Potato Feta Gyros
I lived as a vegetarian for 2 1/2 years during my college career; it was the dorm food that sealed the deal. For the first year of my vegetarianism, I was more of a cheese-atarian. I lived in Oregon and it was Tillamook EVERYTHING. My roommate and I ate cheese, pizza, french fries, hummus and stir fry like there was no tomorrow. For a college student, it was all about convenience. Having our own fridge with our OWN food (not managed by parents) was really an exciting thing. That's why I gained a Sophomore 15 (I managed to avoid it Freshman year due to the crappy food). I clearly needed help!
A few months ago during the busy holiday season, I had the opportunity to meet cookbook author/cool mom Pam Anderson & catch up with her daughter Maggy at a fabulous dinner for her latest cookbook, Cook without a Book: Meatless Meals: Recipes and Techniques for Part-Time and Full-Time Vegetarians. Let me tell you, these two are as good as it gets! I know that if they lived closer, Maggy & I would be tied at the hip. Both these fine ladies have a tremendous amount of love to give and their passion for food and helping others is downright contagious!
What I love Pam's new cookbook is that it's vegetarian home cooking in an easily digestible format. Pam covers many cooking basics and gives a tremendous amount of tricks & tips for the aspiring vegetarian cook. She's basically teaching you how to cook without a book! Each recipe has Pam's suggestions to change things up a bit. For example, there's a bran muffin section where she shows you the muffin base and then lists add-ins & extras so you can build your own flavor profile. Her suggestions will keep your brain turning with ideas! I love it. Reading through this book is like having a cool mom teach you how to cook and fend for yourself in a vegetarian world. It would have made my college years as a vegetarian a BREEZE!
As a part time Vegetarian, I fell in love with this Potato Feta Gyro recipe. I made it earlier this week and boy was it incredibly satisfying and simple to execute. The mashed potatoes are flavor packed due to the feta & roasted garlic and the cucumber yogurt sauce is straight up ADDICTIVE. If only I had this recipe in college!
Here's the deal!
I have an extra copy of this book that I want to give one to a lucky reader!
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Giveaway ends on Friday January 13th (ooh creepy!).
****CONTEST ENDED. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR ENTERING!!!!******
Three Cheese & Herb Tomato Tart
Let's pretend we are neighbors for a second. Wouldn't that be awesome? We'd have coffee together in the mornings with an occasional cinnamon roll or maybe a slice of coffee cake. I'd call you up last minute to see if you wanna hop in the car for a late night Target run and you'd totally be down. In fact, you suggest we hit up IKEA on the way there. Good call! Sometimes I'd borrow a few eggs or a cup of sugar and I'd always repay you with delicious treats.
One day you'd drop off a box of tomatoes from your garden and within hours I'd show up at your door with this Three Cheese & Herb Tomato Tart. You'd invite me in, offer me a slice (even though I already ate two before I arrived at your door) and we'd sit on your back porch eating together. We'd talk about what was going on in the neighborhood (why does that dog ALWAYS bark?!). I'd pull up some hilarious videos on You Tube from my phone and then you'd show me a sewing project you're working on. Eventually we'd have some fancy boozy beverage and no doubt we'd drink too much. I love how we never have to worry about driving home!
When I ask you what you liked about this tart, you'd say "Duh! There's puff pastry involved!" Then you'd marvel at how perfect your homegrown tomatoes taste paired with a blend of three different cheeses, garlic and herbs. I'm so glad we're neighbors, aren't you? Now can I please borrow your hedge trimmers? My front yard is getting unruly.
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Melon & Mint Salad
While growing up, I could always count on seeing a bright yellow plastic melon baller nestled in the back corner of my mom's kitchen utensil drawer. It stood out among countless wine openers, toothpicks, random metal skewers and an egg slicer. That melon baller couldn't help but look pitiful & needy from lack of use. Whenever we bought a melon (which was almost never) that melon baller would come out and I'd be overly excited to use it. Precursor to my adulthood? A month ago I was helping my mom clean out some of her kitchen drawers and she offered up the infamous yellow melon baller. It was almost as if she was daring me to use it. I gladly accepted the challenge and when I flipped through the Heart of the Artichoke cookbook, low and behold I found a recipe that required melon balling action!
I'd like to say that my melon balling went swimmingly; it did not. I was under the impression that a melon baller will give you perfectly round spheres of fruit. I was mistaken. After I hacked up half of the cantaloupe, I walked up to my computer and immediately started watching melon balling videos on youtube (they totally exist!). What I gathered is that you can't make a perfect melon ball; one edge is almost always slightly messed up, flat or has shreds of melon meat hanging off of it. If you have enough melon balls to cover a dish and present the nice round sides up to the world, no one will be the wiser. Top the half perfect melon balls with with cut mint leaves and generously squeeze lime juice on top and you have a fancy salad. After you take your first bite of juicy sweet melon with the lime & mint, you'll forget about imperfections. You'll marvel at how perfectly balanced the salad is and you'll feel like you've satisfied your sweet tooth while cleansing your palette. This salad is the perfect end to a delicious meal.
What have we learned here today? A melon baller that doesn't get used is a very sad melon baller indeed. Bust out your melon baller, it needs you!
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Zucchini Banana Flaxseed Muffins
Hey! Guess what? As of last week, I have a preschooler. That's right! A PRESCHOOLER! Dang! Where does the time go? In preparation for this monumental event, I let Cooper pick out his very own lunchbox and backpack. He went with a nice robot theme and I'm glad for that because the construction themed set was not my favorite color. I know it's not MY lunchbox, but I'm the one who has to keep tabs on it, clean it out & fill it up every other day. I'm also left with the task of having to figure out what to put in said lunchbox and I need to get him excited about lunch time at school! It's a tall order.
At the beginning of the week, I made these Zucchini Banana Flaxseed Muffins with the idea of putting one in his lunch box as a treat for all three days of preschool. Little did I know they would disappear in less than two days. Cooper loved them so much that I actually caught him standing on a chair at the kitchen counter reaching into the container of muffins I put aside for the week! And just when I thought my new hiding place was legit, I walked downstairs to see him eating another muffin behind the couch. SNEAKY kid! If these muffins were loaded with sugar, butter or oil, I'd be upset. But the fact that there's both zucchini and banana mixed in with a little flaxseed makes his sneaky behavior totally OK. I can't really blame him; they taste great! They're moist, tender, full of flavor and the flaxseed gives the muffins a nutty flavor without nuts. You would never really know that there's no oil in this recipe. I have now welcomed these healthy muffins into his lunchbox rotation. Victory!
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Tuscan Kale Salad w/ Pecorino
Kale and I have enjoyed a sultry love affair for over a year now. We've definitely moved past the puppy dog phase and we're currently treading in the I leave a toothbrush in his medicine cabinet territory. Yes, I'm talking about KALE. Lately I've been looking for something new to "spice up" our relationship. I've seen this salad on a few of my favorite food blogs and I thought it might lead us back to the non-stop PDA phase. It worked! Suddenly I'm absolutely infatuated with kale again and all it took was this simple salad!
Close your eyes and you might think you're eating a Caesar salad. Open your eyes and look at that dark leafy green pile of healthy kale sitting on your plate! Crazy, huh? You'll notice how creamy/sharp the Pecorino is and that lemony red pepper dressing sure is tangy AND spicy, right? I find that the texture of the kale shreds pairs so well with bits of the crunchy country bread crumbs, don't you? Now that I know how easy it is to make this, I'm totally going on a Raw Tuscan Kale Salad bender. Think Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas but sub the alcohol with Kale. Watch me.
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Strawberry Clafouti
My mom made a cherry clafouti for company when I was a little, and I've been smitten with the word *clafouti* ever since. Clafouti. CLAH- FOO-TEE. It's a fun word to say. Go ahead, try it. See what I mean? I wish I could tell you that I was an immediate fan of clafouti, but unfortunately I can't. When I was a kid, I wasn't keen on anything that tasted like egg. There was an incident at a Mexican restaurant involving FLAN that totally scarred me. Flan is not the dessert you want to eat on your 9th birthday while you're wearing an obligatory sombrero, trust me. So when I tried a hunk of clafouti expecting it to be like cake, I was truly disappointed! Through the maturing process I have learned the beauty of an eggy custard-like cake batter. Isn't growing up fun?
Those gorgeous strawberries I brought back from Driscoll's found a home in this simple Strawberry Clafouti recipe! The batter required a quick whirl in the blender, much like the Chocolate Dutch Baby I recently made and the strawberries get all roasted and gooey delicious like those dreamy Roasted Strawberries I posted. There's also no shortage of buttered crispy edges. I love crispy edges! And can we just take a moment for that beautiful spongy middle mixed with a crazy amount of sweet roasted strawberries? I've never made anything like it. Sprinkle powdered sugar on a hunk and you can call it breakfast. Or position a scoop of vanilla bean gelato on top and you can call it dessert! Clafouti. Keep saying it. CLA-FOU-TI!
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Chocolate Dutch Baby
Don't give me that look. It's perfectly acceptable to have chocolate for breakfast! Especially when you realize that the slice of powdered sugar dusted cake on my plate is actually a PANCAKE. It's a chocolate pancake, PEOPLE! And it takes absolutely no time to make! I was able to execute this recipe whilst getting ready for work, feeding Cooper, quieting an incessantly mewing cat, wrangling a diaper bag, taking pictures, sneaking in a few morning kisses with my husband, and cleaning up my kitchen on a weekday. Let me say that again- A WEEKDAY!! If that doesn't give you a hint of how easy it was, then I don't know what will!
All you need is a small group of ingredients, a blender, a medium sized cast iron skillet & a hot oven and you're just 20 minutes away from digging into a chocolate pancake for breakfast. Do you need syrup for this pancake? Heck NO! It's perfectly sweet with the combo of the powdered sugar & the strawberries. Isn't that fantastic? No syrup means you have one less thing to deal with in the morning! And yes...it does taste like a piece of really thin chocolate cake!
Mini Ginger Almond Cheesecakes
"I've never had almond cheesecake before!" my neighbor exclaimed after she stuffed her THIRD mini ginger almond cheesecake into her mouth. "Same here," I muttered through my mouth full of cheesecake. We were standing around a plate of mini ginger almond cheesecakes on my kitchen island as if we were two college students huddled over a bong. You can be rest assured, we were just making sure to test each and every cheesecake for quality assurance! One bite after the next, I fell in love with the whipped cream & cream cheese ALCHEMY. Oh the fluffiness! The creaminess! And that thick spicy salty gingersnap crust? It slayed me. How many minis add up to an actual slice of cheesecake? Who cares!?
So...another faux cheesecake recipe that prevents me from making an official cheesecake! I've never made a real cheesecake and I kind of have no desire to when I find simple recipes like this one. I love the cream cheese aspect of cheesecakes....how it's subtly savory and a little thick. But the thought of eating a whole slice of cheesecake makes my stomach turn. It's just too rich and dense for my bones. I like creamy desserts that are light & fluffy with a little bit of savory crunch, and these little minis do just the trick! Now you'll have to excuse me. I have one last mini cheesecake calling my name......
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