We’ve got balls!

Hey everyone. It’s been a rough last couple of months having to cook without Gina because of her 2-10 evening shift. She is now changing to a new schedule where she’ll work the day shift (7am to 7pm)! In celebration of Gina’s recent change in schedule, we decided to cook up a storm this weekend. Here’s a taste of the first installment! So, as I had mentioned in our last post, my Grandma and Grandpa bought me a meatball cookbook (a bible, in fact). Our first recipe that we’re trying out of it is Bombay Turkey Meatballs.

This recipe uses pine nuts, cilantro, and apricots along w/ a little egg, some bread, onions and garlic, and turkey to make delicious meatballs! Here’s the dudes below (pre oven):

So we posted a little while ago about the plants that we’ve been growing. Well, this week is an exciting week because they’re starting to actually produce fruit! Below is a picture of the first batch of lettuce and our first ripe tomato.

And our first ripe bell pepper!

Here’s the tomato cut open, yummy.

Okay, back to the meatballs: we made a nice tomato yogurt sauce with some cumin to put on top:

And our meatballs once they came out of the oven:

And the finished product all plated and beautiful. Served the meatballs in a pita w/ lettuce and topped with our yogurt sauce. Also, the salad next to it with our own yummy vegetables.

More to come! Keep cooking!

 

Z G

Ice Cream, Pasta Primavera, and Vegetable Tagine

Hey all, time for the next installment of Gina and Zach's Culinary Adventures. So it was my birthday recently, and I got plenty of food related gifts! My mom bought me an Ice Cream Maker (Cusinart too!!). I was very excited to make my first batch. My grandma and grandpa also got me some cool stuff including a set of microplane graters which work great for lemon zest, cheeses, vegetables, and other stuff. I'm also looking forward to making some meatballs since they also got me the Meatball Cookbook Bible which has every type of meatball you could imagine (beef, pork, lamb, veggie, fish, and dessert!). We're planning on doing a recipe from it next week (which we'll post here as well). Anyways, on with the ice cream:

Here is a picture of the new ice cream maker:

We decided to start with strawberry ice cream (since the local grocery store had fresh strawberries on sale). This particular recipe, which came with the ice cream maker, had us macerate the strawberries in lemon juice with sugar for a few hours prior to using. Overall, the whole process was very straightforward, and I am looking forward to making many other yummy flavors this summer!

The ingredients:

3 c of fresh strawberries, stemmed and sliced

4 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 1/2 c sugar

1 1/2 c skim milk

2 3/4 c heavy cream

1 1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

The recipe: Macerate strawberries in lemon juice w/ half a cup of sugar for ~2 hours. Strain the berries, keep the juices. Mash or puree half of the berries. In a medium mixing bowl, combine milk and remaining sugar until dissolved (with a hand mixer on low). Stir in heavy cream, reserved strawberry juice, and vanilla. Put it in the ice cream maker, add the remaining strawberries with ~5 mins left. Then I let it sit in the freezer to firm up. Good stuff!

We also made two vegetarian dishes from Gina's vegetarian cookbook. First: the pasta primavera (which we've already made and blogged about before, but it was soooo good that we had to do it again!)

It's pretty simple: first, we cooked onions, yellow squash, and zucchini, and garlic in some oil for a few minutes.

 Then, we put in some fresh tomatoes, broccoli, carrots and cooked for a few more minutes. 

 Meanwhile, we cooked some pasta and defrosted some frozen peas. Threw it all together, with some milk and Parmesan cheese. Very good! and so simple. Also, pretty healthy I imagine.

We did another vegetarian recipe. Gina's been wanting to make this vegetable tagine for a while. It's basically a medley of eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, green pepper, carrots, onions (and of course garlic). Here's a picture of the ingredients:

It was pretty much as simple as cooking these ingredients (started w/ cooking the onions and squash, then threw in the eggplant, a can of tomatoes, and garbanzo beans). It's important to note that we added some cinnamon, cumin, and red pepper flakes: these spices really made the final product very nice. We served it with some couscous and were very satisfied. We made quite a bit, so we'll be eating this for a few days! Sounds good to me.

:)

Food Revolution

Have any of you seen Jamie Oliver and his TV show "Food Revolution?" I caught up on the first 3 episodes of the second season, and was so inspired. So much, in fact, that I decided to make a meal from recipes I found off of Jamie Oliver's website. He is a great chef, and a really inspirational guy. Plus, he's British, so he's really fun to listen to. Check out the show on Hulu if you haven't seen it!

Zach and I made three things for this meal. Barbecued chicken, cooked carrots, and braised greens.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/chicken-recipes/barbecued-chicken-1

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetarian-recipes/carrots

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetarian-recipes/braised-greens-usa-imperial-version

For the barbecued chicken, we whipped up a quick sauce. It has honey, dijon mustard, ketchup, ground chili pepper, paprika, olive oil, and orange zest. Zach received a cool set of graters for his birthday last week (Thanks grandma and grandpa!), and I have to say zesting that orange was the highlight of the meal! I have had to use a cheese grater in the past, and it's just not that easy! Then, I marinated the chicken, and Zach put it on the cast iron grill. Here's a picture of the sauce.

Meanwhile, the greens were ready to go into a pot of salted, boiling water. I think our greens were kale and chard. I have never cooked with them before, and it was surprisingly easy and fun.

After the greens boiled for about 5 minutes, in they went to a skillet and we added olive oil, garlic, and juice from half of a lemon. Sauteed it for 3 minutes, and it was perfect.

The carrots were super easy, too. They boiled for 10 minutes in water, with some sugar, rosemary and thyme, and butter. Then they went on a cookie sheet with a squeeze of orange, garlic cloves, and the herbs to cook at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. Aren't the carrots so pretty?

His and hers plates.

A close up of the amazing vegetableness.

What's fun about this meal is that our main components were organic. I don't think we had ever had organic chicken before, and it was really quite a different taste than regular grocery store chicken. It seemed fresher, and it didn't dry out. It definitely costs way more than non-organic chicken, but it was fun to try.

We all need a little more interesting vegetables in our lives, don't ya think?

Grilled Vegetable Paninis

Today, I made grilled vegetable paninis! Zach keeps his allrecipes.com account up to date, and adds good looking meals he wants to try to his recipe box. I was flipping through it this morning, and found this recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Grilled-Mediterranean-Vegetable-Sandwich/Detail.aspx. (The recipe online has a prep time of about 3 hours because it wants you to flatten the sandwiches for 2 hours, but I skipped that part, and the whole thing took me about 30 minutes, including the roasting in the oven.)

So, I trekked to the store to pick up my ingredients. Red bell pepper, eggplant, olive bread, portabello mushroom caps, and some extra vegetables and pita chips for the sides.

The recipe called for mayonnaise with some chopped up garlic, and I spread that on one piece of bread per sandwich. Additionally, I threw the sliced red pepper and eggplant in the oven with olive oil and salt and pepper to roast for about 20 minutes, until the eggplant was tender, and the pepper was charred. In a separate pan, I sauteed the mushrooms for about 5 minutes, until tender.

Here are the assembled sandwiches.

We got a cast iron grill pan a couple of weeks ago, and it's perfect to get the grill marks on the paninis, and it really crisped up the olive bread.

Ready to eat!

Isn't that a good lookin' lunch?

Sometimes it's nice to have a vegetarian meal that doesn't weigh you down. This was a wonderful meal on a beautiful Sunday. Plus, Zach did the dishes, so that was even better!

Happy eating!