Want a healthier pasta recipe?

Again, I find myself sitting around trying to dream up a new recipe.  While in Austin last weekend for our grandson’s birthday I was 2 days into the South Beach diet.  It’s easy for me to get started on any new diet because I tend to obsess over what to cook and make. If someone likes to cook, then any diet should be easy, it’s a challenge for me to take something boring and make it more delicious.

Seems like everyone is always looking for a healthier way to prepare recipes. This can probably be made even healthier than I made it, so feel free to change up any of the ingredients. My daughter makes julienned zucchini all the time in place of pasta. I just wanted to add a little whole wheat pasta for some texture.

For our Christmas dinner this year we made mashed potatoes mixed with sauteed kale and onions. So, I’m sitting over the weekend thinking how good those potatoes were and maybe I could try doing a cauliflower mash and add the kale and onions to that mixture instead of mashed potatoes.  I’m doing that this week and will post the results if they are worth mentioning.

Back to the weekend and the dieting. Well, I blew the diet and it was worth it. My son made about 7-8 different kinds of homemade pizza and a beautiful Mickey Mouse Birthday cake. (Remember the train wreck cake from last year?) I was only two days into the diet so why not just wait until Tuesday to restart.

So, before I get back into “the diet” why not try a healthier pasta dish. The third week of this diet allows for some whole wheat pasta. Here’s what I decided to do. Since whole wheat pasta is suppose to be so good for you, I cooked a very small amount of pasta and then julienned 3 zucchini which I sauteed along with some garlic. A few toasted pine nuts were added along with some Parmesan cheese and some parsley out of my herb garden. I drizzled in a little browned butter but that could easily be changed to olive oil. (I used four tablespoons of butter; but two probably would have been plenty.)

The results were delicious. For a healthier version when I get around to it, I’m going to cook some spaghetti squash and then fold in the zucchini with that and omit the pasta altogether.

If you aren’t a zucchini fan, give this a try, I think you will like it. Don’t overcook your zucchini though, you want it a little al denté.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: For my grandmother who passed away two weeks ago — Mama’s Butter Cake . It’s the best butter cake. Now I have her cake pans which will probably make my cake even better.

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Oh how I love mashed potatoes.

Very good side dish for my roasted chicken.

I’m really trying to be good with this new year just beginning. I’ve been going to the gym 3 times a week and have drug out my Zumba tapes that I paid a fortune for and clumsily trying to do the dance steps in my kitchen (with no one watching of course).

I do dream of mashed potatoes (not really). We never eat potatoes much since our kids have left home because we really don’t need to be eating them. I remember as a kid loving to lick the pan. In fact, I would rather have licked the mashed potatoes out of the pan than have a big heaping pile in my plate.

Mashed potatoes are great for holding all kinds of gravy and even sauerkraut (for my sister) or to put on top of a shepherd’s pie.  I always loved the little lumps my mother would leave when mashing the potatoes. Sure way to tell that she did not use instant potato flakes. There’s just something about cold weather (and we are having some now here in Texas) that makes me crave something mashed and smooth and comforting to go with roasted chicken and this cauliflower mash with kale hits the spot and not too many calories either.

I know a lot of people have mashed cauliflower to make mock mashed potatoes, but they don’t fool me. We had Giada’s recipe for mashed potatoes with kale with our prime rib for Christmas dinner and it was wonderful; but this recipe is healthier and I have added parsnips to the cauliflower mash to give it a little more character. See what you think of this recipe. If you try it, please leave a comment below.

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Thank your Lee Brothers for this recipe.

We lived in Ft. Madison, Iowa for 6 years and surrounded by corn fields. Kids (not mine, they were too young) would get summer jobs detasseling corn, and we would enjoy corn festivals in nearby towns at harvest time where you could eat yourself sick with fresh buttered corn on a stick.

What I loved about living in small towns in the midwest was all the food festivals in the surrounding communities. I remember watermelon festivals, strawberry festivals and especially the corn festivals. Back then you could go to a festival and the kids could run all over the place without a worry, playing and eating until they could not hold another bite.

After a trip to Charleston a couple of years ago and seeing the Lee Brother’s Southern Cookbook everywhere, I decided to check it out from our local library and copied so many recipes onto my Mac Gourmet cookbook. I love having this computer cookbook because I can either type in recipes or import from websites and it so much better than the system I previously used.

I made this recipe last summer and it is been hiding in my files just waiting to make it’s appearance.

Corn and okra are two of my favorite vegetables and two of my favorite things to pick up at a farmer’s market. I have to admit that I did not buy fresh okra for this recipe but used frozen okra BECAUSE the fresh okra looked terrible in the grocery. It always has black streaks and just never looks fresh picked. I would rather have frozen okra than the spotted vegetable because I know it was picked and frozen at it’s peak. There are a few changes I will make in this recipe when doing it again; I will add a little sautéed onion and garlic and maybe some green chiles. A little cheese would also be a nice addition. I loved the creamy texture of this dish; almost a savory creme brûlée.

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Who didn’t grow up loving Jello and Jello Knox Blox? 

Remember the song from the Jello commercial –

♫ Watch it wiggle, see it jiggle. Cool and smoothy, Jello brand gelatin. Of all desserts you’ll love the one that tastes so light and makes such fun. Make Jello gelatin and make some fun. J-e-l-l-o!♫

It’s hard to imagine a life without Jello as a kid. My favorite was strawberry with bananas. My grandmother had a particular refrigerator tray that was a light blue aluminum pan, and that was what she made her strawberry jello in and then she added bananas to the chilling mixture. We couldn’t wait for it to set up so we could dig in. My mother came up with all kinds of desserts using Jello over the years; but it seems like you just don’t see it used in recipes as often now. I don’t even make the Jello salads anymore like I did back in the 70′s and 80′s. No one in my family ever ate them but me. I have an appetizer that has been a catering favorite for years — Garden Vegetable Terrine that has Lemon Jello in it and it’s delicious — kind of sweet, kind of hot and spicy recipe.

These days it seems like if we eat Jello we are sick or getting ready for some kind of medical test.

Well this particular gelatin recipe is made with Knox gelatin. End results I guess would be like Jello Knox Blox that we use to make for our kids. They really loved being able to pick up Jello and eat it with their hands; but these Jello Blox are for adults only. My sister tore this recipe from one of her magazine and put it in “to make” notebook so I copied it while visiting and thought why not try them out for my bunco group at my house last week. I’m sure this recipe was a Knox advertisement because it specified Knox unflavored gelatin.

♫ ”It wiggles, it jiggles, it’s fun for everyone”.♫

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What a comforting bowl of soup for a cold winter night.

I don’t know where you live in this world of ours, but whether you are having a warm sunny day or a cold chilly wintry evening, I think you will enjoy this soup.

Soup is one of my favorite dishes to make. Seems like you can throw just about anything in a pot and come up with a wonderful dish that will make your family or guest think you have slaved over a hot stove all day. Add a nice crusty bread and a beautifully dressed green salad and a soup becomes a fantastic meal. Potatoes, pasta, or rice can be added to soups or stews to make a simple pot of simmering vegetables hearty enough for anyone in your family who might say “no” to soup for dinner. I often think of “what would our pioneer mother’s have made for dinner”. I’m sure stews were often on their menus. Dad comes in with something he had shot while out tending the fields (??) and she adds it to the pot and then throws in any kind of root vegetables they may have in their cellar. I’m not sure I could live like that but I often think I would like to be a time traveler to go back and experience some of the things our forefathers lived through; but with one foot in the present.

Don’t you just love what you can do with a soup. You can serve a pumpkin tomato soup in small hallowed out pumpkins or you can put your soup in a beautiful soup tureen. There’s always dessert soups that are simple and delicious and will impress your guest when served in a martini glass.  At my daughter’s wedding back in October we had, as one of our hors doerves, a tomato bisque that was served in a tall shot glass with a grilled cheese triangle teetering over the top of the glass.  Now that was fun; the grilled cheese could either be eaten as is or dunked (I did) into the soup and then you could finish off the soup by a swift tilt of the head and down the soup. I also just posted a Crab and Corn Bisque from our Hawaiian feast weekend.

I did not have any sherry in my liquor cabinet and didn’t want the extra stop while shopping to pick it up so I lazily opted for the cooking sherry from the grocery.

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