We haven’t had a food blog update lately so to catch up, here’s a few more recipes from our food blog, Cooked from the Heart (click on the recipe titles below for the recipes):

Rice Noodles with Beef & Mint

This recipe is one of our latest favorites. We’ve made it a few times more since we realized how good it is with fresh mint! The first time I made it, I served it with rice noodles as noted in the recipe but as we found out on subsequent versions, this is just as good over steamed rice. If you’re not too much into beef, pork and chicken works quite well with the spices and the addition of mint too. You’ll probably agree that this dish is all about the mint!

 

Pan Fried Tilapia with Miso Curry Sauce

If you love fish, here is an easy and delicious weekday meal. If you don’t have Miso just your favorite curry sauce or sweet and sour sauce will also work nicely with this recipe.

My daughter who does not eat fish only had the vegetables in the sauce over rice and she deemed it delicious! If you’re like her and don’t like fish either, this sauce will probably work over some pan fried chicken too.

 

Chinese Braised Ribs

I just love ribs cut this way (so much easier to eat) and I love them braised Chinese style like you get at dim sum restaurants. We haven’t been to dim sum lately and I was having a craving so I thought I would make them myself.

Little did I know how much my husband would love them too! He usually does not like messing with dishes that have a small meat to bone ratio. He just doesn’t think the effort to be worth it. lol! But surprisingly, he really loved this dish.

 

Corn & Egg Drop Soup

This is the accompanying soup when I made with the Chinese braised. Since my daughter eats very little meat and was also feeling under the weather, I knew she would not want any of the braised ribs. She does love soups though and what better for a sore throat than soup, right? So I made her this egg drop soup with corn and this was all she had for dinner. She had a couple of bowls of it, so she was good

 

 

Tags: Cooked From the Heart, food, recipes

Today is my youngest daughter’s 14th birthday. We are not having a birthday pary. She doesn’t even want us to sing to her! I suppose she is now officially a teen ager. One tradition that we do have for their birthdays that she still wants to stick to is the one that involves food.

Every year on their birthdays, they get to choose the meal. On previous years, when it came time to my youngest daughter’s birthday, everyone else in the house will start dreading the day because they know what is coming. SPAGHETTI!

No, my spaghetti isn’t that awful! It’s just that it’s the Clone’s favorite meal. She requests it at least once a month but especially on her birthday because she knows she’ll definitely have her wish granted.

This year though, you can tell someone is getting older because spaghetti did not even come into play. What did come into play though is spaghetti’s more sophisticated cousin, LASAGNA!

This year, she requested Spinach Lasagna, roast beef with lots of gravy and collard greens. Yes, she specified COLLARDS because she was tired of malabar spinach which is the only green that we had a lot of from our garden this year. She didn’t want anymore spinach, well except for the small amount used in her lasagna, so off to the market we went to buy collards.

Her main request of spinach lasagna, we discovered a year or so ago when I participated on a blogging carnival called Daring Kitchen where food bloggers were encouraged to try challenging recipes that they would normally not cook in their kitchen. For this particular challenge, it was making your own pasta, and spinach pasta at that!

The recipe looks a bit daunting, but I assure you, by the time you’ve made this dish a couple of times, it really does get a lot easier. This time around, I was thankful for the girl’s penchant to play with dough. I still haven’t got a pasta maker so was I glad when she asked if she could roll out the pasta! She did a great job, too, even managing to roll out wide sheets that almost covered the whole pan in one whole swoop!

It was also a great way to spend a birthday afternoon together. Fun and satisfying

Tags: birthdays, family, food

With the weekend coming up, I’m scouting for recipes to try this weekend. I have a few in mind already now we’ll just have to see how much energy I have left to actually cook them!  It’s a grey and rainy day here in NC today and I’ve been craving some kind of bean soup. So if nothing else, I just may have me a pot of soup this weekend!

If you’re on a look out for food ideas, here’s a few recipes recently published in our kitchen blog:

Here is a delicious marinade for fajitas. My husband loves his red meat so steak fajitas it is for him but you can also use the same marinade for chicken or whatever meat you choose even shrimps. With shrimps though, just make sure to not marinate it too long as the lime will start breaking down your shrimps. i.e. cook it before you’re ready to put it on the fire.

This would be perfect for that last hurrah on the grill.

How about hamburgers for breakfast? Well why not?

It has all the elements of a good healthy breakfast: starch in the form of bread, your protein in the beef patty and the addition of an egg makes it complete! A great way to start the day.

Try it out!

Here’s another out of time dish if you’re like us and don’t mind eating out of turn once in a while. Grits is usually eaten for breakfast, but this dish is so good, it’s good enough for dinner!

If you’re up for something really delicious, you gotta try out this Mushroom and Shrimps over Cheesy Grits. As Paula Dean would say, this will make you want to smack yo’ momma!

 And if you’re wanting to want to try something exotic and new yet somehow comforting as the weather cools, then you’ll enjoy this chicken stewed in coconut milk. The flavors are not shocking, but they are mildly exotic. Just enough to make you dream you’re sitting somewhere sunny and warm.

Try this out when the weather starts getting too cold and dreary. It’s a perfect thing to keep the SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) away.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Tags: Cooked From the Heart, food, recipes

We went to Walmart this past weekend and while there, I decided to check if they had any Olivari Olive Oil. I received some coupons and a sample of the Extra Virgin Olive oil for the giveaway that I’m hosting on my food blog and their literature says that they also make flavored olive oils. So that’s what I was looking forward to getting with my coupons, and so far Walmart is the only store that carries this brand. I was disappointed to find though, that the Walmart store we went to only carried the ‘Classic’ Olive Oil. So I got a bottle and held on to my other coupon to get a flavored one when I find it.

If you would like to try Olivari Olive oil, make sure to enter the giveway for this Kitchen Essentials Kit that I am giving away on Cooked From the Heart. Click on the photo above to go to the giveaway post.

Tags: Cooked From the Heart, cooking, food, giveaways