Faux Souvlaki

 What an interesting name!  This recipe comes from my friend Dee...and neither one of us is very confident on the origin of the name of this recipe.  Souvlaki is usually meat and veggies on a skewer, so maybe the faux is since it is put in a pan for roasting?  Maybe Dee made up the "faux" part since she is married to a man from France? 

Anyway, Dee had made it for Eleanor years and years ago and she loved it.  So, I got the recipe to make it at home.  Eleanor still claims that her version tastes better, but I'm fairly confident that Dee gave me the recipe she uses.  So...either she faked me out with giving me a recipe with a missing ingredient, or she just adapts it better as she cooks, or Eleanor was really hungry that day.  I like how I make it, so I'll post that in this episode of freshfamilyfood!  It does seem to be a recipe that would adapt well to changes and substitutions.

It seems to be an especially good weekend dish for us.  I had hoped to make it last weekend but it ended up being delayed since I used the bell peppers for something else.  I had planned to stop at our Sendik's store to get the peppers for this, but when I did my Trader Joe's run at the end of the week bell peppers were on sale there.  It's kinda nice since they had orange peppers on sale also.  It just makes the dish prettier.  This seems to go so well with potatoes...and I had some of those that needed to be used this weekend as well.

The snow outside just seems to call for heartier food in our tummies.
Faux Souvlaki
2 pork tenderloins, cubed
1 onion, diced
1 red pepper, cut into chunks
1 yellow pepper, cut into chunks
(I used an orange one also...and an additional red pepper)
salt and pepper
minced garlic
oregano
red wine vinegar
olive oil
Toss all ingredients together and marinate in the fridge for an hour or so.
Roast at 400 degrees for 45 min.


Addendum:  Just to clear the record..Dee assures me that she has the recipe written exactly as  typed above!


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Chicken Tinga Tacos

 Chicken Tinga Tacos
 This recipe is pulled from one of my favorite food blogs which was discovered by Elizabeth.  The link from the recipe will take you to the BittenWord blog.  
I guess after these WEEKS of eating yummy appetizers and dips I was really ready for some hearty food, and this looked good so I put it on the plan for this week.  I adapted it a bit for the crockpot.

•  used chicken breasts, about 2 pounds since the family pack was on sale at Sendik's this week.

•  did not add the chicken broth since things get a bit soupy in the slowcooker.  The comments following the recipe blog state that too.  

•  used feta cheese since I didn't get a chance to make two stops and get to the Mexican market as well as my neighborhood store.  

• increased the chipotles

Many people have mentioned that they brown the meat before putting it in the slowcooker; however, I'm usually an efficient person and usually throw everything in together.  I did do the browning step for the onions and chicken this time.  I think I'll go back to throwing everything in together since I don't notice the difference. 

It was a good and quick and hearty meal.  I will make this again!


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Stuffed Peppers

Ah...so many ideas on what to stuff in bell peppers......

Stuffed summer squash or stuffed eggplant or stuffed peppers are a great thing to make the when the garden produces faster than we can eat it. Stuffed peppers are good even when the peppers come from the grocery store, as these did. I bought yellow and red peppers because they are so pretty and were on sale. They weren't from my garden or even from a Farmer's market this time...but they are from the USA.

If the peppers are smallish I think they look great when just the tops are cut off and then they are stuffed. But, since these were largish, I cut them in half and parboiled them for just a couple minutes. I don't like the peppers too soft, so it was a couple minute parboil.

My very favorite filling is out of the book, Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. It's a recipe for a stuffed vegetable filling with spinach and artichoke hearts. I make it with a few variations, depending on what I am stuffing and what I have for filling. I made it pretty true to the original recipe this time. I always omit the pecans...for obvious allergy reasons.
This is a good dinner on its own since it is filling, but we had it with some grilled burgers and grilled potatoes on the night Paul returned from his most recent Asian excursion. I cooked them on the grill this time (which was a first) and they were yummy.

The Moosewood recipe:
10 oz fresh spinach, steamed (I used thawed frozen)
4 oz cream cheese at room temp
14 oz can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
1/2 c grated sharp cheddar cheese
1/2 c minced scallions
1/2 c toasted pecans (omitted, as noted above)

Stuff the vegetables and bake covered at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or so. May want to add water to the bottom of the pan before covering to help steam the vegetables (I don't do this if I parboil the peppers).

The peppers are a great lighter dinner on their own. That's the way we usually have had them...but it was fun to have them as part of this dinner too.


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Checkerboard Pizza

We're fans of roasted red peppers and olives, so we love this pizza.

The recipe is from the book, Pizza by James McNair. I know that I have talked about this book before, especially because it's the dough recipe I often use. The credit for this pizza goes to him; however, I greatly reduced the cheese quantities mentioned in the original.

This time I used some fresh sliced mozzarella cheese on top of the crust before topping the pizza in the cool checkerboard pattern. The toppings were roasted red peppers (from a jar this time) and black olives, both roughly chopped. I put some minced garlic on it and a small amount of shredded Parmesan over the other toppings(that is the picture below). The mozzarella was easy to slice because my parents gave us the very cool cheese knife last year for Christmas. I don't really understand how this knife can work so well to cut hard cheese or soft cheese, but it does work really well.

I put the crust in a round pan before I thought about it. I like how it looks a bit better if the pizza is a rectangle, but after the crust was in the pan I decided to go with colored wedges instead.

This would be a very fun thing to serve at a poker party:)
Not that I have poker parties, but I just think it would be a good idea. Maybe if my friend, Carol, who went to the World Series of Poker on a sweepstakes entry has another poker party I'll take this.

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Old Apples and Wilting Peppers

I am a fanatic about not wasting food...if I bought it, I better find a way to use it, so as I foraged in the refrigerator the other night, I found two old apples(still ok, but not something you would want to bite into) and at least 6 sweet peppers that were either starting to show their age or they were ok.

The nice thing about apples, add a little sugar and heat and you get pie filling! I had two apples, a yellow delicious and a fuji, so I melted about  a tablespoon of butter in a saucepan and added the peeled, diced apples. After a few minutes I sprinkled a Tablespoon of brown sugar and some cinnamon over the top and continued to cook the apples until they were just tender...the product was a dish of scrumptious apples for each of my kids for Sunday supper dessert!

As for the peppers, I cleaned and sliced these and blanched them in boiling water for about 5 minutes. Once they were blanched, I quickly cooled them in an ice water bath so they would stop cooking. After draining them, I packaged them in ziplock bags and froze them.  They will be great for a quick batch of fajitas this winter!

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Pico de Gallo

The CSA box was very heavy last week, so I knew that I would be busy over the early part of last weekend. The farmer very neatly put a "salsa" bag together including various types of peppers, tomatoes, and onions. We received a bunch of cilantro as well. Since my refrigerator didn't look like it would hold all this good food for long, I decided that I needed to figure out how to reduce the vegetables...and quickly!

I did roast some of the peppers on the stove. While I was doing that the phrase, "depth of flavor" came to mind, so really wanted to use that phrase in the blog. Yep, the roasted peppers gave the pico de gallo a depth of flavor! I roasted them directly on my gas burner. I did have the exhaust fan on, so I'm sure the smell of roasting peppers woke my new next-door neighbors. The smell of roasting peppers smells earthy and like something else not so legal...so we'll see what they thought when I talk to them this weekend!!!

The rest of the ingredients just required some time to chop. I did run the chopped red onion under cold water in a strainer to take a bit of the bit (and subsequent bad breath) out of them. I added a couple grinds each of salt and pepper and a tablespoon or so of canola oil. Some of the peppers were chopped without roasting.

Tasty....I'm sure we'll be done with the huge bowl of good veggies by the end of the weekend. Fortunately, my husband bought a big bag of tortilla chips at the warehouse buying club yesterday, so we should be set to finish this bowl over the weekend!

Yum...tastes like summer!