Spaghetti with Braised Kale

Tonight I made another recipe from the October Bon Appetit. I'm pretty sure this was a Molly Wizenberg recipe - I always love her stories. I read her article about Green Goddess dressing and Chez Panisse right before I went there, and it inspired me to order the salad with the dressing at the restaurant, which I LOVED.

Spaghetti with Braised Kale

I liked this recipe a lot. It was somewhat similar to the other night - greens with pasta, but this one worked a bit more as a dish for me. Maybe because I cut back on the pasta? My only complaint was that I wanted a bit more sauciness to hold it all together, but that was probably my fault - I probably should have put more of the cooking water in at the end.

This was my first time cooking kale (we've gotten it in the CSA before but Mr. T always used it) and I really, really liked this way of cooking it. The onions and garlic made it soooo tasty. I actually used kale and chard, because I didn't have enough kale and the chard looked like it was reaching the end of its rope too. It was really good. I would make that again just to have as a side.

I served this with some very good mild Italian chicken sausage that I got from Oink Moo Cluck at the Worthington Farmers Market. VERY tasty.

All in all, this was definitely a thumbs up meal. :)

Butternut Squash with Mussels and Pasta

We have an abundance of produce at our house that we are not using quickly enough. This week is a determined effort to use more of it! :) I flipped through the October Bon Appetit the other night and came across a few recipes that made use of some of our veggies.

The first one I tried was

Linguine with Butternut Squash, Spinach, and Mussels

We had this for dinner Saturday night. I loved the mussels. Cooking them was super easy and even better, super fast. Mr. T picked them up at the North Market and said they were really cheap too - only $5 for a pound. I will definitely be making these again.

The butternut squash also turned out very well. I roasted half with some fresh sage to save for another time (lunch today!) and I thought it was good both with and without. I've never been a huge squash fan and I definitely prefer it saltier vs. sweeter, but this was very good.

Overall though, I can't say I loved this dish. The pieces just weren't coming together as a cohesive whole for me. I liked the individual parts, but I ate them that way. Maybe I needed to make more sauce or cut back on the pasta, but it just wasn't awesome all together. Definitely a thumbs up for the parts though - my first time cooking both mussels and butternut squash, and I'll do both again!

Beer Can Chicken and Easy Potatoes

I commented on the gorgeous day today and suggested grilling instead of the earlier plan of braised kale and spaghetti (from Bon Appetit...it's only postponed). Mr. T came up with Beer Can Chicken. For anyone who doesn't know, this involves shoving an opened can of beer into a whole chicken and then grilling it. We've never done it before but always wondered how it would turn out. Well, it was freaking delicious. Some of the best chicken I've ever had. It was ridiculously moist, as I believe I said after shoving 3 bites into my mouth in rapid fire. Mr. T used the recipe from "How To Grill" by Stephen Raichlen but I'm sure there are lots of variations out there on the interwebs.

To go with the delicious chicken, we had two super easy sides. A few days ago, I made cole slaw by putting CSA cabbage in the food processor and mixing it with Paul Newman Ginger Sesame dressing. It's obviously very easy and a nice low cal side. I take it for lunch a lot and sometimes put some chopped nuts on top. (When I don't have CSA cabbage, I just buy a bag of pre-shredded cole slaw mix.) Because it was leftover, it was a little mushy, but not too bad. I also decided to use the small thing of potatoes we got from the CSA weeks ago. They were small potatoes that looked sort of like new potatoes, but as Mr. T pointed out, they tasted more like Yukon Golds. I cut them into 8s and tossed them with olive oil, salt, pepper, and some fresh rosemary. Then I just wrapped them into some foil packets and tossed them on the grill for about 35 minutes. Easy peasy. They actually were delicious and my only regret is that I didn't make more!

VERY yummy pasta

Since we've been getting so many veggies, we've been trying to put them to use. I was feeling a little overwhelmed with squash and zucchini, so I decided to look for a good recipe for them. I just randomly happened to get an email from Jeni's ice cream that day about their recipes being in Food & Wine, so I decided to look there instead of my usual Epicurious. I picked three recipes and sent them to Mr. T. He chose the first one and we were both thrilled he did because we LOVED it. Both of us. It was pretty healthy and we thought it would be a great base recipe, easy to adapt to just about anything.

Farfalle with Yogurt and Zucchini

I sauteed some delicious shrimp in olive oil and garlic to go with it and they turned out great and rounded out the meal. We both thought it was a great meal. I will certainly be making that again. Also, I used 2% Greek yogurt instead of whole milk (all I could find at Weiland's), and it was fine.

More recipes to come soon!

Recipes

To make good use of some of the great greens we've been getting, we made a delicious Potato Soup with Kale and Chorizo. We threw in about a pound of greens - kale, chard, and kohlrabi tops. The soup was great and is very filling. Pretty healthy too!

Since we were backing up on green onions, we made these incredible green onions biscuits.

They were so good! And to top it all off, I made homemade butter to go with it! I used cream from Snowville Creamery and basically just threw it in the Kitchenaid. Wow, was that ever good. It was so creamy and tasty. The combo of the fresh butter and the still-warm biscuits was wonderful.

I also bought some delicious looking sugar snap peas at the Farmers Market last weekend which we finally tonight made into a stir fry with shrimp. We based it on a grilled shrimp recipe but didn't actually grill anything.

I thought it needed a bit of salt but it was otherwise great. And we also made a roasted beet salad to try to eat up some of the delicious beets. That was just a simple salad of lettuce, roasted beets, goat cheese and a basic vinaigrette.