July 5, 2012- Arugula Salad with Grapes and Cashews- Vegan

Arugula Salad with Grapes and Cashews- Vegan

Salad #3 is another one from Vegetarian Times. Sometimes I ask myself where I would be in life without this magazine and I'm really not sure where my cooking and eating life would be. But anyway...for salad number three we decided, well Nick surprisingly picked an ARUGULA salad! Shocker. Well we of course mixed spinach in with it but it was still delicious. We also had a cucumber that Nick's mom gave us fresh from her garden. So the salad had spinach, arugula, red grapes, cucumber, and cashews. Very simple. The dressing was red wine vinegar, some brown sugar, and olive oil. We really enjoyed this salad and will probably make it or a variation of it again. Yay for salads!

Spinach from our garden!

July 4, 2012- Portabella Burgers with Homemade Maccaroni Salad

Portabella Burgers with Homemade Macaroni Salad

Usually for Memorial day and the 4th of July Nick and I still try to feel "American" and have a "burger" obviously it is a veggie burger so we decided to go for a portabella mushroom burger this time. We bought some ciabatta rolls to serve them on and some swiss cheese. Nick marinated them in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and we cooked them on our make shift grill (meaning our flat plan on the stove) and I decided to buck up and buy mayonnaise to make some homemade macaroni salad. I don't really like mayo and I don't like having it in my house but I knew to make macaroni salad I needed to buy it so I did. The macaroni salad was pretty good. Our burgers were messy with an addition of avocado but delicious. We downed a cold glass of beer and enjoyed some good old fireworks that night. Happy 236th birthday America. We'll enjoy another burger next year.

July 3, 2012- Falafel with Tahini- Vegan

Falafel with Tahini- Vegan

We have a couple of recipes for falafel, one being our falafel burgers we make frequently but this one is from the Meat Free Mondays cookbook (recipe number 2!!!). So we decided to try this one. Typically falafel recipes call for parsley and we never buy the parsley but this time we did. I bought Italian parsley because we are, of course, Italian! So anyway, it also called for making a homemade tahini sauce which we have never done. We usually eat our falafel with hummus. So we decided to be brave and make a homemade tahini sauce. Well, the tahini sauce was thick and not so tasty by itself, think really thick kind of lemony sesame seeds...anyway. But all together it was a rather good meal and I will say that I do like this falafel recipe. We typically have our falafel in pita with lettuce and some cucumber so we still stuck with that. Probably will have the falafel again, maybe with hummus next time...who knows. Oh...no picture. :(

July 2, 2012- Avocado Spinach Panini- Vegan

Avocado Spinach Panini- Vegan

This is a recipe from a summer Vegetarian Times from 2011. We don't actually own a panini press, we own a George Foreman grill but it's practically the same thing, grill marks are grill marks right? This panini was super simple to make. We got sourdough bread, fresh spinach (not from the garden, we didn't have enough), sundried tomatoes, and avocado. Nick liked to mush up the avocado and spread it so it stays more nicely. So we spread the avocado on both sides put the sundried tomatoes on and put about a cup of spinach on and put it in the grill and left it there for about 5 minutes. And that was it. Very simple and yet tasty. A nice quick summer sandwich with lots of iron! We had ours with a few baby carrots and shared a bag of veggie chips.

July 1, 2012- Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Arugula Pesto

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Arugula Pesto

So for my birthday Nick bought me the Meat Free Mondays cookbook which Paul McCartney and his daughters wrote and I am excited to say that this is our first recipe from their cookbook. I was excited to try this gnocchi recipe, well hesitant and dreading it is more like it, because our last time making gnocchi was a DISASTER. It was more like soggy dumplings that we had to force ourselves to eat or we would have wasted 3 pounds of potatoes and too much good parmesan. Anyway, this time we knew we would do it right and alas we did! We completely followed the recipe and it turned our perfecto! Besides my first batch of cooking them because I cooked them for too long and we had another soggy mess but they were delicious and the arugula pesto was simple to make and Nick actually liked it. Side note: Nick does not fancy arugula much. I decided to substitute cashews for the pine nuts as I usually do in pesto because pine nuts are so expensive. But this recipe is definitely worth a try and it was exciting to finally get some pasta right. It was also a colorful dinner with orange pasta and green sauce. I also made a southern banana pudding for dinner. It has vanilla wafers on the bottom, with sliced bananas next, then vanilla pudding, then another layer of that. You put it in the fridge for a few hours and the vanilla wafers get soft like cake. It is really yummy and we served it with a little bit of whipped cream. Yum!

Look! Pasta! Yay!

It's sideways...but you get the picture...it looks delicious and tasted delicious too!

Sideways banana pudding! :)

June 30, 2012- Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Tonight we had a birthday party to go to so unfortunately we have no pictures to post. But I will tell you that it was a 1920s party and we did have a fantastic time :)

June 29, 2012- Dinner with the Family- Sweet Tomatoes

Dinner with the Family- Sweet Tomatoes

Tonight we had a birthday celebration for Nick's Mom, our nephew Riley, and our sister-in-law Joanie's parents Mimi and Ray. Needless to say it was quite a few people, 17 or 18 so we all got together at Sweet Tomatoes and ate a lot of food. Fourth or fifth servings for some! I like this place because I can get a huge salad and a slice of pizza and some mac and cheese and a sundae. Perfecto!