Remove from oven and cool.

2.) Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, add peeled tomatillos and cook until tender.

3.) Meanwhile, place chopped onion, garlic cloves, jalapeno,and 1 cup of water in your blender.

4.) Once tomatillos are cooked, remove them from pot with slotted spoon and place immediately in blender, removing the center of the lid to vent and covering with a clean dish cloth, and puree until smooth.

5.) Empty the water from the pot you cooked the tomatillos in, then add a Tbsp of olive oil to the pot and turn heat on medium high. When oil is hot, empty puree from blender into pot and simmer on medium until thickened.

6.) Once thickened, remove from heat and stir in juice from halved limes, chopped cilantro, pinch of brown sugar and salt and pepper to taste. Leave in pot and let cool.

7.) Once chicken is cool enough to handle, peel in to stringey chunks and place in a bowl or on plate.

8.) Grate cheese and place in a bowl. (It is worth investing in a food processor just for this task!)

9.) Set yourself up for an assembly line: you will need two rectangular baking dishes, tortillas, cheese, chicken and sauce close at hand. One by one, dip tortillas in sauce pot, coating both sides. Place wet tortilla in baking dish, add desired chicken and cheese and roll. Repeat until baking dishes are full, or you run out of filling.

10.) Pour remaining sauce over rolled tortillas. Season with salt and pepper and bake, covered, for about 15 mins. Use the rest of the limes at the table.

Serves: 6
Cost: about $6.50 a person

Puffed pastry filled with spinach and chicken

(In the top left you can see the blur of Matt's hand and fork...I could not get him to stop eating it long enough for me to take the picture!)

There are so many advantages to making your own food; it costs less, you can control the quality of the ingredients used, you can season it just how you like it and you get to keep the left overs, to name a few. One of the reasons to cook at home that gets overlooked, though, is effect that smell of cooking has on those waiting to eat it.

Our apartment is pretty small (the price we pay to live in downtown Petaluma) and it does not take long for the smell of whatever I am making to reach the other rooms. Whenever I saute onions in butter my husband will yell out from the other room "smells great, babe!" and then hover near the kitchen until the meal is ready to eat.

This recipe is one of those that fills your kitchen (or whole apartment) with wonderful aromas....I think it is perfect for a cozy Sunday late afternoon. I steamed some asparagus and then sauteed it with garlic and Parmesan as a side.

INGREDIENTS:
1 x bunch of spinach ( you can use frozen, thawed and drained spinach if you don't mind the metallic taste it can have)
4 x cloves of garlic, chopped or pressed
6 oz. of goat cheese or Boursin
1 x package of puffed pastry, thawed
2 x boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut in half (you could substitute just about anything here - portobello mushrooms, steak, crab, tofu.....)
2 x tablespoons bread crumbs
1 x egg
1 x Tbsp Olive oil

1.) Preheat your oven to 425. Wash and dry spinach. Heat olive oil in pan on medium heat. Add spinach, moving it around until wilted. Remove from heat and let cool. Add chicken breast halves to skillet and cook for 3-4 minuets on each side.

2.) Combine cooled spinach, garlic and cheese in a bowl and set aside.

3.) On a lightly floured surface, roll out puffed pastry sheets into one large rectangle. Cut / score in half width wise to make to squares. Cut squares diagonally from one corner to another to make four triangles.

4.) Spread spinach / cheese mixture over pastry leaving a 1/2" border clean on all sides. Place chicken breast halves in the center and sprinkle with bread crumbs.

5.) Combine egg and 1 tbsp water in a small bowl. With a pastry brush, moisten the clean border of the pastry. Wrap edges around chicken and press to seal.

5.) Bake about 30 mins, until pastry is golden brown. :)

Makes 4 servings / cost aprx. $4.25 per serving

Food is good

Food - it keeps us alive, it gives us pleasure, it brings us closer. It can connect us to our ancestors, it can transport us to another part of the world, it can surprise us and make us learn something new about ourselves.

My whole life I have been nurtured and nourished by food prepared by those who love me, and now that I am grown I too can send and share love this way. I have just started to learn to cook (rather than heat) food and I want to spend the rest of my life developing that skill.

When you prepare food for someone, you send so many positive messages; "I care about you", "I want you to be healthy", "you are worth my time and energy", "remember when....." or "remember this day", "I pay attention to what you like" , "thinking of you" and "let's pay attention to the fleeting pleasure of life".

The pleasures of food are not simply sentimental ones, however. Food is incredibly sensual - involving all five of our senses; sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. We start to experience our food the moment we see it, then we smell it, taste it, hear it crunching or sloshing, we feel its texture in our mouths.

Obviously I have spent a lot of time ruminating on the benefits and delights of home made food, but it is only recently that I realize that our food choices can have an even broader benefit. Each day we must eat, and each choice we make in what we eat gives us an opportunity to do good. With each meal we can, at the very least, make ourselves feel good, thus benefiting the world in that we are one less hungry grump walking around. We often have the opportunity to share food with those we care about, furthering our feelings of connection and tradition. We can choose foods that are high in nutrition, another benefit to ourselves, but also eventually reducing the burden of our poor health on our families. We can choose foods grown locally and sustainably, reducing our carbon footprint as well as supporting our local economies. We can also choose to consume fair trade foods that have an impact on our global community and economy....in short, the extent to which we can do good through food is endless, and easy.

This blog will be a small place where I share simple ways that I have found to make the world a slightly better place, while simultaneously making myself and my dear ones feel good. Dinner plate activism, if you will, with a generous side order of hedonism.


(My reaction to seeing the wedding cake made by hand for me by my dear friend of over 20 years, Anitra.)