Category: Five Favorites

Five Favorite NEW Recipes I am Making This Summer

This is only my second Five Favorites ever (linking up with Jenna at Call her Happy), and really it is just bunch of links to recipes I don’t want to lose.

I should write them down on paper, because I still use cookbooks and my recipe book most of the time.

Making pesto with the baby.

Now that I have an 8 week old/am 8 weeks postpartum I am trying to cook again. Plus, I have a whole bunch of great foods coming out of my garden.

1. Chickpea Salad with Lemon, Parmesean, Basil, and Parsley
This is going to be a go-to Friday night meal for a long time, I think. So, yummy, so easy. And it would go great with Tabbouleh salad.

2. Tabbouleh
I love Tabbouleh; maybe it is my 1/8 Lebanese coming out. (I also love Falafel, and the garlic sauce at the Maronite church fish fry…) I finally made it. This is not the exact recipe I used, but close enough. You really just need a lot of parsley, and then the other stuff: burghul, garlic, lemon juice (lemony is essential), oil, tomatoes, and cucumber. Any ratio that you like will work.

3. Carrot Top Pesto…
I was determined to use my nice green luscious carrot tops. So, I made this pesto despite rumors that carrot tops might be poisonous? I think it is the same issue the presence of alkaloids in vegetables like raw spinach. So, basically, don’t eat tons of it everyday, and you won’t have a toxic build-up.

As for the pesto, the kids loved it because of the garlic and parmesan… M thought it was very similar to basil pesto, which I didn’t quite agree with. Next time I might do half carrot, half basil. Or parsley…. or oregano. We have a ton of oregano.

Yes, that is a quart of cold press concentrate…

4. Cold Press Coffee
I can’t believe that I did not try this sooner. So good. I also drink mine with milk and a little bit of simple sugar syrup sweetener departing from my normal black hot coffee. It almost tasted chocolatey.

5. Easy to Peel Hard Boiled Eggs
Not exactly new thing for us, but I wanted eggs that I could peel easily. This technique nailed it. I have been eating a ton of salads since T was born, because we had a lot of lettuce, and a hard boiled egg really tops them off nicely… especially on meatless days.

There you go… Happy Summer eating!

Five Favorites: Small Appliance and Furniture Edition

I am going to try another link up this week, largely because I have been recommending things to people and want to give them the information. Five Favorites, normally hosted by Heather at Mama knows, Honeychild (fun fact: Heather and I once ran a mud run together with some other awesome ladies back when I lived in Buffalo!) is being hosted by Mary at Atelier who is way more stylish than I could ever be.

Here are some of my favorite house hold items:

 Prince Lionheart Warmies Wipes Warmer

1. Prince Lionheart Warmies Wipe Warmer:  This was my third baby splurge. After having two in cloth, and now that we had a job instead of a fellowship, I splurged on having warm, wet wipes right on the changing table. It was and still is soooo worth it.

2. Shark Navigator Vacuum and its Hard Floor attachment: After using a Dirt Devil $40 stick vacuum that we had to buy $10 filters for every three months for five years, I finally bough myself a real vacuum. It is amazing, and best of all is the hard floor attachment. This means I can vacuum my hard floors and wipe them with a microfiber pad at the same time. Plus, it is super easy to vacuum under beds and couches with the hard floor attachment. This vacuum is my cleaning hero.

3. Ikea Wingback Chair: My dear professor made one furniture request and it was a wingback chair. I hunted for hours to find our wingback chairs last spring. Then, just in time, Ikea started carrying one in our price range. All of my blog posts are written from one of these chairs, and I read almost every evening seated in mine. The only assembly required was the screwing on of the legs.

 4. Cuisineart Food Processor: I have been wishing for a food processor for years, but knew that the best ones are the most expensive ones. M even wanted to by me one back in grad school, but I refused knowing the price tag. This year, I saved my Christmas and birthday money and asked M to combine it all to get the best reviewed food processor under $200. This is what he got me, and I love it. It makes pesto in minutes and does all sorts of other chopping things.

5. Mr. Coffee Automatic Burr Mill Grinder: While M and I have drunk lots of coffee our whole marriage, we did not splurge on whole bean coffee until we moved to St. Paul. Then M discovered the burr grinder which grinds the beans more evenly and releases less oil. So, we went for the burr grinder as well. We set the number of cups we want to make on the dial as well as the consistency of the grind, press a button, and dump it into the filter. No more measuring out coffee! The Mr. Coffee’s only drawback is that it grinds into a plastic cup, which the grounds tend to stick to.

That’s five!