Recent Recipes

I have tried a couple of good recipes lately that I feel compelled to share. I love cooking Asian and I love making soup, so these two recipes are right up my alley!

I made Chicken Satay Stir-Fry with Orange Jasmine Rice last week. It does have peanut butter in the sauce so I scooped out some of the chicken stir-fry mixture before coating with the peanut butter sauce for Jack, my cute little allergen...

This was great! I was thrilled with how it turned out. I pretty much love all of Rachel Ray's recipes, but this was great. It was an easy recipe and best of all didn't call for Hoisin Sauce, which can be kind of pricey. It wasn't very spicy which I appreciated because I'm not sure the girls would go for it, and besides I have Chili Sauce that can easily spice things up. I think this is one of my new go-to's. I found that you could probably mix in a bag of stir-fry veggies in lieu of cutting the fresh veggies, but I happened to have all the veggies on hand so I chopped and cooked.

Then on Sunday I made Minestrone Soup from the Food Network Page. They had a list of 50 easy soups, and they did not exaggerate. None of the soups on this list seem intimidating to me. I may just make all of them! For Sunday meal, though, I made the Minestrone Soup because we had all ingredients on hand and also it seemed healthy.

If you make this soup I would add half more liquid to the cooking. It didn't have enough soupy-ness to it, in my opinion. I think this could easily be crock-potted, which I may try in a pinch, but really, it came together so fast that I'm not sure a crock-pot would be necessary.

However, I'm not sure I'll be making this soup again since the link to the 50 easy weeknight soups recipes is not working on the foodtv.com site! Ugh!

Well, anyways, the soup was good. I sauteed carrot, onion, celery, garlic and cabbage in olive oil, then added 4 cups of chicken broth, a rind from Parmesan cheese, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of garbanzo beans (the recipe called for cannelini beans, but I didn't have those on hand), salt & pepper, brought it to a boil, and then simmered for 20 minutes. I added some Orzo pasta and cooked for another 8 minutes until the pasta was done. Before serving I removed the rind.

I probably added too mush pasta, which I realize now that I type this out. But next time I will add about 6 cups of water/chicken broth. The girls liked it, especially the garbanzo beans, and Jack liked it too. I was happy to discover that he didn't have a reaction to the Parmesan rind.

I would love to encourage you to pick up Parmesan cheese the next time you're at Costco. Freshly grating my cheese has made a WORLD of difference taste wise, and as for cost it seems to be less expensive to buy and grate your own. And then you have this delicious cooking spice!

All in all, a great simple soup with not a lot of allergens. It's terrific as leftovers, too! I love soup!