Pickled Red Onions

If you've never had pickled onions, you're seriously missing out. We're not sure if there's anything better to put on a taco. This recipe is extremely simple, which instantly made it a favorite of ours.

Here's what you need:

3/4 cup white vinegar

3 Tbsp white sugar

Pinch of salt

1 Bay leaf

5 allspice berries

5 whole peppercorns

1 large onion

Here's what you do:

Peel you onion and cut in half. Cut into half-moons and put into a canning jar.

In a small saucepan, heat the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil.

Once the mixture comes to a boil, pour into the jar with the onions. You might want to use a funnel.

Pop on the lid and put in the refrigerator to cool. 

Enjoy!

Roasted Green Beans with Balsamic Reduction

The fresh green beans looked gorgeous at the grocery store the other day, so we created this recipe on the fly. Zack correctly decided that they should be roasted with chopped garlic, to which Michelle added the balsamic reduction to finish it off. These green beans were de-li-cious.

Here's what you need:
2-3 lbs fresh green beans
3-4 large cloves of garlic
Kosher salt & freshly ground pepper
Oil oil to coat
4 Tbsp-ish balsamic vinegar

Here's what you do:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Trim the ends of your green beans and toss in a large bowl. Chop the garlic, but not too small. It will roast and be super tasty with the green beans. Add that to the bowl. Season with kosher salt and black pepper. Drizzle enough olive oil to coat.

Toss in a 9 x 13 Pyrex baking dish. Bake for 30 minutes or so. When the beans are ready, they will wilt and the garlic will turn a light brown color.

While the beans are roasting, put the balsamic vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-high heat.

Allow that to reduce by half. We did this once before for our Tomatoes with Balsamic Reduction and we forgot to mention that you shouldn't breath the scent of balsamic while it's reducing. It's quite strong and will definitely clear your sinuses. If it reduces down before your beans are ready, just reduce the heat to low to keep it warm.

Drizzle reduced balsamic over the beans.

Enjoy!

Cranberry Walnut Couscous

With the holidays upon us, here is a festive new side dish for you to try. Zack found this recipe on the Country Living website via Google. It was tasty. We both agreed that our favorite part was the crunch of the walnuts. 

Here's what you need:
1/2 cups dried cranberries
2 1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 medium cloves of garlic, minced
1 1/4 cup couscous
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Salt and pepper to taste

Here's what you do:
In a medium saucepan, combine 1/2 cup chicken stock and dried cranberries and bring to a boil. Once boiling, remove from heat and allow the berries to steep and re-hydrate the berries.

Strain the berries from the chicken stock and set the berries aside. 

Using the remaining chicken stock from the cranberry re-hydration, add the remaining 2 cups of chicken stock and the garlic to the saucepan. Bring that back to a boil.

Meanwhile, chop the walnuts and toast over low heat on the stove top. Let those toast for a few minutes to release the oils. They'll smell extra nutty when they're ready. Be careful not to burn them!

Once your chicken stock is boiling, add the couscous. Cover and remove from the heat.

Let the couscous sit for 5 minutes to soak up all of the stock. Remove lid and fluff like you would rice.

Add the cranberries and walnuts.

Taste the couscous and add salt and pepper to your taste. We liked the hint of sweetness.

The original recipe called for chopped mint, which we thought would be nice, but we didn't have any on hand. We actually had all of the remaining ingredients in the pantry, so we decided we'd save the mint for next time.

Enjoy!

Balsamic Chicken Tenders with Tomato Couscous

Zack conceptualized this dish completely. Couscous is a pasta, but cooks like a rice. We've made it with chicken stock before, but this was our first experiment with tomatoes. If you haven't noticed, we like to try new things in the kitchen. This one was a winner, and perfect for a weeknight meal.

Here's what you need:
1 lb chicken tenders (You can use chicken breast, just cut them in half)
1/2 cup Balsamic vinaigrette
1 cup couscous
1 15 oz. can low sodium diced tomatoes in juice
2 Tbsp olive oil
Pinch of red pepper flake
water
salt and pepper to taste

Here's what you do:
Throw your chicken in a freezer bag and pour in the vinaigrette. Place in the fridge for an hour or so to marinade.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Heat a large skillet over medium high heat and add a little bit of olive oil. You don't need much, because the marinade will prevent sticking as well.

At this point, you just want to brown the tenders, not cook them all the way through. Add them to the pan in shifts so that they aren't crowded and have room to sear.

While you're chicken is browning, strain a can of diced tomatoes, reserving the juice in a measuring cup. Set the tomatoes aside in a bowl for later use. You want a cup of liquid for the couscous, so top off the tomato juice with water until you reach one cup.

Add the juice, two tablespoons of olive oil and a pinch of red pepper flake to a medium sauce pan.

Start the mixture coming to a boil when you're about done with your chicken tenders.

Once all of the tenders are browned, throw them all back in the pan and place in the oven for 10-15 minutes.

Now that your tomato juice is boiling, add one cup of couscous.

Cover and remove from the heat.

After about 10 minutes, your couscous should have soaked up the juice and cooked through. Fluff with a fork to make sure all of the liquid has absorbed.


Finally, stir in the tomatoes that you strained earlier.

Sprinkle a little grated Parmesan over the top, stir it up again, and call it a day.

And by now, your chicken should be finished.

Definitely easy enough for a Tuesday, right?

Enjoy!

Creamy Polenta

Recently, we've discovered David Rocco's Dolce Vita. It's a great show on the Cooking Channel. We always thought polenta was some difficult side to make and you were better off buying the pre-made polenta and just slicing it to use when you needed. Boy, were we wrong. Polenta is actually pretty simple, just a little tiring. You have to stir the entire time. Slight forearm discomfort is worth it for this yummy dish.

Here's what you need:
4 1/4 cups of lukewarm water
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 lb yellow corn meal

Here's what you do:
The first and most important step is to start with lukewarm water - not hot, not cold. Cold water will make your polenta lumpy. We don't really know why you shouldn't use hot water, but David Rocco said use lukewarm, so we did, and the polenta turned out amazing.

Add the salt to the water. Pour in a high-walled skillet or low-walled dutch oven. Your pot needs walls, but you don't want them too high because you're going to be stirring a lot.

Turn the heat on medium and add the corn meal. Start stirring in a clockwise direction.

Continue stirring, always in a clockwise direction. Apparently if you don't stir in the same direction, Italian women all over the world will roll over in their graves and your polenta won't turn out properly. We didn't want to risk that, so we stirred in one direction the entire time.

Eventually, your polenta will thicken and look like this:

At this point, there were a few bubbles coming through and the polenta was the consistency of porridge. The entire process takes 20-30 minutes.

You can serve your polenta two ways - warm, with a bit of olive oil and grated Parmesan, or cooled. We did both, but forgot to snap a picture of the cooled polenta. 

To cool it, spread the polenta in a baking dish (we used a 9 x 13 Pyrex) and let cool on the counter. Slice into squares and serve.

Enjoy!

Smashed Black Beans

As a side to our flank steak fajitas that we had the other night, we whipped together this tasty side of smashed black beans. This is one of the simplest sides we've ever created, and we're pretty sure we'll never have black beans any other way for the rest of our lives. Alright, that may be a slight exaggeration, but they were really tasty. This recipe only makes enough for two, so if you're feeding a larger group, increase the amount of beans.

Here's what you need:

1 can of black beans

crumbled queso fresco

Here's what you do:

You're going to need to either pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees, or if you have a toaster oven like us, use that! We used a small Pyrex dish and it fit perfectly in the toaster oven. We didn't have to heat up our whole house with the hot oven either. 

Heat the beans in a sauce pan over medium heat. Keep them in their own juice for this part. 

You just want the beans to heat through. Once that's done, scoop them out with a slotted spoon so that the juice is left behind. Spread in an oven safe dish.

Using the back of a fork, gently smash the black beans so that they break open, but are still basically bean-shaped. 

Crumble the queso fresco over the beans.

Place in the oven/toaster oven for 5-10 minutes, or until your cheese melts.

Serve hot.

Enjoy!

Dirty Mashed Potatoes

One of Zack's favorite things is mashed potatoes. We don't make them near enough for his liking, but they make an appearance on our table pretty frequently. This time we opted for dirty mashed potatoes with a hint of garlic. We actually decided to add the garlic after the potatoes were done, so we used garlic powder instead of actual garlic. We know, fresh garlic would be better, but we improvise in our house. 

We tried something different this time too... basically because the meatloaf we made to go with the potatoes wasn't cooking as quickly as we'd anticipated and our potatoes were ready too early. See, improvising.

Here's what you need:
1/2 bag of small red potatoes
1/4 cup light sour cream
4 tbsp butter, divided
1/4 milk
2 tsp garlic powder

Here's what you do:

Start by scrubbing your potatoes thoroughly to clean them. Then slice so they're all pretty uniform sizes. This will help them cook faster and more evenly.

Boil the potatoes for 20-30 minutes, or until they fall apart when you stick a fork in them.

Drain the potatoes, then dump in a large bowl. Add the sour cream, milk, garlic powder and 2 tbsp of butter.

Mash together. It's not going to be completely smooth because of the skins, but we like a little bite.

Now, if the rest of your meal is ready at this point, feel free to serve. As we mentioned before, our meatloaf wasn't cooperating, so we put these in a casserole dish, dotted the top with butter and added it to the oven with the meatloaf.

This step really just helped us by keeping the potatoes warm, but stirring in the melted butter on top was a nice touch.

Enjoy!

Turnip Puree

While we were shopping for our duck, we decided that in lieu of mashed potatoes, we wanted to try our hand at a turnip puree. Turnips are tasty. And, just as simple, if not easier than mashed potatoes. 


Here's what you need:

4-5 medium turnips (or 3 large ones)
2 cups milk (enough to just about cover the turnips in the pot)
3-4 sprigs of thyme
2 cloves of garlic
1 stick of butter, cut into tablespoons
Kosher salt
Black pepper


Here's what you do:
Start by peeling your turnips and chopping into 1" pieces.

Throw all of the turnips in a sauce pot over medium heat and pour in milk until the turnips are just about covered. We didn't really measure it, so just eyeball it.

Add the thyme sprigs and smashed garlic.

Cover, but not completely. You want some of the steam to be able to escape. Bring that up to a simmer - not a boil. Let it gently simmer for 20-30 minutes, or until the turnips are fork tender.


Once they're tender, remove the turnips and put in a mixing bowl. Don't pour out the cooking liquid yet! You'll need some of it to loosen the puree to your liking. Add the butter to the bowl with the turnips, and add milk from the cooking liquid as needed. Season with salt and pepper.

We started by mixing this up in our stand mixer, but ended up buzzing it up with our immersion blender. You could also use a food processor.

Enjoy!