Another spring-inspired dish, this time from the new cookbook I picked up "Power Foods", distributed by Real Simple. It's filled with delicious, mainly vegetarian dishes that are high in nutrients.
This salad used a couple pounds of asparagus, fresh peas, caramelized leeks. It took me several stages to put together, but the end results was a fresh, lemony dish.
I am still quite obsessed with Torretta's Bakery. Quite convinced that anything and everything created in the shop is going to meet and exceed every expectation of food that I've ever had.
I decide to try the pasticiotto this week. It was delicious, mind you, but a little less glamorous than some of the other pastries. I believe it was cherry in there with the sweet cheese. I also snacked on a slice of the Sicilian pizza. Wow. I really am not one of those pizza-loving folks. I find it heavy and have a general dislike of cooked tomatoes - i.e. tomato sauce. But this squared-sliced, fresh-baked pizza really hit the spot.
Truly, they can't do anything wrong there.
I'm kicking off my spring meals with some green-inspired dishes. Dinner consisted of shredded sprouted-grain lasagna sheets tossed with fresh, steamed snap peas, fresh parsley, sauteed baby bok choy, sauteed shallots and goat cheese.
I had intended to create a delicious lunch dish, high in protein and nutritious with greens. However, I made one vital mistake: premade pie crust. I had one of those frozen pillsbury roll-out pie crusts in the fridge, that in my laziness, I decided to use as a base. Holy freaking cow. It has so much fat and so much sodium, you'd think I just decided to eat 3 pounds of salted butter instead.
Healthy tip: Never under any circumstance use Pillsbury Pie Crusts.
The contents were fine. I use all egg whites, sauteed leeks, lots of fresh chopped dill, and give it a dusting of Parmesan. It was really that simple. In any case, it was like buttery insanely good due to the pie crust and I pretty much destroyed my diet eating the whole thing over the course of two days.
I'm mildly obsessed with coconut, and my friends will be the first to tell you this. My friend was joking that if I was on an episode of Hoarders, they'd open my kitchen cabinet and find 2 cases of coconut milk. That I could fund my own coconut milk can drive. Ha...ha..huh.
Well, whatever. I love coconut and I'm not afraid to admit it. You've seen images of the Coconut Cake and Coconut Cream Cupcakes I made last month. Well, I delved into virgin territory last week and made: Coconut Rice Pudding.
There were a lot of recipes to choose from, and I didn't like half of them. I also only had brown rice, which no one seemed to recommend. But that's life and I thought it would be mildly healthier anyway. A loosely based this recipe from the Rice Pudding Recipe featured on the blog Slice of Feist. I'm not entirely sure what went wrong with it. Texturally it worked out well - but spice-wise, it was lack luster. I needed something more. I nearly doubled all of the spices and flavors in the first place. Okay, it was unintentional. I halved the recipe, halved the rice and such, but forgot to half the spices. But even then, it was still sort of flavorless and mild. I wanted more--something. The coconut flavor - I even added coconut extract -- wasn't particularly strong either. Maybe if I'd had raisins, it would have been better or at least added an additional flavor in the mix.
I think that in the future, I will be able to enhance this recipe more to my taste. But in the first go around, it only look cute and was only mildly comforting comfort food.
