Carnitas with Spicy Salsa

I feel in love with Mexican food when I lived in Arizona. Now that I'm in Ohio, it's a lot harder to find good Mexican food, so I frequently make my own. This recipe is super flavorful and satisfies my cravings for Mexican food.

The carnitas are simply pieces of pork which are first browned in a skillet and cooked in slow cooker with some onions & garlic. While the pork is cooking, I dry roasted tomato, shallot, and serrano chilies in a cast iron skillet until charred. Next, I transferred the vegetables to a blender, added chicken stock, and seasoned with salt & pepper. This salsa was super easy to make (no chopping required!) and had a good level of heat because of the chillies.

LESSON LEARNED: Mexican food is easy to make at home!

Recipe for Carnitas with Spicy Salsa

Chicken Skewers with Orange/Cucumber Salsa

I was pleasantly surprised by this super simple healthy meal. I would like to think that I eat pretty healthy (for example, eating little processed/prepackaged foods & hardly ever getting fast food or even cheap chain-restaurant food), but I don't necessarily strive to make ultra-healthy dishes. I would MUCH rather is a half of serving of deliciously rich food than a whole lot of healthy food. I guess I'm in the quality over quantity camp when it comes to eating. That being said, this dish really impressed me.

You start by chopping boneless, skinless chicken breast into small cubes. The chicken is then marinated in a mixture of yogurt, cilantro, garlic, coriander, and turmeric. While the chicken is marinating, you make a quick salsa of chopped cucumber, orange segments, scallions, and serrano chili. Then, the chicken is skewered and broiled until cooked through and deliciously brown. The end result is super-flavorful chicken with a sweet & spicy refreshing salsa. I also served the chicken with whole wheat couscous which cooks up quickly in 5 minutes.

LESSON LEARNED: A simple salsa can add tons of flavor to a dish!

Recipe for Chicken Skewers with Orange/Cucumber Salsa

Homemade Tomato Sauce

In our household, tomato sauce is one of the staples I keep in the freezer (along with homemade chicken stock!). It makes for a super easy meal on days where I don't have a lot of time or motivation to cook an elaborate dinner. Over the last few years, my husband and I have tried A TON of different recipes and this is the one that we keep going back to time and time again.

Here's why this recipe works. First, you use canned whole tomatoes so you can easily make this year round. I splurge and get the imported Italian San Marzano tomatoes. These cans have D.O.P. serial numbers on each can and run about six dollars a can. I think they taste have a really rich tomato flavor and are slightly sweet. They are totally worth the extra money, but any canned whole tomato would work just fine. Second, the sauce is slightly spicy from red pepper flakes and is full of vegetables. The neat thing about this recipe is that you broil a mixture of carrots, celery, onions, and garlic until they are slightly charred - which gives them a ton of extra flavor. Third, this sauce freezes beautifully. The recipe makes enough for 2-3 batches of pasta, so you put the work in to make the sauce and can reap the benefits in the future.

LESSON LEARNED: Sauces that you can make ahead and freeze are time-savers.

Recipe for Homemade Tomato Sauce

White Pizza with Caramelized Onions & Chicken

I'm someone who loves to peruse recipes, make detail shopping lists, and go to the grocery store. I plan out five meals a week (plus an assortment of desserts!). By the time Friday comes around, I have usually made everything that I've planned for the week.

Last Friday, I didn't have anything planned for dinner, so I decided to make something out of what we had at the house. Here's what I came up with!

First, I've been wanting to try a new pizza dough recipe. I have a stand-by homemade pizza dough recipe, but I saw this recipe in a book and was very intrigued. In this recipe, you don't have to knead the dough and you simply mix it up in a bowl, cover it, let it rise, and store it in the refrigerator up to two weeks. It's super easy to make - especially if you normally don't make homemade dough! Next, I cooked an onion over low heat in a saute pan until it became brown and super-sweet. Then, I thinly sliced a cooked chicken breast I had leftover from the week. Finally, I made a simple parmesan cheese sauce by cooking together butter and flour, adding milk while whisking until thick, and gently stirring in grated parmesan cheese. DELICIOUS!

I probably should have waited a few more minutes until slicing, but it looked so good! Plus, my husband was in charge of putting the cheese on the pizza (he likes extra cheese), so it definitely looks like there's a ton of cheese in this picture. :)

LESSON LEARNED: This pizza dough recipe is super simple (really, it's about 2 minutes of hands-on time)!

Recipe for White Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Chicken

Chicken Parm-atouille

This dish is part chicken parmesan and part ratatouille. It's really the best of both worlds! I love it because it's chock full of vegetables. I used eggplant, yellow squash, onion, green pepper, garlic, and tomatoes.

Here's the steps to make this delicious meal. First, you saute all the aforementioned vegetables and place them in a baking dish. The vegetables are topped with thin slices of fresh mozzarella cheese. Next, one side of a chicken breast is dipped in a mixture of parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs, egg, and (yes!) breadcrumbs again. The chicken is then browned in a saute pan (that's easy...just wipe out the one you used for the vegetables!) and placed on top of the cheese. The whole dish is then baked in the oven until the chicken is completely cooked.

The end result is absolutely DELICIOUS! The chicken is super crunchy and sits on a bed of gooey cheese. For extra cheesiness, I topped each portion with a little more parmesan cheese. Because it was cooked on top of the vegetables, the chicken is incredibly moist and flavorful. The vegetables are the perfect accompaniment to the chicken. Especially when you get a forkful of chicken and veggies at the same time. :)

LESSON LEARNED: Dipping chicken in breadcrumbs twice resulted in a very crunchy breading!

Recipe for Chicken Parm-atouille

Spinach & Bacon Risotto

I think that making risotto is magical. You start with hard, little nuggets of rice, add chicken stock combined with lots of stirring, and end up with creamy puffed-up rice pillows. This dish sounds fancy, but with a little bit of time, you can make this dish very easily. It starts with the rice. In fact, my husband asked "Did you use a special kind of rice?" and I answered "Yep, I used arborio rice!". If you are not familiar with this type of rice, the best way to describe it is a short, fat rice. You can easily find this in any grocery store.

After choosing the correct rice, the next step is stirring. This is the most time-intensive part of the dish and the recipe here is for a "quick" risotto (it only takes 20 minutes of stirring compared to upwards of 45 minutes in a more traditional risotto). I started by cooking bacon until crisp, removing the bacon and part of the bacon fat, sauteing onion/garlic in a little of the leftover bacon fat, toasting the rice, deglazing the pan with some wine (that's just getting all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan), and slowly adding warm chicken stock to the pan. This is where the stirring begins! You constantly stir the rice and add stock once the previous stock cooks out. As you stir, this develops the starch in the rice and this is what makes the dish creamy. I would highly suggest stirring while enjoying a glass of wine! I certainly did!

Once you have used all the chicken stock, stir in some butter and Parmesan cheese. I then added some chopped fresh spinach and tasted the dish for salt. After I plated it, I added some more cheese for good measure. Here's a bonus: we found out that this dish is WONDERFUL as leftovers for lunch!

LESSON LEARNED: Slowly adding stock and stirring is the key to good risotto.

Recipe for Spinach & Bacon Risotto

Welcome to my blog!

Over the last three months I've had so much fun posting on my dessert blog, that I decided to start another blog which focuses on savory food! Not only do I bake a ton of sweet treats, I also cook homemade dinners about 5-6 times a week.

Although I've always had an interest in baking, I started seriously cooking about three years ago. Before that, I used to eat a lot of processed or packaged foods. For example, my "signature dish" was boxed pasta salad (adding giant chunks of cheddar cheese or chopped tomatoes!).

Oh how far I've come! When we lived close to friends, I began to host 5 course dinner parties. I now make everything from scratch: from pasta to stocks to sauces. I've determined that cooking takes a lot of practice, a little patience, and a touch of creativity. It's my goal to inspire you to cook something new and to share the tricks that I've learned along the way.