Category Archives: Supper

Roasted Golden Cauliflower Soup with Curry

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Do not adjust your monitor! This cauliflower purchased at the St. Paul Farmer’s Market is an interesting orange-y gold!  I’ve been seeing more and more varieties of vegetables in unique colours lately.  Cauliflower that is orange, purple or bright green; purple potatoes; golden beets; and bright yellow carrots and tomatoes are becoming commonplace at the Farmer’s Market and grocery store.  I don’t remember seeing these varieties much, just a year ago.  I attribute this influx of vegetables in a new rainbow of colors to the masses becoming interested in growing and eating heirloom vegetable varieties and the local food movement gathering broader appeal.  With all of the chatter among thoughtful eaters, people are becoming less suspicious of oddly shaped and uniquely coloured foods.  We as eaters are learning that these characteristics often are accompanied by flavors that exceed those of red tomatoes of uniform colour and size; massive white turkey breasts, and eggs with white shells and pale yellow egg yolks in by immeasurable amounts.  With a special-looking specimen like this golden cauliflower, I wanted it to play a starring role in what we made for our supper.  At home, I have never done anything with cauliflower other that roast it, steam it or eat it raw.  Recently, I sampled a truly delicious creamy, cheesy cauliflower soup at Heartland Restaurant in Saint Paul, and so for a weeknight meal my goal was to make a soup that was warming and delicious, but a little lower in calories and fat than the creamy-cheesy bowl of love from Heartland that I could never duplicate anyway.  I followed some direction from Martha Stewart found in a recipe for Curried Roasted Cauliflower Soup on her website.*  The results were good, but as expected, it was no match for the Heartland Cauliflower soup which elevated all expectations for what a cauliflower soup could be from the first spoonful.  I am not a James Beard winning chef though, and I’m striving to be health conscious, so I’ll cut my soup some slack.  It was a tasty and healthy meal.

I started the soup by roasting the cauliflower.  Martha Stewart’s recipe called for the cauliflower to be drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt.  I used some cooking spray so that the cauliflower wouldn’t stick, but skipped the oil and salt.  The roasted cauliflower came out the oven with a similar colour and texture to macaroni and cheese.**  Next, I added the roasted cauliflower to a pan of sautéed onions.  Again, I used cooking spray instead of the butter suggested by Martha, but followed her lead on adding curry powder and low sodium vegetable broth, water and chopped fresh parsley.

I reserved a few of the best looking florets to top the soup, and gave the entire concoction a whirl in the blender to make it into a uniformly smooth consistency.

We enjoyed this soup with some grainy brown bread toasted with tomato slices, 21 Seasoning Salute** and a little melted mozzarella cheese.  The curry added some kick, and helped to emphasize the golden colour of the cauliflower.  It was a light but satisfying supper and there was enough for both of us to have a bowl re-warmed for lunch the next day.  I’m sure we’ll make this soup again.

*Say what you want about Martha.  She’s got her name on books, magazines, a website and a TV show that have been downright influential to my wedding planning, home keeping, cooking and entertaining and her website is by far the most comprehensive, well-organized resource on these subjects out there.

**Mmmm.  Macaroni and Cheese.

***21 Seasoning Salute is a salt free assortment of dried herbs and spices from Trader Joe’s that is indispensable in our kitchen.

Sort of Stroganoff

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One of the downfalls of loving to cook and eat is getting into bad habits of having too much of our favorite foods, too often.  Like many concerned eaters, we’ve recently watched the documentary, Forks Over Knives, and what we took away was a desire to go “Plant Strong” in our diet.  To us, going Plant Strong means that meat (for Bjorn), complex carbohydrates and processed foods (for both of us) are playing a smaller role in our meals.  We’re also aiming for scaled back portions when we do use these ingredients.  We want to do this for our health, to shake off some bad habits we’ve acquired and to shed what we carry that comes along with those bad habits.  We’re trying to put whole fruits and vegetables the center of more of our meals.  We’re gardeners, veggie lovers and avid Farmer’s Market shoppers, so this isn’t new.  We have just renewed our focus on putting the nutrient dense, delicious natural foods in the starring role they are meant to play in our diet.  I am also trying to take little shortcuts and make substitutions to reduce the fat and salt used in our cooking, without sparing flavour.  So far, we’re feeling good about the changes and I think we’re enjoying more variety and creativity in making a shift away from our pizza-pasta-burger routine we fell into over the summer.  I love pasta a lot so we will still eat it, but a smaller amount, and prepared in a more thoughtful way.  Tonight, our supper took the form of a lightened up, veggied-up, cobbled-together concoction with some characteristics that harken back to a traditional tangy and rich Russian-style Mushroom Stroganoff.

The recipe was simple, and came together quickly.  I started by sautéing two small yellow onions with non-fat cooking spray, and just a little bit of olive oil.  Then, I added chopped button and cremini mushrooms.  I love mushrooms and can hardly resist adding them to every pasta meal I make, along with peas and spinach.  They go with practically every sauce, and taste great together!  Bjorn, being pleasantly open-minded as an omnivore has no problem foregoing the traditional beef in the stroganoff on a run-of-the-mill Tuesday night.  To make the sauce, I loosely followed a Beef Stroganoff recipe, minus the beef from on of favorite my blog-haunts,  Skinnytaste, using a can of tomato soup.  We didn’t have Worcestershire Sauce in the cupboard, but after a quick Google search, Bjorn informed me that soy sauce with a shot of hot sauce would do the trick as a stand-in for Worcestershire Sauce.  I used Braggs Liquid Aminos and Sriracha, aka, Rooster Sauce.  We like deeply flavored sauce, so I added a healthy shake of paprika and some crushed garlic and let the sauce cook a bit.  After cooking the onions and mushrooms and adding tomato soup the sauce was pretty thick, so I used some low sodium vegetable broth to thin it out a little.  I cooked egg noodles separately in lightly salted water and when they were well on their way to al dente, I added peas to the sauce pan.  When the noodles were nearly cooked, I stirred in some low-fat Buttermilk and a few generous handfuls of fresh spinach leaves into the sauce.  Buttermilk gives the creaminess and tang of sour cream you want with a Stroganoff, but is low in fat.  I had it on hand because I am planning to make another recipe that subbed buttermilk for a higher fat dairy product, so that is what I used, but low-fat sour cream would have been fine as well.  The spinach and peas don’t belong in a traditional stroganoff, but they sure taste good!  We enjoyed this cozy, richly flavored, savory dish with a little shaved parmesan and we both found the supper to be tasty and satisfying.  With a few little tweaks to our cooking and eating habits, in time, we will see a positive result, I think.  I also think we’ll enjoy some delicious suppers in the meantime.

Taco Salad – Mac and Cheese Mashup

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For a person who loves to cook, I sure do struggle to do it sometimes.  The problem isn’t a lack of ingredients.  We keep our fridge, pantry and freezer well-stocked with all of the staples I need to make a healthy and delicious bean and vegetable soup; a roast beef dinner with all of the trimmings or even a simple salad or plate of pasta.  The problem also isn’t a lack of inspiration.  I read enough food magazines and blogs to have enough under 30 minute meals in mind to feed us for months.  The issue is, without a huge amount of free time, and so many tasty restaurants nearby, it is easy to cave in on a night when we’re tired, and go out and relax over a restaurant meal rather than prepare it, and have to clean up afterwards. There is nothing wrong with those relaxing dinners out.  I am so glad to have the freedom to do this sometimes, but we go out more than I’d like to admit, and more than realistically we should on our budget.  Every now and then on those tired days, inspiration strikes, and leftovers pair with an easy pantry staple, and we surprise ourselves by pulling together a quick, easy satisfying meal.  The rules on these nights are:

1.  Use whatever needs using;

2.  Make something yummy that makes you glad you are eating at home;

3.  Make it quickly and with as little mess as possible; and

4.  Work together.  Many hands make light work.

Tonight, the stars aligned over our kitchen, and a very easy, very craveable meal was born, which is best described as a Taco Salad – Mac and Cheese Mashup.  Pictured below, is the vegetarian version.  It was darned good.

Before I go further, let me say a few words about Macaroni and Cheese.  Boxed Macaroni and Cheese, specifically, Kraft Dinner is my ultimate comfort food.  To me, Kraft Dinner is one thing, and Macaroni and Cheese is completely something else.  I really like traditional casserole-style macaroni and cheese made with real cheese now and then, but it is Kraft Dinner that is my true favorite.  I have been making it since I was very very little, and no matter what anyone tells me about preservatives, or orange powdered sauce mix, I don’t care.  I’m always going to eat it.  I love it so much that I wrote a paper in my college composition class called The Kraft Dinner Connoisseur.*  Both Kraft Dinner, and a traditional, from scratch Macaroni and Cheese have a solid place in my recipe repertoire.  Tonight, it is Mac and Cheese, out of a box, yes, but Kraft Dinner, no.  I keep a box of 2% Velveeta Shells and Cheese in the cupboard.  It is a nice portion for two, with some leftovers.  It might be a teeny bit healthier, being that it uses 2% milk fat instead of whole milk fat in the cheese sauce.  And another plus, you can make it even when you have no milk or butter on hand, since all you do is stir the pre-mixed cheese sauce into boiled noodles.   Pictured here is the omnivore version…

I made the Mac and Cheese and added a a nice creamy scoop to our bowls, the rest was leftovers.  Leftover magic!  We had tacos last night, and so we reheated the ground beef taco meat, and the vegetarian Taco Filling by Fantastic Foods** and added a scoop to our respective bowls. Bjorn assembled the fresh taco fixings:  Chopped tomatoes, and avocado, cucumber, chopped green lettuce and radicchio, chopped green onions, salsa, a sprinkle of Monterey Jack cheese and a few crumbled chips.  It was GREAT.  And by great I mean yummy, creamy, and indulgent, and I dare say, somewhat complex, since the meal consisted of two distinct dishes that usually only end up on the same plate at a pot luck.   It met requirements for a meal that needs to satisfy, be quick, use what we have, and require very little cleanup and make us happy to eat at home.  And now, I even crave it when we aren’t in need of a quick fix.  If you aren’t  morally opposed to eating Velveeta 2% Shells and Cheese, and you need a quick and tasty supper, give this mashup a try.

*If a person who wrote a paper in college entitled The Kraft Dinner Connoisseur wasn’t destined to be a food blogger, I don’t know who is.  I got an A.

**Yowza.  For a person who believes in the health benefits of from-scratch home-cooking and avoiding preservatives and commercial foods, I’m really showing my convenience food-using stripes in this post.  I stock a few convenience foods that we eat purposefully because they are delicious and they make life easier.

Linguine with Chunky Vegetable Sauce – A Simple Monday Night Supper

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So many Mondays, we come home and feel too wiped out to cook.  We tend to cook a lot over the weekend.  On Monday we both come home tired, hungry and wanting to relax instead of preparing and cleaning up after a meal.  The obvious result is, many Mondays we go out to eat.  We tend not to plan ahead which leads us to pick a place we know well.  We often issue last-minute invites to family members in the neighbourhood who might want to join us in making the transition back into the weekday grind a little kinder to our weary souls.  The Groveland Tap is right up the street, and it has been a go-to place to meet up for a burger and a tasty beer on these lazy nights.  They have great happy hour specials on beer and appetizers that seem always to be going whenever we’re there.  The Nook is also becoming a regular in the Monday night rotation.  The Nook has a long wait most nights of the week because their burgers are the best.  Monday nights they run a $1.25 mini-burger special after 8:30 p.m., but if we arrive a little earlier than that, we’ve managed to sneak right in before the rush for cheap burgers starts.  We are lucky to have these friendly, casual spots close home to lean on, and especially grateful that we have friends nearby to join us.   The downside is that it becomes a little too easy to get into the habit of never cooking on a Monday.   Lately, we’ve been trying to eat a little healthier, and to eat out a little less to help us stick to our budget.  This is certainly no Nook burger and fries, but it still hits the spot.  It is a simple pasta dish with a chunky vegetable sauce that I’m posting as a reminder to myself that there are some meals that are so quick and consistently delicious that I can even tackle cooking them any night, even on a Monday.

This is a meal that comes together up in 15 minutes or less.  A pasta with a simple sauce can go any direction that our appetites desire.  I grab whatever vegetables I have on hand or that need to be used up.   I almost always have fresh mushrooms in the fridge, peas in the freezer because these are staples in my diet, and favorites that are easy to use in many meals.  There is alway an onion, some sort of pasta and usually a can of good tomatoes in the cupboard too.  If Bjorn is in the mood, it is easy to add chicken or a few frozen meatballs to his plate.  Fortunately, Bjorn is happy enough to go without meat fairly often which makes meal preparation even easier.  I gather, wash and chop the veggies and get some olive oil heating in a pan.  As soon as I remember, I start boiling water for the pasta.  Today I opted for Linguine noodles.  They cook quickly, and they must be al dente to be any good, so I get the sauce almost ready before starting the pasta.  The sauce is simply sautéed onions and mushrooms, depending on mood, garlic.  Once those are cooked, I add a can of San Marzano tomatoes and chop them to manageable chunks in the pan.  For a canned tomato, San Marzano tomatoes are a little spendy, but they are special, as far as canned tomatoes go.  They are only grown in one region of Italy where they get their distinct flavor from volcanic ash present in the soil.  They make pasta with tomato sauce more of a taste treat than a simple, plain tomato sauce straight from the jar.  There is nothing wrong with sauce from the jar, but ever since I discovered San Marzano tomatoes when I have pasta with tomato sauce, it is what I want to taste.  When the sauce is good and bubbly, I salt the pasta water, add the noodles and start a timer.  A few minutes later, I add a few handfuls of peas to the sauce.  I like to drain the linguine out a little short of boiling time and finish cooking it in the sauce.  When I remember to, I reserve a little pasta water to loosen the sauce if I’ve made it too chunky.

If the sauce is chunky enough to count as a serving or two of vegetables, I don’t even make a salad.  I top the pasta with some cheese and a small handful of fresh basil leaves from our garden.  The cheese can be anything from grated Grana Padano to shredded cheddar, although fresh mozzarella is definitely my go-to when it is in the fridge.  This meal is so simple, and so delicious.  Even on Mondays, I’m running out of excuses not to cook.

A Tale of Three Salads…

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I like making a foods that are a concept more than a recipe.  A concept dish has a central idea to it, that you can run with in any direction that you please.  Dishes in this category include pizza, many pasta dishes, a stir fry, a sandwich, many soups and stews, pasta salad, or any salad for that matter.  The structure of a concept dish is based on a few central and necessary components.  For a pizza, this would include a crust and toppings.  It can go anywhere from a traditional tomato sauce/cheese/pepperoni to topping a gluten free pizza crust, vegan “renotta*” and roasted red peppers.   Foods like these accommodate my cooking style.  They allow for imprecision, experimentation, and using whatever is fresh from the garden or farmer’s market.  A conceptual recipe can be influenced by a certain cuisine, or an ingredient in the fridge that needs to get used up.  They can even have multiple influences, such as the salad I’m about to share; one of the most enjoyed meals of the summer which had no less than 3 sources of inspiration.   The first inspiration is the Cobb Salad at Salut in Saint Paul.  I ate this salad several times a week in the count-down days leading up to our wedding when our nightly meal had an agenda and was a business meeting more than a relaxing al fresco dinner at a bustling brassiere across the street from my apartment.  The Salut Cobb salad was a great supper for me in the days leading up to our wedding.  It was a salad, but it was hearty, and it was huge.  I ordered the Cobb with the chicken and bacon on the side, which we took home and added to Bjorn’s lunch the next day.  I also had enough salad left over for my own lunch at work even after being totally satisfied by my supper**.  The Salut Cobb is was a pretty standard Cobb, ingredients-wise:  romaine lettuce, grape tomatoes, avocado, hard-cooked egg, blue cheese and garnished with toasted parmesan crisps.  The salad comes dressed, but the dressing is light.  Still, the salad is rich because of the avocado, blue cheese and eggs.  The salad I made contained the tomato, avocado and egg elements, but the Salut’s main influence on my salad was the fact that I made a salad for supper.  After living on the salad for 2 meals a day for the months of May and June 2009, I became a believer that a salad can be supper.  The second source of inspiration for my salad was a traditional Salad Niçoise.  I don’t eat tuna and anchovy which are central elements of this salad, but I planned to use green beans, eggs, and potatoes (in addition to the already mentioned tomato) and the Niçoise is a salad that says “yes you can” to these ingredients in a cold salad.  The third and most influential inspiration for my salad was the Ensalada Mixta pictured in Summer Made Easy Special Issue of Everyday Food Magazine in an article called Bask Country with food prepared by Aran Goyoaga.  I have already mentioned, this article inspired me to return to blogging after 3 month hiatus earlier this summer.  Aran Goyoaga prepared an Ensalada Mixta for a tapas party featured in the article.  An Ensalada Mixta is a traditional Spanish salad.  Aran Goyoaga served hers stylishly deconstructed, and allured me with its casual elegance and its peeled, soft cooked eggs with their tops cut off.  A behind the scenes photo-journal appears on Aran’s blog, and the salad is pictured, in the center of the first photo, and then again, larger, toward the end of article.  With elements of all of these salads in mind, I made a salad supper we loved with veggies from our backyard square foot garden and the Saint Paul Farmer’s Market which were fresh and lovely and crying to be a part of an uncomplicated summer meal.

I arranged all of the elements of the of Cobb/Niçoise/Ensalada Mixta-influenced salad deconstructed, on a large platter that we were given as a wedding present.  The preparation was extremely simple.  I boiled and then roasted fingerling potatoes from the farmer’s market with olive oil, crushed garlic and chopped rosemary from our garden and sprinkled a little champagne vinegar at the end to make their flavor bright***.  I boiled and peeled eggs, but didn’t manage to get them off of heat in time to make the lovely soft-cooked eggs from the Ensalada Mixta.  I picked and rinsed green and Bibb lettuces and frisée from the garden, and sliced garden tomatoes and fresh mozzarella.  I sprinkled a little salt and fresh-ground pepper to the potatoes, eggs and tomatoes.

I blanched green beans from our garden and corn from the farmer’s market corn and cut it off the cob.

For a dressing, I blended avocado with parsley, salt and pepper and light mayonnaise in the food processor.

I was aiming for a Green Goddess-type dressing.  The avocado concoction began with great ingredients, but turned out heavy with too much mayo, and missed the mark.  I put Olive Oil, Balsamic Vinegar, salt and pepper on the table to allow us to dress our salads to taste on our plates.

There are great salads that contain a set list of vegetables and proteins that are dressed in a particular way, such as a Cobb, a Niçoise, or a Caesar.  My salad was a concept; a sum of it parts –the ideas and ingredients that influenced its creation.  In spite of a less than exceptional dressing, and hard, instead of soft-boiled eggs, it worked out.  We enjoyed its simplicity, and were satisfied by it because so many of its elements were hearty.  Bjorn commented that the meal had a European feel to it, which makes sense in light of elements being inspired by salads native to France and Spain, both cuisines that prize great ingredients, and prepare them without excess complication.   It has its American note to it also, in the Cobb ingredients, avocado and square foot garden-raised vegetables.  I am slowly learning that great ingredients, prepared without unnecessary complication and served simply have such a refreshing and satisfying result.

*I don’t think I can be convinced that a pizza is a Pizza without cheese.  I guess if it became medically necessary for me to eat pizza without cheese due to sudden, extreme lactose intolerance, a pizza like the one I recently read about on the Food in my Beard could perhaps, fill the sad, cheeseless void in my belly.

**I won’t lie.  I always ate the salad with a hunk of Salut’s bread and some cold salty butter that they bring out to start your meal.  This was totally justified, by my choice of a salad as entree, right?  I’m sure the chewy bread and butter helped make a salad so satisfying.

***Thank you to our friends Jenny and Ben for introducing us to this wonderful way to prepare potatoes, based on a recipe by Jamie Oliver.

Inspired by… Summer Soba

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I am a follower of an ever-growing list of blogs.  If I let myself, I would probably be able to add a new blog to my Favorites every week*.  Most of the blogs I follow are food-related, a few focus on lifestyle, decor or fashion, but mostly, cooking, restaurants and the like.   There are so many creative and fascinating people out there blogging, it humbles a person who is just starting out.  A lot of these fantastic bloggers have better cameras, and more technical agility and more honed culinary skills than I do.  Some of them have even contracted with a web designer.  But this doesn’t deter me, because this is just for fun.  The way I look at it,  if I keep coming back every day to see what these internet personas are doing in their little corner of the world, maybe someone will stumble upon our blog and come back to see what we’re eating and what is inspiring us.   Since I spend a few of my free moments virtually lurking around kitchens of some serious foodies and great chefs, now and then I am inspired to try a recipe, or more even often, create a dish inspired by something delicious-looking I’ve found in a blog.  Hence, a new, soon-to-be recurring feature, Inspired by… which will feature a dish I make that is based on Another Blogger’s Creation**.  I encourage readers to follow the link back to the original blogger’s post.  When I say, my dish is Inspired by… something I don’t mean I’m going to even attempt to recreate exactly what the original blogger did, or show how to make the dish step-by-step.  It is more likely to be a riff on the original.  I like to play fast and loose with recipes, and I am not a Parisienne daily grocery shopper, so I’ll be using what I have on hand.  So, here it goes.  My first Inspired by… begins, where my blog following began, an easy Summer Soba supper, inspired by Macheesmo.

Macheesmo is the first blog I ever followed.  I was googling a recipe for some ingredient I needed to use up, and landed on his site.  Macheesmo is an informational blog written by a guy named Nick, and typically shows a recipe step-by-step.  He has a few recurring features, such as a weekly poll to determine a recipe he’ll make and blog about, and “Homemade Trials” where he attempts to make something from scratch that you’d otherwise buy.  I think he even does research.  As is typical for me, I followed the recipe loosely.  I stir-fried green onions, carrots and button mushroom with a few Thai chilis and green beans from the garden.  The sauce contained soy sauce an sesame oil, but substituted ginger from the spice cupboard for the fresh ginger and champagne vinegar for the mirin.  The Macheesmo recipe contains corn, which sounds great, but wasn’t in my refrigerator.  I topped mine with toasted black sesame seeds and fresh basil from the back yard.

As promised by Macheesmo, the result was a tasty and healthy supper, and an even more delicious cold lunch at work the next day.  It was far tastier than a frozen microwaveable meal which are a noontime standard in the office lunch scene.  Ironically, a co-worker commented “that doesn’t look very appetizing!” when she observed my plate.   The dark colour of the soba noodles, combined with the soy sauce sesame seeds must have thrown her off the trail, because it actually was the best lunch I’ve had in a while.   To each his or her own.  I recommend checking out Macheesmo, and giving the Summer Soba a spin.

*I did in fact just add about 5 to my links, Blogs To Get You Through The Day list.

**Yes, Another Blogger’s Creation purposefully harkens back to Another Bad Creation, (ABC), the 1990’s R&B group from my youth.

Chicago Dog Days of Summer

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If I were a followed blogger, I’d have to apologize for the long silence.  Some day!  For now, it’s a good thing to have zero followers.  Summer arrived, and I started filling my free moments with being outside, gardening, cookouts, trips to the lake and general summer fun and relaxation.  I got re-inspired to return to our blog by an article I read recently in the Summer Made Easy Special Issue of Everyday Food Magazine called Bask Country about a tapas party with food prepared by Aran Goyoaga, a pastry chef, blogger and cookbook author, written by Jean Lear, photographed by John Kernick.  I read the lines “She started blogging as a way to keep track of the baking she was doing at home….Soon her serene, light-filled aesthetic–captured by her photographs as well as her prose found a loyal readership.”  Now, that is what I was thinking of when I started this blog.  I immediately jumped up and grabbed my camera and my laptop.  And then I encountered a bunch of boring computer and camera problems and had to save this post for another day.  Problems solved…  Here is my first attempt at recreating a close approximation of an authentic Chicago-style hotdog.

First, I had a little shopping to do in order to top the dogs properly.  Chicago dogs come with sliced tomatoes, mustard, onions, a dill pickle spear, a funny little pepper called a Sport Pepper, and a sprinkling of celery salt on a poppy seed bun.

Its been a hot summer, so an advantage to the Chicago dog is that it can be made on the grill.  I brushed the buns lightly with butter in order to help adhere poppy seeds to the top.

The meat version, served with a side of grilled sweet corn, with butter, pepper and salt, of course, and a few strips of bacon, for good measure.

The veggie version, is a close approximation of the classic chicago dog, except with with a vegetarian dog, and of course, all of the essential chicago dog fixings.  I enjoyed mine with a cob of grilled corn, a slice of watermelon and cukes & onions with dill, vinegar with salt, pepper.  A tasty escape to the Windy City!

Sauced – Gates Bar-B-Q Shish Kebabs

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We’ve heard from a few friends who may know that Gates Bar-B-Q Sauce from Kansas City is The Best Barbecue Sauce.

Bjorn’s co-worker Jason was kind enough to bring us a bottle of Gates Bar-B-Q Sauce back from a recent trip home to Kansas City.  What better way to welcome the arrival of grilling season than slather some Extra Hot Gates Bar-B-Q sauce all over vegetarian and meat Shish Kebabs on their way to the grill?

Veggies on hand included bright yellow bell peppers, zucchini, green onions, button mushrooms and heirloom cherry tomatoes.  In a matter of minutes, those can be washed and chopped into large chunks of similar size and threaded on to bamboo skewers, pre-soaked in water.  It was late and we were tired so this meal needed to be fixed quickly.  The protein selected for the vegetarian version was pre-made vegetarian “meatballs” and for the omnivore iteration, real beef meatballs from the freezer, defrosted quickly in the microwave.

After grilling, as usual, the difference between the vegetarian and the real beef version is difficult to distinguish visually.   I made a simplified parsley pesto of fresh Italian Parsley, fresh garlic and olive oil, zipped in the food processor which pulled together green peas, chickpeas and Basmati rice into a cohesive side.

The finished plate:  this happens to be the veggie version. Notice the delicious char on the heirloom yellow cherry tomato toward the top of the left skewer.  That Gates Bar-B-Q Sauce has kick!   The meal prep was quick and left flavorful leftovers that re-heated well for a tasty and easy lunch at work the next day.

Our Way to Eat – The First Supper

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This is by no mean our first supper, but it IS the first supper going live on our new blog.  It isn’t anything spectacular, but its a good starting point.  Its a supper that shows our way of eating. It started with a lot of thought.  It is inspired mostly by ingredients on hand that needed to be used before they spoiled, and it has the meat and mirror image vegetarian riff.   Bjorn worked late.  I went for a run and thought about supper.   I ran by Subway and saw a sign advertising Orchard Chicken Salad with grapes and presumably apples in it.  We had these lovely soft hamburger buns that needed to be used up, and we had a pear.  This was enough to inspire my first attempt at Chicken / Quorn Chick’n salad sandwiches.

It is almost impossible to distinguish between the regular chicken salad with light mayo, celery, and pears and the Quorn version visually.

I have a problem having a totally cold supper, and I’ve had potatoes on the brain.  (Thank goodness I left that depressing  “carbs are bad” phase in my 20’s.)  I ended up with potato skins stuffed with roasted broccoli, chives and melted cheddar, topped with greek yogurt because I wanted potatoes, but didn’t want to eat the whole thing, plus toppings so I hollowed them out and then added toppings.  Yum.