Kale is one of the healthiest greens available. It's tasty sautéed with some olive oil, or cooked in soup. Here's a soup recipe for any of the remaining cool days this spring, or for later this year in fall or winter.
Deviled Egg Fest
After taking a few weeks off, we're finally back! We have lots more recipes to post in the upcoming weeks. But first, I wanted to share our creation for Easter. We gathered at my aunt's house for Easter dinner, and we brought along an entry for the deviled egg contest. In all, there were seven different recipes. We decided to concentrate most of our creative efforts around presentation. We also included some cute lady bug appetizers that fit the spring theme of our platter.
Stuffed Tomato Appetizers
We've been spoiled lately with some early spring- and summerlike weather. It already has me looking forward to summer produce. Although garden tomatoes are months away from being available, grocery stores stock plenty of tomatoes year round. These two recipes for stuffed tomatoes are simple and tasty. The first ones are stuffed with Mike's scrumptious hummus. The second ones are stuffed with a yummy couscous mixture.
Hummus Tahini
Hummus, hummus, let me count the ways...
I have an almost unnatural love for hummus. If you haven't had it, it's a wonderful bean dip made from one of the least beany beans, combined with the paste of sesame seeds, and seasoned just so exquisitely. And it's good on everything—thin it down a bit to go on pita bread at your favorite Mediterranean restaurant, keep it thick and creamy for vegetables, spread it on sandwiches, you name it.
Seafood-Pasta Arrabbiata
This pasta dish is one of our favorites, and it's a nice one to prepare if you have the time to make your own pasta sauce from scratch. Arrabbiata, which means angry in Italian, is a spicy red sauce. Mike always has to remind me how to pronounce it: ah-rah-bee-AH-tah. If you're not a fan of spicy, go easy on the spice, or omit it altogether.
Garlic Chicken Stir-fry
If you've made it anywhere other than our front page, you might have noticed we have a fondness for garlic. If you haven't, consider yourself informed. I often feel bad that we're not going through multiple bulbs of it a week. But then again, I do work with live human beings, so maybe it's just as well.
I've been trying to capture the lovely garlic flavor of a Chinese take-out staple: broccoli chicken. Unlike the deep soy flavors and colors of a broccoli beef, broccoli chicken tends towards a lighter flavored sauce that really brings out the garlic tones. I'm not quite there yet, but this last attempt was too good not to share.
Creme Caramel Dessert
We celebrated Christmas 2011 at four different family gatherings. Luckily, each one was a different day, especially considering the spread-out locations—Grayslake, Marengo, Bolingbrook, and Hoffman Estates. The day after Christmas, Mike, Mike's cousin Karyn, and I put together a few different Thai-influenced dishes for dinner with Mike's and Karyn's families. (Earlier this month, I posted the Thai spring roll recipe we used for appetizers that day.) We rounded out the meal with this Thai-style creme caramel dessert. It was very simple to put together, but it was yummy, and it looked all fancy.
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