Spaghetti Squash Carbonara

Squash. Those things that people associate with Thanksgiving dinner drowned in butter and brown sugar. But I am here to tell you squash are so much better in every other way! There are so many different type of squash for different things (Click and see what I mean!) 
This recipe, for example, uses the natural sweetness of the spaghetti squash to pair nicely with the saltiness of the bacon. I use ricotta cheese, peas, and onions to give it a different dimension of taste that blend it all together smoothly.
For you that don't quite know what a Carbonara is, no worries I had no idea either until I started this new relationship with food, it is a typically a pasta dish with a egg and cream sauce with bacon. Sounds like it could be breakfast (and  it most certainly should be! I can't be the only one that wakes up sometimes and think, "I just want some squash with eggs and bacon!" No? Ok. Never mind then.) I replaced the pasta of the dish with natures own pasta. If you haven't had spaghetti squash, you are in for a treat! No, it doesn't taste like pasta and don't let anyone tell you different, it is so much better. The "noodles" are slightly crunchy after you cook the squash and it keeps it's shape unlike other squishy squash, so you get more coverage of sauce on the squash giving a nice squash:sauce ratio.
This recipe is fairly easy and so many Local goods you can use! So grab a local spaghetti squash, some yummy local bacon, and other random veggies and you're off! If you don't like some of the veggies in it just replace them with ones you do like! Don't be trapped within a recipe! You will improve it to better suit you. Let me know what you use instead so I can try your awesome exploration! So ready? Set. GO!

Spaghetti Squash Carbonara 

• 1 medium Spaghetti Squash (Local!)
• 1/2 lb Bacon (Local!)
• 1 Onion (Local!)
• 1 Zucchini (Local!)
• 1 garlic clove (Local!)
• Handful of mushrooms (more or less) (Local!)
• 2 Leaves of Kale (Local!)
• 1/2 cup frozen Peas
• 7 Eggs (Local!)
• 3/4 cup Cream or Whole Milk (Local!)
• 1 tbsp Italian Seasonings
• 1/2 cup Ricotta Cheese
•  Parmigiano-Reggiano for sprinkling (Optional)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Cut squash in half length-wise. Scoop out seeds and goop. Place cut side down on pan and pop in oven for 40 mins.
3. Lay bacon out on a pan with sides (like a cake pan) and put in oven with squash cooking until squash is done or edges crispy.
4. Meanwhile, slice onion and place in large skillet at medium heat with a bit of butter. Then start slicing the rest of the veggies. 
5. Add zucchini to onion first, then five mins later add mushrooms, then five mins later add kale and garlic. Stirring after each addition.
6. Turn off stove and add peas leave
7. Mix together eggs, cream, and seasonings in medium bowl.
8. Once bacon and squash are done remove from oven. Remove bacon from pan and place on plate stacked on top of each other and place in freezer to cool for five mins.
9. Carefully, pour grease from bacon into skillet with veggie mix and turn back on to medium.
10. Pour egg mix  into skillet and continually stir mixture wen cooking to get a small egg curd and a bit of cream (about 10 to 15 mins.) Then remove from heat.
11. Scrape out squash "noodles" with fork into large bowl.
12. Scoop egg sauce into bowl with squash. Add ricotta and stir til blended.
13. Cut bacon into 1/4 in strips and add.
14. Plate, sprinkle with Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Enjoy!

Whole Wheat Sea Salt Brownies

I have a sweet tooth. This is no secret. But I don't like things too sweet. And a sweet & salt combo is like Heaven!
So when I discovered the existence of sea salt brownies thanks to a cashier at Trader Joe's I knew it was meant to be.
Trader Joe's sea salt brownies are little bite sized pieces of rainbows (At least what I imagine rainbows taste like...). A dense dark chocolate chunk of brownie infused and sprinkled with little pieces of sea salt. Yum. But alas, we do not live near a Trader Joe's (which is a very very good thing) so that means when a craving hits I am out of luck. That's why I made these little babies. Plus they are made with whole wheat flour and honey (instead of sugar) and I can customize them the way I want. Next time I think I will add in some expresso to add to the richness and some chocolate chips to add to the chocolate factor. You can add or subtract to the salty factor, the measurements given make them slightly salty but not overwhelming. So do what you will with this recipe! You can't mess it up! :)

Whole Wheat Sea Salt Brownies

• 1 cup melted Butter
• 1 3/4 cup Honey (or natural sweetener of choice)
• 3/4 cup Cocoa Powder
• 1 1/2 tsp Sea Salt, plus addional for sprinkling
• 1 Tbsp Vanilla
• 4 Eggs
• 1 1/2 cup White Whole Wheat Flour (I actually found some at TJ's! or King Arthur's!)
• Add Ins!! (Chocolate chips, Walnuts, Flax seed, Shot of expresso, whatever floats your boat! :) 

1. Preheat oven to 350 F degrees. Grease a 9x13 inch pan.
2.  Mix together butter and honey. Mix well.
3. Add in cocoa, sea salt, and vanilla. Mix well.
4. Beat in eggs.
5. Stir in flour. But do not over mix.
6. Fold in add ins.
7. Bake for 30 mins.
8. Sprinkle with extra sea salt.
9. Let cool (or not...) and enjoy! 

Whole Wheat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars

      So apparently tomorrow is Halloween... When did that happen?! I didn't even get my decorations up this year except some spiderwebs on the fireplace. Usually I bake up a storm of pumpkin treats as soon as it is deemed acceptable or even a little sooner if my sister or fiancee beg me to make their favorite pumpkin infused baked good. But this year has been crazier than usual with school and work and sleep.
   
         Also since I don't use sugar or white flour anymore, it's been difficult finding any recipes that are appealing to me. Everything that had anything that I might be able to use had crazy ingredients like coconut or almond flour or coconut oil. I don't roll like that. I hate coconut with a fiery passion and I love using butter with an equally (non-hateful) passion. So I decided I'll just find a normal recipe and adjust it to my needs and hopefully it goes well.
       Luckily it did and that's how these babies were born! They're so good and of course I have to throw in some flax seed for a little nutty flavor but you can leave those out because the whole wheat flour gives it a hint of nutty flavor anyway. Also I used maple syrup to partially sweeten them just to give it that little boost of fally flavor. If you don't want to use whole wheat that's cool just sub out stuff for the stuff that I subbed out. (Inception recipe!) But anyway, I hope you like these yummy and healthy option for a nice pumpkin treat.

  Whole Wheat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars
2 cups White Whole Wheat Flour (King Arthur)
1 Tbsp Pumpkin Pie Spice
1 Tsp Baking Soda
3/4 Tsp Salt
1/4 cup Flax Seed (optional)
1 Cup Butter (Softened)
 1/2 Cup Honey (Local!)
3/4 Cup Maple Syrup (Local!)
1 Egg (Local!)
2 Tsp Vanilla
1 Cup Pumpkin Puree (Local!)
1 1/2 Cup Chocolate Chips

 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

 2. Mix together dry ingredients: Flour, Pumpkin pie spice, baking soda, and salt.

 3. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add butter, honey, maple syrup, egg, vanilla, and pumpkin.

 4. Use hand mixer and mix ingredients together until blended. (It will be doughy.) Fold in chocolate chips.

 5. Grease 9x13 pan with butter or other oil then press dough into pan.

 6. Bake for 35-40 mins.

 7. Enjoy your yummy fall treat! (Actually they are good anytime! So enjoy all the time!!) :)

It's Soup Time!!

Today has been a lazy day. Maybe it has to do with the chilly fall weather we are having or maybe because it's Saturday and that means we need to catch up on our laziness for the week. I don't know what it is but I do know that I didn't really know what to make for dinner tonight. The arrival of fall helped me decide we wanted/needed soup. It is chilly in our apartment and I refuse to turn on the heat, It's not THAT cold yet (as I refuse to get out from under my warm fuzzy blanket.) Anyway, I decided on soup but want kind of soup. Well digging through our pantry I decided something with quinoa. I <3 quinoa! It's nutty and crunchy and absorbs any flavor perfectly but I've never made a soup with it. So I go to pinterest (like I usually do when I'm thinking what to make) and there are several quinoa soup recipes but I couldn't find any that were simple enough my lazy self. So I raided my fridge and came up with a few local carrots and dino kale! Those can go in soup! Woot Woot! So I grabbed some homemade broth from my freezer that I made from chicken bones and scraps a couple weeks ago. So tonight Simple Kale-Quinoa Soup was born! It was yummy and hit the spot for a chilly night like tonight. I love how rich the chicken broth is in soups, it just makes a simple soup complete.

Here We go Again...

After not staying with this blog for quite a while I decided to try it again... But with a different approach. I think I will take pictures of my dinner or anything interesting "real food" thing and post and say a little something about it. If someone requests a recipe or something then I will then post one. Basically, I am doing what I normally do on my personal Facebook so I don't flood it with crazy food pictures. Another thing different is that I am not just cooking for me but for my fiancee Kurt also. Which means I can;t making everything that I think looks interesting because he's kind of picky. Anyway, tonight is Monday that means that Breakfast for Dinner! (Or is it Brinner? I like brinner...) We usually have brinner on Monday nights because it is quick and easy and that is good after a long Monday. I whipped up the usual eggs with lots of veggies (zucchini, onions, dino kale, and tomatoes) and some yummy local bacon. But I decided to get creative tonight with some muffins! Whole Wheat Beet-Zucchini Muffins is be exact. Remember what I said before about Kurt being picky. Well luckily he tried these and ate two! Hooray for him liking any bake good ever! They were quite good and I can't wait to pack one for lunch tomorrow! :9 If anyone would like to try the recipe let me know and I will do a post on them if I can remember the recipe. :)

Adventures with a Chicken

So last Tuesday I obtained a chicken from friends. I was looking for grass-fed free range chicken which is hard to do in Northeast Iowa but luckily my friends are awesome and raise some and butcher them and were nice enough to sell me one! Yay for connections!
Anyway I would like to point out that first of all I have never made a whole chicken before. My family always buys them in a bag of either just breasts or thighs (usually without bones) and so that was passed on to me naturally. But I was determined to cook a whole chicken because 1) it's cheaper 2)I can use the leftovers for other things 3)it isn't a processed and weird whole.
Don't get me wrong it's not like I've never cooked poultry the the bones and stuff before I've made countless turkeys! But what is a good way to season and prepare a chicken. Well I found a recipe for a crock-pot chicken and it looked good plus the same recipe told how to make chicken stock with the leftover bones and such! (Win!) Plus it looked super easy.And it was! (Winning!)

Raw Chicken in Crock-Pot

Spices

Done Chicken!


I was at my mom's house when it was just a about dinner so I asked Mr. T to make some rosemary potatoes to go with it just cube up the potatoes and put in the oven with some rosemary and butter. Well he got confused and put the cilantro that I had in the fridge on instead of rosemary (I need to teach him his spices...) but it turn out ok and I sprinkled a bit of rosemary on it when it got out of the oven. Overall it was a great meal especially since I hadn't had any meat for 3 days which I think is a record because before meat was an every day thing especially at my parents house where if we didn't put meat in the spaghetti we would hear it from dad that meat king. But I didn't miss it too much but it was still really good!

Cilantro Potatoes


So after dinner I prepared the crock-pot with all the chicken stuff that was left after I took off all the meat and made some chicken stock in my sleep. Yeah. I'm that talented. So when I woke up the house was full of yummy chicken smells!
And with that broth I made chicken noodle soup that night. Which was also super easy, fast and yummy! Mr. T is still raving about it. With the leftovers I put into jars and froze them so I can take them back to college with so I can have a quick dinner. Mr. T insisted that I leave him a couple jars too so being a nice person I did.

So now I'm back at college and a whole new chapter will start with new adventures of time management and trying not to take the easy way out and go to the dining centers or cafes around campus. But I think I can do it because I've been planning my meals to be easy and fast so that I will stay on it. But I have also decided that it is almost impossible to be in college and not go out every one in while with friends. So in this new light I am going to limit myself to going out 1 day a week but it has to be somewhere new that I haven't been before and/or somewhere that does serve real food. For example last night my sister and I went out for dinner with a friend and her new boyfriend and I wanted to try Indian food which I have never done before. Needless to say it was sooo good! It was really spicy for me but it was just so good that I just had to eat it all! I will be back! Plus I love trying new things anyway and this was definitely something new! Also my sister got a dish with beef and she wimped out on the spice so my friend and I tried it and both being foodies we decided that the beef was probably grass-fed! Win! I love when restaurants use awesome sustainable ingredients!
Today will consist of grocery shopping for the week and also shopping for a few school supplies to start classes tomorrow. Ugh. School.

The Last Couple of Days...

They have been... challenging but also eye opening to how we had eaten before.
We will start with Monday night. For supper I decided to make fajitas. I found a whole wheat tortilla recipe in the past I would have just picked up any (white) flour tortilla or if I was in a "healthy mood" I would have picked up the one that says "low fat!" or "90 calories" and been perfectly fine with it because it is easy and convenient. But this time I decided to investigate the tortillas I would have picked up. The ingredients are ridiculous! Seriously there's almost 30+ different ingredients! Holy crap. What the hell are "dough conditioners" or "cellulose gum"? And why do they need to be in my food?! The recipe that I used had 4 ingredients! And it tasted every bit (if not better) than the store bought tortillas.And seriously making them isn't that hard at all. Kinda relaxing beating up the dough with my fists.

The next thing that happened was a thing of habit that we need to break. I forgot to get sour cream so like I usually do I asked Mr. T to pick some up from the grocery store on his way home. When he got home I noticed he got "light" sour cream not thinking of it and thinking it should just be the usual dairy stuff in it. But when I looked there is like 10 different ingredients most of them I could pronounce if it killed me. But since town is 10 minutes away and we were both starving we decided just to use it and be more careful next time.
Anyway, the fajitas were really really good! Even if there wasn't any meat in them Mr. T scarfed a couple down. I had put on a plate of different things to add to them like avocados, cilantro, tomatoes, and olives. Yummy!

Then last night I used the mixture (peppers, onions, and mushrooms) that was left over from the fajitas and added some zucchini to it and made quesadillas and they were delicious! I think this will be a staple meal especially when I go back to college because it's quick and so good!
Well tonight I will be making a whole free-range chicken in my crockpot and make broth with the carcass for chicken noodle soup tomorrow night! Fun fun!