Penne with Goat cheese and Zucchini

Zucchini seems to be a very abundant vegetable during the summer, it doesn't cost much at the store and if you grow your own you can wind up with so many that you don't even have a clue as to what to do with it all.

I remember when I was young in my mother's vegetable garden we'd wind up having so much zucchini that if we missed any of them on the couple of zucchini plants we had, they'd grow so large they wouldn't be good for anything other than bread or to feed to the cows. I also remember not being too fond of zucchini as a child unless it was in raw sticks and dipped in ranch dressing. Now as an adult I love the stuff, started liking it as a teenager (as I did with most foods that weren't "normal" in my eyes, though there wasn't much I didn't like as I wasn't/am not too picky). I try to use it frequently in my cooking as a filler and as a main veggie.

I want the little one to learn to like veggies more, but it's a long arduous task to get him to eat something that has either color or isn't just fish sticks, cheese, bread, rice or chicken. So in order to do that, the best thing to do is put veggies in tons of stuff and say "eat it, it's good for you and will make you grow strong and healthy!" Ahhh if only I were as cool a Pop-eye the sailor man and could just flex and eat it, making him all for the awesome healthy foods.

Now to make this wonderfully healthy meal, you will need 1 zucchini, 1 box of whole wheat penne pasta, a jar of vegetarian bolognese sauce, 1 onion, and 3 cloves of garlic. Cook the pasta till al dente, drain and put in a big bowl. Chop the onion and garlic, saute in enough extra virgin olive oil that it won't stick but not make it mushy. Add in chopped zucchini at the last minute and then put it in the bowl with the pasta. Take your sauce and pour about 1/4 of the jar into the bowl and mix. Pull little bits of the goat cheese and add it on top.


As you can tell this is healthy and simple to make and will make enough for 3 people and then some! Oh and did I mention I didn't get any complaints about dinner that time around? :D

Black Bean, Zucchini, Corn and Bell Pepper soup

One pot meals are perfect when you want to make something without too much clean up. They are also great if you make a whole bunch of it so you can take the next day off of cooking, except of course to warm it up :) . Soup seems to be a wonderful way to achieve this easily. Not only can you make it pretty easily but most of the time it's very healthy as well!

Anything can be made into soup, just have to add water (usually unless it's something like a chowder where milk or cream is used instead). I happened to have a few cans of black beans (I tend to try to keep them in stock though :) ) and some veggies. A zucchini, three ears of corn, two bell peppers (one yellow and one red), a red onion, and about four cloves of garlic made up the veggies. We like meat at our house so I added in ground beef and ground pork but this would have been perfectly good without it.

Slice the zucchini in rounds then cut them in quarters, put to the side in a bowl for later. Chop the bell peppers and add them to the same bowl as the zucchini. In a big soup pot get some olive oil heating up on med-low heat and chop the red onion and the garlic, adding it to the pot and letting it soften before adding the pork and beef to brown. Rinse the black beans, adding them after the meat is cooked most of the way through. Add in about 10 cups of water, salt and pepper to taste and a couple bay leaves (make sure to remove the bay leaves when the soup is done because in the words of Alton Brown "they aren't good eats!").

Now for the corn. This was the fun part (well only a little fun, more like dirty). Take the husk and silk off the corn and grab a bowl. If you can still see pretty decently with out them, take your glasses off or you will be cleaning them after this. Set the pointy end down in the bowl and take a rather sharp knife and cut the kernels off the cob. I personally got sprayed in the face numerous times while I was doing this, hence the previous warning :). Put the kernels into the zucchini and bell pepper bowl.

Let the soup cook for about an hour at the least and about 5-10 minutes before you are ready to eat taste the broth to make sure there is enough salt and pepper and then season accordingly. At this point you want to add in the veggies we set to the side. If you like yours softer, then by all means put them in sooner, waiting just lets them have a bit of a bite to them.

My husband always says, "This soup is good for the soul." when I make it, Here's to hoping you'll agree!

Pancakes for Dinner

Over the weekend I had a birthday to attend. The little one turned 9 and so therefore I made a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Unfortunately for me I didn't make it from scratch and used a boxed cake mix and frosting. This is all fine and well if you can handle vast amounts of sugar and not get a sugar hang over the next day. I can't anymore. I've been eating a lot healthier food than I used to for the past 2 and a half years, and things that are less than healthy (certain fast food, and food with lots of sugar and simple carbs like white pasta, bread and white rice) upsets my tummy now when I apparently had an immunity to them before.

I cook healthier now not just because it's much healthier to make your own food (since you can regulate what you put into it as well as add as much or as little of certain things as you want to your taste), but I also have high blood sugar which I can regulate with healthy cooking. As you know (those of you who have tried any of the other food on the blog) that doesn't mean my family and I eat "cardboard" (you can ask my mom if they taste good, because she has tried almost everything on here, and she'll tell you they do... whether they do or not :P ).
All that to tell you I didn't take a picture of the cake for the blog because none of them came out really well and I don't want people to want to eat a cake that would give you a huge sugar rush (the hubby actually had a piece the day after and said "I can feel the sugar rush already!" looking slightly disgusted about a minute after he ate it) and a sugar hangover (which is what I had) the next day.

As you can see this post is about pancakes. I have said before that the little one LOVES pancakes, so, for dinner (yes I said dinner) I made him some. I had planned on doing that for him for breakfast, but had changed my mind because I didn't have time by the time I dragged myself out of bed and wrapped presents and frosted the cake. The night before I went looking at other blogs for a basic pancake mix and stumbled upon JoyofBaking.com. They just happened to have a simple mix that didn't have too many ingredients and luckily I had them all in my cupboard already. I will not be posting the recipe (click on the mix link for the pancake recipe) as I'm sure the person who did the recipe would much rather get the traffic there to view it :).
Now I also need to let you know my pancakes weren't as fluffy as the ones in the other blog. I was bad and read 2 cups of flour when it was supposed to be 1 cup (I blame myself for having terrible handwriting and miss read what I had written down). I tried to make up for it by adding more of the other ingredients, but it seems I still didn't get my pancakes as pretty and fluffy as they were in the recipe that I had seen. This however didn't matter to the one they were made for. He gobbled them up with their maple syrup and butter. I had made a batch big enough to make enough extra for the morning too!