Fresh No-Cook Tomato Sauce

This recipe is from my fabulous sister-in-law's father, Tom.  He was kind enough to share his recipe with me and it's one of my favorite summer meals.  I should note that he recommended that this recipe not be served with any cheese topping, as he feels it detracts from the beautiful simplicity and flavors of the core ingredients.  That being said, I bastardized it with my American taste buds and serve it topped with fresh mozzarella.  Shhhhhh...  If you want to keep it legit, Tom recommends not doing any cheese, and instead serve it with a side of melon and crusty bread. 

One Pot Baked Ziti

My life has been so chaotic lately, I barely have time to cook or post recipes any more.  My 4 year old never stops chattering, and my 18 month old's idea of fun is trying to climb furniture or turn the oven on.  So when I make dinner these days, I need it to be relatively easy, and with little clean up.  Also ideal?  A meal that everyone in my family will actually eat.  I'm trying to eat lower calorie meals in order to lose the last few pounds of baby weight, my husband wants to feel full, my daughter hates anything with vegetables, and my son doesn't like most meat.  

This Baked Ziti was pretty much a miracle.  First of all, it all bakes in one pot!  Just make sure you use something that can go in the oven, like an enamel dutch oven.  Otherwise, you'll need to transfer the food into a baking dish, which will give you two dishes to clean up (the horror!).  It only takes about 30-40 minutes to cook, which is super necessary in my life right now.  I held my breath when I served it to my family, praying that the meal wouldn't be filled with tears and gagging (like most meals these days...toddlers are so much fun!).  To my immense relief, everyone ate it happily!  Sweet success!  And to my own happiness, this dish is under 400 calories a serving, so I can eat it guilt-free.  WOO!

Pasta with Creamy Butternut Sauce

One of my favorite fall dishes is Pasta with Creamy Butternut Sauce.  The sauce tastes rich and decadent, but it is oh-so-healthy. It's also a really easy dish to make vegetarian!  But for my meat-eaters, this dish is excellent with sliced sausage added to it.  Either way, it makes the perfect comfort meal for a cool fall evening.  Enjoy!

Gnocchi alla Caprese

So you may have noticed that my blog has been quiet for the past few months.  This spring we decided to put our first family home on the market and buy a new home in a neighboring county.  It was a difficult decision as we loved, loved, loved our home.  Fortunately we found a great home to buy, and we ended up closing on both our old house and new house on the same day in the middle of June.  Let me tell you... packing up our entire house with a crawling baby and a moody toddler, a double closing, and moving on a 103 degree day...it was a nightmare!  Needless to say, these past few months have been difficult ones.  We had to make many sacrifices:  we missed out on a fun friends trip, family dinners were replaced by take-out, and we lost our summer garden!  My husband planted it all before we realized we were going to put our house up for sale.  Of course right as everything in the garden started growing, we moved.  So for the first time in many summers, we don't have our summer garden vegetables to enjoy.  Boo!

However, we can still buy in-season veggies at the local grocery store (Earth Fare!).  Nothing beats an in-season tomato paired with fresh basil, right?  Let me introduce you to the perfect recipe for the season: Gnocchi alla Caprese. This recipe is definitely a summer-only recipe, because it requires in-season produce in order to reach its full delicious potential.   It takes only about 20 minutes to make, and its simplicity really allows the fresh ingredients to shine.  I could seriously eat this meal every day, and so could my kids.  Which is good, because I might be serving it at least once a week for the rest of the summer!

Creamy Sausage & Spinach Pasta

My sweet newborn baby is apparently not a newborn any more...he's a whopping 8 month old.  If you think the first baby grows up fast...well, the second is just a blur!  He's crawling, pulling up, cruising, eating grown-up food; and most importantly, he is sleeping through the night.  However, back 8 months ago, none of us were getting much sleep, and my husband and I were zombies.  When you have just one child, you can theoretically sleep when the baby sleeps.  But when you have two kids?  Well, that clearly just doesn't work. 

Mama's Spaghetti Sauce

Growing up, every year on my birthday I would request the same thing:  my Mama's spaghetti for dinner and my Mama Lou's pound cake for dessert.  It is a meal straight from comfort food heaven and just the thought of it makes me feel happy and content....and hungry, very hungry.  When I was nearing the end of my pregnancy a few months ago, my mom asked if there was anything she could do to help me prepare for the baby.  I had only one request:  I wanted her spaghetti sauce recipe so I could make it in bulk and feast on it during those first tough newborn weeks.  It took a lot of effort to get the recipe, because she had never written it down before.  She just kind of threw things in a pot and produced deliciousness.  So she jotted down a general idea of what she did, which involved a lot of "add some water" and "an onion or two" and other vague instructions.  So when I got around to making it, my poor mother was flooded with texts, emails, and phone calls from me asking for more specifics.  But it was worth it: the end result was pretty darn close to my Mama's Spaghetti Sauce.    This sauce takes a lot of time (and probably love), but oh man, is it worth it.  

Summer Garden Gnocchi

Our family just returned from a fabulous beach trip; the last family trip with just the three of us.  Next time, our number will be four! As wonderful as the vacation was, I'm feeling exhausted this week from all the excitement.  I've been too tired to make it to the grocery store, which means our kitchen is depressingly empty.  Fortunately, I sometimes view an empty fridge as a fun challenge, and become motivated to try to create a new recipe using only what I have on hand.  

Spinach Pesto Pasta

It's time again for this month's Earth Fare recipe!  Like my other Earth Fare recipes, I chose a recipe that represents the spirit of my blog: family friendly, quick to prepare, inexpensive to make, and healthy and delicious to eat.  

Like many other parents, the battle to get my child to eat anything green is an epic one.  And to be perfectly honest, I probably don't eat enough of the green stuff either.  I attempted to get my daughter to try a bite of a salad the other day, and she took one look at the spinach, and stated "I don't eat leaves, Mommy".  (Whatever kid, you spent your first two years  of life eating leaves and sticks every time we went outside.)  After a particularly unflattering moment of jealousy after seeing yet another Facebook post of a mom announcing about how much her kid loves kale, I decided to get creative.  What if I made pesto, but it had a spinach base instead of basil?  A quick google search showed me that I wasn't the first to come up with this notion, which further encouraged me that this might be a great idea after all.  

Cheesy Hamburger Macaroni

Today's blog post is a special one!  I've been chosen to write and share a recipe for one of my favorite grocery stores:  Earth Fare.  Normally when I grocery shop, I spend an inordinate amount of time reading the labels of every item I'm considering purchasing, and then scanning it on the phone app Fooducate to ensure I'm not getting something with scary ingredients.  I don't have to do that at Earth Fare.  I can trust that everything in the store has already been well vetted.  Their company vision is to be the most trusted organic and natural food market in the country.  Nothing in their store contains high fructose corn syrup, artificial color or sweeteners, synthetic growth hormones, and trans fat.  If other big chain grocery stores did that, half the store would be empty!  

Ham & Cheese Gnocchi

The South just survived what the forecasters were calling a "historical" snow storm.  Thankfully Athens just received sleet and snow, instead of freezing rain and ice, so we were able to enjoy a winter wonderland this week, instead of a crippling catastrophic event.  Even though the snow is now melting, I'm still finding myself craving comfort food.  For some odd reason, I am specifically craving French comfort food--a Croque Monsieur, to be exact.  

If you've never had the pleasure of eating one, a Croque Monsieur is a decadent ham and swiss sandwich that has been grilled and topped with a béchamel sauce.  This dish, however, is a bit high in calories, and perhaps isn't the most kid-friendly dish, so I set out to recreate the dish to make it more in our family's style.  I decided to reimagine the dish as a pasta; using gnocchi instead of bread, and a white cheese sauce instead of a béchamel sauce.  

This dish, my dear readers, is so far my absolute favorite dish of 2014.  I originally wanted to name my pasta Gnocchi alla Croque Monsier, but I was afraid it would make the recipe sound too intimidating, when nothing could be further from the truth.  It was so quick and easy to make (less than thirty minutes!) and both my husband and kid gobbled it up.  If you keep your portion size reasonable and pair it with a light salad, this meal easily remains under 500 calories. 

Crack Macaroni and Cheese

I have spent the last few years trying to find THE best macaroni and cheese recipe.  I've come close, but hadn't quite found the one.  I scoured the interwebs, searching through culinary message boards, when I first heard it referenced... "Crack Mac and Cheese".  I blew it off the first time I saw it, but when I saw it mentioned again, my interest was piqued.  Apparently this mac and cheese was so delicious, it was more addicting than crack.  I soon discovered that "Crack Mac and Cheese" was really Martha Stewart's more classily named "Perfect Macaroni and Cheese".  (Maybe there can be some sort of happy medium for its name...like Cocaine Macaroni and Cheese?)  I decided to make it for my family's hugely attended Thanksgiving dinner, where I would get a lot of good feedback.  Of course anything referenced as "crack" and is also made by Martha Stewart was going to be delectable, and it sure as heck was.  It was ahhhh-mazing. I had found the ONE.  My mac and cheese soulmate!  Here's my one big tip: don't be lazy with the topping.  I usually just sprinkle on some panko crumbs or crushed Ritz Crackers, but decided to go all out for Martha's sake, and by golly, it was worth the extra 5 minutes of effort.  

Chicken Spaghetti Casserole

Sometimes you have a day where you just need some comfort food.  I had a whole week of those days last week, so after some recipe searching, I decided on Chicken Spaghetti Casserole.  It looked warm and cheesy and filling, and yes, it is made with the "cream of" soups I usually avoid, but darn it, sometimes you just want something easy.  So if you are looking for a filling one-dish meal that has a reasonable amount of calories (and taste), this Chicken Spaghetti Casserole is perfect for you.

Vegetable Alfredo Lasagna

While doing my favorite evening activity (perusing Pinterest while drinking a glass of red wine), I stumbled upon a recipe that had me literally drooling in anticipation:  a Vegetable Alfredo Lasagna.  Unlike most recipes I "pin", I actually made this recipe just a few days after discovering it.  I'm not going to lie: this recipe takes a long time to make (as most lasagnas do), but it's bursting with so much veggie goodness that you feel like Popeye after you eat a square.  Even the "Alfredo" is packed with veggie nutrients--it's made with cauliflower!  I changed some of the veggies called for in the recipe to suit my own tastes (and what was growing in our garden), and I lowered the amount of cheese and noodles to make it even healthier (I got it under 500 calories for a freaking HUGE serving!).  Feel free to modify the lasagna for your own preferences.

Pasta Alla Norma

For my birthday this year, my sister-in-law made an amazing Pasta Alla Norma, which translates to pasta with tomato sauce and eggplant.  I always have bad luck when I try to cook with eggplant (it's totally my cooking nemesis), but the pasta was so good, I was desperate to try to replicate it.  The problem is, like most great cooks, my sister-in-law doesn't follow a recipe, she just wings it.  So I pestered her for hours for every tip and ingredient involved, and then armed with her advice, I gave it my all.  I think it turned out pretty great (though not sure if it was quite as good as my sister-in-law's). It's a little higher in carbs than I usually have for dinner, but a hearty bowl is under 400 calories, which makes it diet-friendly.  

Healthy Tuna Casserole

When I was growing up, one of my favorite dinners was tuna casserole.  It's odd that most kids adore this dish, considering canned tuna can be a tricky meat to love at any age.  Yet somehow tuna casserole is a common comfort dish for many families.  I hadn't made a tuna casserole since I was in college, when I made it from a Tuna Helper box.  When I saw Skinnytaste's recipe for Skinny Tuna Noodle Casserole, I decided to give it a whirl, in hopes that I would find another fish recipe to add to our meal rotation.  I changed the cooking method and ingredients around just a little, but followed the recipe pretty faithfully (for me). It turned out pretty darn great; so great that I ate way more than one serving size.  You may want to pair this with a side salad to prevent yourself from doing the same!  

Spaghetti Squash Alfredo

When I was in college, my favorite "fancy" meal was Alfredo Pasta. It was my ultimate splurge, both in price and calories.  As I've grown older and wiser, I've learned to appreciate healthier pasta toppings, but every now and then I get a hankering for my old love.  When I saw Food Doodle's Skinny Spaghetti Squash Alfredo, I was stoked to try it out.  It was easy to make, and was very tasty. The hardest part of the recipe is preparing the spaghetti squash. I baked mine this time, but next time I'm going to try the microwave method. I think it might be a less scary option.

Gnocchi with Swiss Chard & White Beans

One of the first recipes I "pinned" on Pinterest was Skillet Gnocchi with Chard and White Beans from Eating Well.  Since I have been avoiding high-carb foods, the recipe was put in my "someday" pile and forgotten.  Yesterday, however, was cold and rainy, and I found myself craving something hot, gooey, and full of carbs; aka my comfort food.  Instead of declaring it a "cheat day", and ordering out for pizza, I decided to try the Eating Well recipe instead.  Although higher in carbs, it is still packed with vitamins and low calorie. Plus, it's a great way to sneak some swiss chard into your kid's diet! I already had most of the ingredients on hand, and the recipe was a breeze to make.  More importantly, it tasted excellent.  It was hot, cheesy, and carby; everything I had wanted in a meal last night.