Artichoke Hummus

I made this dip to bring to a playgroup yesterday, thinking that only the mommies would really go for it. After all, as I made it, Abby watched me and said "Oh yuck! I don't like artichokes! They are the yuckiest!" Even when I pointed out that she had never had an artichoke, or at least not in a long time, she maintained that they were the yuckiest, end of story.

As it turned out, the kids at the playgroup flocked to the veggies and dip, even bringing it down to their own kiddie table to share. And when my girls needed an afternoon snack, they requested the leftovers! So while I didn't take a picture of the dip per se, I do have a picture of the girls going at the dip and - even better! - scarfing down a bunch of veggies in the process!

Artichoke Hummus

1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1 can/jar of artichoke hearts, drained (I used a 12 oz jar, but I think the cans come in 14 oz sizes)
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
2 Tbsp olive oil
kosher salt (add to taste)

In a food processor, blend beans, artichoke hearts, lemon juice, rosemary, and olive oil together until smooth. Add kosher salt to taste, blending well after each addition of salt. Garnish with sweet paprika, if desired, and serve with lots of fresh-cut veggies!

Chicken Baked in Curry-Peanut Sauce

I failed to get a picture of this dish, as my camera battery had died - but it is chicken breasts baked in a beige sauce. Not that photogenic! It was, however, delicious. Both girls gobbled their chicken right up. Abby said, "Mommy, this sauce is so tasty! Thank you!" So, woo!

This recipe made about twice as much sauce as I needed for the 5 chicken breasts I was baking, so I popped half of it in the freezer for a future tasty dinner.

Chicken Baked in Curry-Peanut Sauce

1 inch chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped (if you're not a big fan of ginger, use less)
2 tsp garlic, chopped
1/2 cup smooth natural peanut butter
1/4 cup rice vinegar
2 Tbsp soy sauce (I always use reduced sodium)
1 tsp red Thai curry paste
1 1/4 cups light coconut milk
1/4 cup cilantro leaves

4-6 chicken breasts

Preheat oven to 375F.

In a blender or food processor, combine all ingredients (except for the chicken breasts). (Or put the ingredients in a bowl and use your immersion blender, if you have a nifty little one like I do!) Blend them until smooth.

Place chicken breasts in a 9x13 baking dish and pour sauce all over. Freeze any leftover sauce. Bake chicken until the internal temperature reaches 165F - for me, this was somewhere between 35-45 minutes.

Creamy Asparagus Soup

I bought one of those 2-lb bags of asparagus from Costco (indeed, I adore Costco and it's mountains of produce!) for roasting up alongside out Easter lamb - but when the time came, I was just not in the mood for asparagus. So I needed to use it up, and I was in the mood for a creamy soup. I used potato to help thicken the base, so I could use just two cups of 1% milk instead of cream, butter, etc. - and I achieved an incredibly creamy soup.

As with all soups, my kids were a little iffy on this. Abby ended up eating about half of her bowl, though not without some prodding. Lizzy tried a bite... which is, well, something at least!

Creamy Asparagus Soup

2 lbs of asparagus, washed and chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp dried dill
1/4 tsp dried lemon peel
salt
1 large potato, peeled and chopped
2 cups of stock (vegetable or chicken)
2 cups of milk (I used 1%)

In a large pot, stir together asparagus, onion, celery, olive oil, dill, lemon peel, and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until vegetables have begun to soften.

Add potato and stock. Cover and cook over medium-low heat until potato is soft enough to fall apart easily. Stir in milk.

Use an immersion blender to puree soup (or, puree in a blender, working in batches. Be careful when blending piping hot soup!!). Continue to keep warm over low heat until ready to serve.

Banana-Oatmeal Bread

I've tinkered with this recipe over the years, and it is currently our favorite toasting bread (needless to say, it makes great pb&j, too!). It's got this lovely hint of banana flavor, and it tastes fabulous toasted and buttered. Mmm. This recipe is for the bread machine - I've made bread by hand a few times, but I honestly don't see a difference in the final outcome, and the bread machine allows me to be so wonderfully lazy!

Banana-Oatmeal Bread

1 cup ripe banana, sliced
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 1/3 cups milk
1 3/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 1/2 cups bread flour
3/4 cup rolled oats
3 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp gluten
1 Tbsp + 1/2 tsp rapid rise yeast

Add ingredients according to your bread machine's instructions (I add mine in the exact order listed here). Set for the whole wheat cycle. This is a 2-lb loaf, if your machine requires that info. Walk away while the bread machine works its magic, and then take all the credit and glory when people compliment the yummy bread.

Zucchini Nuggets, Take Two

Waaaaay back when we started this blog, I posted zucchini nuggets. I made those all the time that fall, and then they kind of fell by the wayside. I found myself once again with some lonely, unused zucchini in my veggie drawer the other night, so I thought of those nuggets. I revamped the recipe this time around, largely because I had run out of Panko bread crumbs, also because I had more zucchini to use up. These were just as big a hit with the girls as the originals - served alongside some home-baked sweet potato fries, these made a great "fries and nuggets" dinner!

I used homemade bread crumbs for these. No one in our family really loves the crusty ends of loaves of breads (or "bread bums", as we call them), so I collect them in a bag in the freezer. When I need bread crumbs, I whirl up a few "bums" in our food processor - and voila, I have coarse, whole wheat bread crumbs!

Zucchini Nuggets, Take Two

3 small zucchini, grated
2 cups coarse bread crumbs
2 Tbsp flour
2 eggs
1/2 cup cheese (cheddar, jack, whatever you like)
canola oil for frying

In a large bowl, combine zucchini, crumbs, flour, eggs, and cheese. You want the mixture to have a meatball-like quality to it.

Heat up a small amount of canola oil in a frying pan over medium-low heat. Gather up scoops of the zucchini mixture, slightly smaller than a golf ball. Mush the ball in your hands a few times until the mixture is really holding together, and then flatten into a nugget shape. After all the nuggets are formed, cook them in batches.

I cooked them "low and slow" - about 4 to 5 minutes per side, over medium-low heat - to let them get nice and golden. This made about 24 nuggets.

Mushroom-Spinach Sauce

We had a day last week when I realized the girls had reached dinner time with nary a fruit or vegetable to their day. This is very uncommon for us - but it was a day when we were running around with school, ballet, and errands, and we had done more "on the fly" eating than usual. I wanted to pack as many fruits and veggies into dinner as I reasonably could, while also making something the girls would eat without complaint (as they were very tired and likely to kick up a fuss). I resorted to the favorite mom trick of pureeing veggies into a sauce for pasta, and served the pasta with smoothies. I like to use a rotini pasta with sauces - the spirals hold a lot of saucy goodness! The girls cleaned their plates (and their cups), and I felt much better about our day!

(I'm continuing my goal of one vegan and one vegetarian dish per week, which has been much easier than I expected. This was our vegan meal of the week (the smoothies were bananas, strawberries, pomegranate juice, and vanilla soy milk).)

Mushroom-Spinach Sauce

1 box rotini pasta
2-3 handfuls of baby spinach
1 zucchini, sliced
5 large white mushrooms, washed and chopped
1 Tbsp olive oil
dash of oregano, salt
2 tsp balsamic vinegar

In a large pot, cook pasta according to package directions. Reserve 1 cup of the pasta water when draining the cooked pasta.

In a sauce pan, heat up the olive oil over medium heat. Add the spinach, zucchini, and mushrooms. Season with oregano and salt. Cook, stirring, until the zucchini and mushrooms are soft. Transfer the veggies to a blender, adding balsamic vinegar. Blend veggies until smooth, adding some of the pasta cooking water as needed.

Toss the cooked pasta in the sauce before serving.

Rosemary Beef Stew with Greens

In continuing to use up that big bag o' spinach last week, I made a wonderful rosemary beef stew. I adore rosemary, and we've had enough rain and gloomy temperatures to make beef stew a welcome addition to the weekly menu. The spinach was fine in this soup, although I generally prefer hardier greens, like kale, in my soup.

Rosemary Beef Stew with Greens

1/2 lb cooked and cubed beef
4 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup red wine
1 cup water
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped onion
4 carrots, peeled and chopped
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 clove garlic, minced
2-3 handfuls of washed, chopped greens (spinach, kale, chard, whatever you like)
1 cup sliced mushrooms

I took the easy route on making this, and would do it in a slow cooker in the future (I wasn't thinking quite that far ahead that day). In a large pot, combine beef, chicken stock, wine, water, celery, onion, carrots, rosemary, and garlic. Bring to a boil and lower heat. Simmer until vegetables are soft (I let mine go for about an hour). Stir in the greens and mushrooms - simmer for an additional 10-15 minutes, until mushrooms are soft and cooked through.

I served this with some cheese toast, and the girls did a fairly decent job on it - they picked out and ate the beef and carrots, and Abby also ate the "lettuce" (as she calls all greens). I've made tremendous progress on getting the girls to at least try soup this winter!

Spinach Tart Crust

This week, I have a challenge on my hands. I bought a 2.5 lb bag of spinach at Costco last weekend, as I needed a little bit of spinach for a dinner party menu. I am bound and determined not to let this spinach go to waste, but I'm also not much in the mood for spinach salads all week. So I'm finding ways to use it up! First up, a double spinach tart - spinach in the tart filling, and the crust. This crust was so good, and it was an easy way to pack more spinach into my kiddos. I got the idea from my friend Ana, who has long made a tart crust with basil mixed in. I can see myself trying out cilantro and parsley in the future, too!

Spinach Tart Crust

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 big handful of baby spinach
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup butter, cut up into pieces
1/4 cup chilled water

In a food processor, blend together the flours, spinach, and salt until well-combined. Pulse in the butter until mixture resembles pea-sized crumbs. Pour in the water, and blend until dough just starts to come together.

Remove the dough from the food processor and knead it lightly until it comes together. Form it into a disk and wrap it in plastic wrap. Chill for about an hour.

Preheat oven to 350F. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured board and press it into a removable-bottom tart pan.

Fill as desired (I sauteed some sliced mushrooms and a few handfuls of baby spinach in some oregano olive oil and laid that mix across the bottom, then topped it with four beaten eggs, a splash of milk, and some shredded cheddar cheese). Bake for 35-45 minutes.

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My kids absolutely adored this, and each had seconds. They rarely ask for seconds, particularly of something involving spinach, but they thought the green crust was a lot of fun. If I can incorporate beets and create a pink crust, I think I would blow their minds!

Avocado Goddess Dip

For some wonderful, miraculous reason, my girls have been all about trying new vegetables lately. In the last week, they have had grape tomatoes, broccoli, cucumber, romaine lettuce (new to Lizzy), and asparagus. They have done this without complaint and without me having to nudge them into trying them. What on earth?! Either all of my attempts to get them to try more things is finally paying off, or it's some fluke never to be repeated again. We will see!

Last night, Abby held up her broccoli and said "Look, Mommy, it's like a tree!"

Remembering Jenna's recent post about having her boys "eat like dinosaurs", I said "You can eat that tree like a dinosaur!"

"But Mommy," she said, "I'm not a dinosaur. I'm a little girl."

"I know, Abby, but the broccoli is like a tree, so -"

"But Mommy, it's not really a tree. It's just a broccoli."

"I know, Abby, but -"

"And I'm just a little girl, eating broccoli. Okay?"

"Okay, Abby."

So, the dinosaur thing is not quite working for my little girl - but hey, she's eating the broccoli, so woo!

I've been trying more dips and dressings as the girls have been willing to eat more vegetables. One of my first tries was a green goddess dressing, but based with avocado instead of mayo. It was delicious and had a lot more nutrients and good fats than our usual dips!

Avocado Goddess Dip

2 ripe avocados
1 bunch tarragon, chopped
1-2 Tbsp chopped chives (depends on how much you like chives!)
1 handful chopped parsley
salt & pepper
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1-2 cups milk (start with 1 cup, add more as needed to get to desired consistency)

De-seed and scoop out the avocado. Add everything to a blender or food processor and puree. Add more milk as needed, depending on how thick or thin you want your dip to be (I added more milk after I served the girls, to make a dressing for my salad).

I've submitted this post to the Big Words, Little Foodies recipe swap over at Food with Kid Appeal. See what other little foodies have to say about their dinners!

Polar Bear Cupcakes

I am just tickled pink that "Lost" is back tonight (even though, with my husband's schedule, we may not get to actually watch it until this weekend - sob!), so the girls and I made up some polar bear cupcakes today as a tribute!

When I bake cakes or cupcakes for birthdays or actual celebrations, I keep it basic with white sugar, all-purpose flour. But when I'm baking cupcakes on a Tuesday because my favorite show is back on, I like to go a little healthier. I find you can basically make a muffin, with flax and whole wheat and blah blah - because once the frosting is on, it's just as yummy as a true cupcake!

Polar Bear Cupcakes

1/2 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
3/4 cup milled flax seed
1/2 cup raw sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 tsp maple extract
1 egg
3/4 cup milk (I used 1%)

Preheat oven to 375F. Line 10 muffin cups with liners.

In a bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt.

With an electric mixer, cream together the butter, flax, sugar, vanilla extract, and maple extract. Beat in the egg. Alternate between adding the flour mixture and the milk, beating until combined.

Divide batter evenly between 10 muffin cups. Bake for 15-20 minutes (I started checking at 15 minutes; I took them out of the oven at 18 minutes). Let cool


Frosting - I use the Cook's Illustrated buttercream frosting, although it's been a while since I actually looked at it! Here are my rough proportions:

1 stick unsalted butter
2-3 Tbsp half and half (or cream)
1 tsp vanilla extract
pinch salt
2-3 cups confectioner's sugar

With an electric mixer, cream together the butter, half and half, vanilla, and salt. Add 2 cups of confectioner's sugar and beat on high speed for several minutes. Add more sugar as desired to reach frosting consistency, but be sure to beat on high speed for several minutes after additions - you want it to get really nice and fluffy!

We decorated with shredded coconut, chocolate chips... and animal cracker bits for the ears. That's what happens when you don't keep mini marshmallows on hand and decide to make cupcakes with no prior planning! ;-)

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One of these already leaped into my mouth and forced it's way into my stomach... yummmmm. Abby hates cake and has already said that she won't be trying one after dinner, but we'll see if her tune changes. I feel fairly sure, based on her enthusiasm for licking the frosting beaters, that Lizzy will be more than happy to have dessert tonight! Perhaps these cupcakes will give me the sugar rush I need to stay up until 11 p.m...