Chard, orzo and turkey soup

I have been making this soup for years. It's kind of an Italian version of chicken noodle soup. It's light with mild flavors, perfect for this winter season if you have just caught cold and need some plain soup to soothe you.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of chard, rinsed and chopped
1/2 cup of orzo
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1/2 small yellow onion, minced
6 cups chicken broth

For meatballs:
1 small egg
1/4 cup breadcrumbs
1/2 yellow onion
1/2 pound of ground turkey
1 clove or garlic, minced
1 handful of fresh chopped parsley or cilantro
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan
salt, pepper

In a medium-sized pot, sautee the onion and carrots with 1 tablespoon of olive oil until onion is translucent. Next add the broth and chard. Keep heat going at medium until chard is wilted. Add orzo and cook for 10 minutes. I like to make my meatballs tiny so they are bite-sized and you don't have to break them up in the bowl with your spoon and send broth flying everywhere! Form meatballs and plop raw meatballs into the soup one at a time. Cover pot and let simmer for another 15 minutes, or until orzo is completely cooked and meatballs are tender and cooked through. Add salt/pepper to taste, and serve with a spinach salad and warm bread!

Salmon with kale and mushroom ragu over polenta

This meal was fantabulous and only took 25 minutes to make. Like Bon Appetit says, "Fast, Easy, Fresh"!

Ingredients:

Salmon fillet
lemon slices
fresh-chopped parsley
1 bunch of fresh kale, chopped
5 stewed tomatoes, peeled , chopped and seeded (or stewed in a can if you don't have time to stew them yourself)
2 cups of sliced crimini mushrooms
1/2 diced yellow onion
2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
salt, pepper

Dress salmon fillet with parsley, salt, pepper and lemon slices. Preheat oven to 350. Heat olive oil in pan over stove and sautee onions and mushrooms for a few minutes. Add garlic and kale. Sautee another few minutes, until kale is wilted. Add tomatoes, salt and pepper and cover with lid. Let simmer on medium for 20 minutes, occasionally stirring. Meanwhile, bake salmon and cook polenta on stovetop in a separate pot. Spoon ragu over polenta and serve with baked salmon!

Lasagna and Max

Another meal I cooked on Sunday for the week was lasagna!!! Sometimes my workweek is so heavy that I do not have time to cook. It's a challenge to pull a 14-hour day and then come home to whip up some gourmet meal, and we try to avoid takeout, well, because it's just not that healthy! So I try to cook a pot of soup and a casserole of some sort on Sunday after church, and that way we can have a few home-cooked meals during the week. Do I really need to post my lasagna recipe? Everybody knows how to make lasagna, right? The only special thing about my lasagna is that I jam-pack it with steamed kale so I'm not just eating cheese and noodles. So here's a picture! but this blog post is just an excuse to also post a picture of my favorite, most cute and adorable dog, MAX!!!! He's my lovebug :)

Crock pot beef stew

Daniel and I have both been sick this week, and I've been working on an incredibly intense arbitration at work, so I thought I'd let the crock pot do my cooking for me. We decided on beef stew.

Ingredients:

1 pound of beef, cubed
3 diced carrots
4 celery stalks, diced
1 yellow onion, diced
3 Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cubed
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups of beef broth
1/2 cup of red wine
4 tablespoons of flour
2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon of oregano
1 tsp thyme
1 tablespoon chopped basil (or dried if you live in a cold place and can't find fresh)
2 bay leaves
salt, pepper to taste

Pull out the crock pot! Roll the cubed beef around on a plate of flour until it's good and coated. Layer the vegetables and herbs with the beef in the crock pot. Top with W. sauce, red wine, salt, pepper, broth and cover crock pot. Cook on low for 8 hours. Come home from work to the most tantalizing aromas your olfactory nerves have ever experienced. Serve over rice!

Valentine's Day: To go out or not to go out.....that is the question!

For the moment, Daniel and I are happily childfree...until we get a referral for an orphan in Ethiopia sometime next year and our world will turn upside down! But for now, we are living on the edge with boundless freedom to go out to fancy restaurants, steal away on weekend trips to Carmel, go dancing all night, etc.... We don't actually do any of these things, but at least we know we have the freedom to do so! Usually, Daniel will say, "Hey, let's go away for the weekend to Carmel! What's stopping us?"

And then I dream for a second about how amazing a trip to Carmel would be, the beaches, 17-mile-drive, the art galleries, delectable dinners, romantic coffee shops. Then reality comes screeching around the corner in the shape of a dog named "Chica" with cat poop hanging out of her mouth and a trail of torn up kleenex she has dug out of the trash can. And then I say to Daniel, "Who's going to watch the dogs, do the laundry, do the grocery shopping, clean the house, read my 1200 pages of transcripts that are due next week? I'd rather stay home and watch a movie on the couch tonight..." And then Daniel hangs his tail and mopes to his office. Plus we've got choir and Sunday school to teach, so we can't ever really miss church except for the summertime.

This prelude leads me to the burning question: To go out or not to go out on Valentine's Day. Do we want to brave the crowds and 45-minute waits at the romantic restaurants downtown? We are DINK's! We should be living the life! (Dual income, no kids, in case you are not familiar with that acronym. I've been calling us that for a while as a joke, when one day Daniel corrected me and told me that we are NOT dual income since I'm the only one that works, and I should come up with another catch phrase for us)

Part of me wants to live it up and celebrate our childfreedom, but the other part of me wants to stick a middle finger up to Valentine's Day in solidarity to my single compadres out there. When I was single, I absolutely hated V-Day. It was yet another reminder that I was alone and had no one that loved me. Nowadays, different holidays torment me, e.g., Mother's Day. I hate the media and American calendars telling me when I'm supposed to feel romantic. So tonight I've decided that I'm making meatloaf for Daniel, and we're staying home. I think we'll celebrate romance in March instead, just in time for my birthday!

Turkey Chili with beans

We ate this turkey chili so fast, I didn't have time to take a picture of it, so you will have to use your imagination! I cooked it 8 hours on low in my crock pot. Here goes:

INGREDIENTS:

1 pound of ground turkey
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 small diced yellow onion
2 diced carrots
1 32 oz can of stewed tomatoes or diced tomatoes
12 oz of cooked kidney beans (from a can is okay)
12 oz canellini (white kidney) beans
12 oz of black beans
1 cup of broth if you like a more soupy chili
3 cloves of minced garlic
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp cumin
salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, any other spices you want to throw in there

First I cooked up the onion and the turkey quickly in vegetable oil in a pan, trying to not break up the turkey up too much. Once that was fully cooked, I scooped that into the crock pot, along with all the other ingredients. I gave it a quick mix and then cranked the crock pot up to LOW heat for about 8 hours, stirring about once every hour or two. I served it with warm, fresh-baked Challah bread and all the fixings: chives, sour cream, cheddar. I tossed a spinach salad on the side, and it was a delicious dinner for my parents, sisters, Daniel and me with leftovers to spare!