Twenty-Minute Tuesday: Roasted Red Pepper Fusilli
Pasta has carved its niche as the universal comfort food. So that I can justify my own pasta cravings, I like to think that the aforementioned ‘comfort factor’ comes from some reason other than the fact that many popular pasta dishes are loaded with creamy sauces, heavy meat portions, and/or an abundance of cheese. This pasta dish is a fresh and light change of pace, using a fun corkscrew-shaped noodle to absorb the bright orange/red sauce created from roasted red peppers and carrots.
Time Saver: Rather than roasting your red peppers on the day-of, save time by using a frozen or jarred variety. I roast red peppers from my garden or the Farmer’s Market when they are in season, and after allowing them to cool, I freeze them in quart or gallon-sized freezer bags.
Kid Stuff: Both the corkscrew shape of the pasta in this dish and the name created an extra ‘fun factor,’ because who could say no to having “Silly Noodles” for dinner?
Roasted Red Pepper Fusilli
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup roasted red bell peppers, chopped
½ cup medium onion, finely chopped
½ cup carrots, finely diced (about 1 large)
8 oz. dry fusilli pasta
Assembly:
1.Set a large pot of water to boil.
2. Heat oil in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add roasted red peppers, garlic, onion, and carrot; sauté 5 minutes. Add 3/4 cup water, cover, and reduce heat to low. Simmer 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, cook pasta in pot of boiling salted water according to package directions.
4. Remove roasted pepper mixture from heat. Purée in blender or food processor until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, if desired.
5. Drain pasta, and return to pot. Stir in red pepper sauce & serve warm.
Enjoy!
Adapted from Vegetarian Times
Last year at this time, BabyFoodScoops whipped up this Photo-of-the-Day Calendar. A great Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Birthday, Christmas, or Grandparent’s Day gift. I’ve made at least one calendar for each of these five celebrations!
Spring is in the Air!
Has it been nearly a month? Ohmygoodness. Thanks for sticking with us!
Those of you who do currently or have ever blogged can relate that the process can be like a part-time job sometimes! Creating or tweaking recipes or projects, trying them a few times to ensure they are ‘bloggable,’ grocery shopping, cooking, composing, photographing, cleaning up, writing, photo processing, posting and sharing. Each post is a new process. Blogging can be like a part-time job (an unpaid-but-entertaining part-time job, of course). Now don’t get me wrong, I still very much adore it, but sometimes you need a break from even the most fantastic of jobs.
So enough about that – the long and short of it is that we’re back. We have some great 20-Minute Recipes to share next week, and even a chat about homemade baby food. That’s right, our littlest has graduated to eating dinner with the rest of the family, and she is giving us a run for our money with her appetite!
And because I just cannot leave you without a photo.. just a quick spring project we threw together one sunny afternoon. On occasion we like to send little projects like this to the grandparents to keep their refrigerators appropriately adorned with evidence of the girls. Also, we used it as a talking point about all of the gardening we have been working on! At first we were going to make a “big rabbit” and a “little rabbit” but getting babies to open their hands is much more of a challenge (read: messy) so we went with carrots instead.
Last Year at this Time: BabyFoodScoops whipped up these Chicken Lettuce Wraps!
Displaying Photos of Children’s Friends
Just a quick post today about how something very simple can make a little one’s day!
It is heart-warming to see my daughter build friendships and make little friends. She talks about them daily and wants to do the things that they do and like the things that they like. The child had yet to see Dora but frequently reported it to be her favorite because her friends named Natalie (there are two of them) both like Dora The Explorer. Thank goodness the Natalies aren’t into iPhones! The scheming side of me wonders if maybe the Natalies could tell her that potty training is the next big thing. Hmm…
I’ve been in clean, organize & purge mode as we prepare for spring and an early summer garage sale. As I came across our much-loved pile of holiday cards from last Christmas, I just about filed them away when Amelia carefully selected the cards from her “friends” and insisted that she keep them. I recalled a box hidden in storage that I had been meaning to go through — after removing the senior pictures (!!) of some close friends, I ‘upcycled’ our Christmas cards and these frames into a homes for photos of twelve friends from near and far.
There is really no need for ‘tutorial’ here – I just trimmed the photos to size and allowed Amelia to chose which spot each photo would live. We plan to update them as more current photos roll in!
She placed one on the table next to her rocker, and another on the bookshelf that she can see from her bed. She loves to point them out, and tell me stories about things she has done with her friends. Some of her friends she is lucky enough to see weekly, while others live a little further away. She just discovered that one of her very favorite friends will be moving away very soon (sniff, sniffle!). Hopefully seeing her smiling face from the bookshelf will ease the transition!
Solution for {too} Early Rising Young Children
Allow me to paint a picture for you: It’s 4:15am. You are asleep. Everyone is asleep. You hear shuffling. Your door creaks open {okay, so maybe your door doesn’t creak. Lucky!} A small person begins inundating you with requests at full, normal conversational volume: “Pancakes please Mom;” “Hi Dad;” “I want to read Hop on Pop;” “I want to play Memory!” Everyone is no longer asleep: you sigh and hope the clock is wrong; the baby awakens, excited to converse with her sister; husband groans and mutters things you hope toddler does not repeat. Chaos ensues. Thank goodness she can’t yet reach the light switch.
Until two weeks ago, the above story {nightmare?} was a recurrent early morning occurrence. Our career 12-hour-per-night sleeper transitioned all of a sudden into an early riser. It started with a move from 7:30am to 6:30.. then 6… 5… {it got uglier}.. and then 4am. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that this behavior was disruptive to the sleep of the rest of the family. Some {great} friends and I were discussing this business of early rising a few weeks ago, and I was somewhat relieved to hear that it is seemingly common. So common, in fact, that companies market special clocks to serve as a sort of toddler alarm clock: they have areas that light up with a moon and stars when it is time for sleep, and a sun when it is time to be awake and can also eventually be used to teach children how to read a clock. Some have games.. music.. the ability to record your own messages.. The principle is great, and I came awfully close to clicking “buy now,” but something was nagging me. As my house slowly but surely is transformed into a small toy store, I realized that we have already accumulated at least three time-telling puzzles, games, et cetera. Cue the brainstorming: the purpose of these toddler alarm clocks is a visual cue that it is time to get up. What else could serve that purpose? As it turned out, the answer cost less than $10 and was already sitting in my utility cabinet. What, pray tell, was this miraculous alternative?
An Indoor Appliance Timer
Greetings from a land of increased sleep for all! Over the past week we have {somewhat intensely} implemented some sleep behavior modifications and yielded some pretty excellent results.
I simply hooked up her bedroom lamp to an indoor appliance timer and placed the lamp out of her reach. It is set to turn on at 7am. We explained that if she wakes up and the light is off, she should stay in bed until the light comes on. If she wakes up and the light is on, she can come out of her room. We discussed this for a full day, quizzing her repeatedly on what she should do.
It seemed too easy to actually work, but miraculously, it did. And then it worked again. And over and over again. I actually held off sharing this idea to ensure that our success wasn’t a one-hit wonder, but I am happy to report that I am writing to you from a more well-rested point of view. Sometimes we hear her squeal with excitement when her light comes on and she can come out of her room, but more often than not she puts herself back to sleep and the soft lamp light turning on is not enough to wake her up when it switches on. I realize this may not be a golden ticket for everyone, but surely something to trial before committing to something more expensive!
Tip: If your child has been getting up at 5:30am, you probably won’t have success jumping that alarm clock straight to 7am. Try incremental changes (15 or 30 minutes) as their patience in “waiting for the light to come on” will not extend for two hours.
Sweet dreams!
Green Eggs and Parm: a Microwave Coffee Cup Scramble
I hope wherever you are reading this, you are being treated to the same unseasonably warm weather that has arrived in the Midwest. It has been glorious. Refreshing. Sunny. Dare I even add, ‘Springlike?’ Continue Reading »
Sunflower Seed Butter Trail Mix Cookies
Contrary to the evidence, we have actually been doing quite a bit more than cooking and baking around here, but this recipe just couldn’t wait to be shared! They are just seriously divine, and almost too easy to taste so divine. Keep in mind that this is coming to you from a self-proclaimed failure of a cookie baker, so surely if I can do it, so can you. Continue Reading »
Slow Cooker Black Bean Buffalo Chicken Chili
Hello, friends! Whew.. it feels good to get back to the keyboard! While Jess spent January snuggling her precious beautiful newborn, we found ourselves in a bit of a precarious situation. I present to you, Exhibit A:
Glorious baby. Happy baby. Sleepless baby. Happy baby. Napless baby.
This.Child.Does.Not.Sleep. Okay, so she does sleep late at night… and wakes up once to eat and then hunkers back down for another winter nap until morning. I suppose I really have no right to complain, as she is absolutely taking after her mother here — aside from pregnancy, I probably have not taken a nap since 1982. The catch here is that the happy awake baby shown above has been soaking up the time formerly known as ‘blog writing time.’ We have been cooking and crafting our little hearts out.. but when the long day is done and I sit down to write, more often than not I collapse into an exhausted heap whose little brain cannot pen coherent sentences.
Anyway.. tired or not, I’m excited to be back! And what better way to kick things off than this tried and true star?
The backstory: A few weeks ago we took a long car ride and visited some fantastic friends. The children played. The adults laughed. We ate.We ate this. We insisted upon the recipe. And then we came home, and made more. And then we made it again. And we stashed some in the freezer for when we run out. I actually just had another serving, no exaggeration. This was an unexpected ‘win,’ and I love recipes like this – mainly because my taste buds try it before my brain does. {Did that just make any sense?} What I mean is that if I had seen this recipe, I likely would have ruled it out as my husband has a self-proclaimed dislike for buffalo sauce. To his credit, many recipes for “buffalo chicken ______” leave me feeling like the ‘buffalo’ overwhelms the rest of the dish. Not here. The buffalo sauce is a strong undertone without being too much. The vegetables compliment the palate and the black beans stay in tact better than a pinto or kidney bean. And of course you know how I feel about those freezer-friendly options! Add or pin this into your arsenal of slow cooker and/or freezer-friendly meals!
As our friends also feed wee ones at their house, this chili can be a flexible option for kiddos who aren’t sold on spice or buffalo sauce. As the buffalo sauce is stirred in in the last step, it is easy enough to ladle out a buffalo-sauce-free portion for them. Also, it is an exceptionally flexible recipe (No tomato puree on hand? Just double up on the diced tomatoes. Out of chicken thighs? Use just breasts..) The one thing I’m going to go ahead and REQUIRE is the blue cheese crumbles. Similar to the cooking spray/salt touch on our Chicken Taquitos, this is a small touch that truly influences the overall flavor. Amelia calls it “Snow” on her soup. So, people, don’t forget the snow!
Ingredients:
1 large yellow onion, chopped
6 medium stalks celery, diced
6 medium carrots, diced
2 ½ lbs boneless, skinless chicken, cut to 1 ½ inch cubes (I used a mixture of breasts & thighs)
3 cups cooked black beans, (or about 2 15oz cans, drained and rinsed)
28 oz diced tomatoes, undrained
28 oz tomato puree
1 cup chicken broth
2 teaspoons chili powder
½ teaspoon salt
3/4 cup buffalo wing sauce
Crumbled Blue Cheese, for serving
Assembly:
- Measure chicken broth into small bowl. Add chili powder and salt. Stir to combine. Set aside.
- Place onion, celery and carrots into slow cooker. Top with beans and chicken. Pour tomatoes and broth mixture over all and cover.
- Cook on low heat setting 8 hours.
- Stir buffalo sauce into chili.
- Ladle into bowls and top with crumbled blue cheese.
To freeze: ladle cooked, cooled chili into freezer bags or freezer-safe containers and freeze for up to 3 months. To serve, thaw completely and reheat on stove-top before topping with blue cheese.
Source: Wonderful friends who loosely interpreted from this Pillsbury version.
Enjoy!
Torii’s Summer Adventure: Children’s Book Kickstarter Project
I would like to share with you an incredible story that one of my friend’s brought to me recently. One of my girlfriends from college shared with me four children’s books that her mom, Janelle Condra wrote featuring their family dogs Torii and Marli. Janelle has been a teacher of young children for over 30 years and lives in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. She and her husband, Alan, a professional photographer wrote and illustrated the books together. They used a combination of photography and computer illustrations to create the bright, fun pages. Janelle shared the books with Wren and me. We have been reading them together and she absolutely loves them! In fact, she likes them so much she has them memorized almost word for word. Continue Reading »
Roasted Red Pepper Pesto
This latest recipe comes courtesy of my Cook’s Illustrated magazine but I wanted to share it with you because it’s delicious and oh so simple.
As a new mother of two I am finding time to be more and more precious and meal preparation more and more challenging. Therefore when I come across something like this recipe that’s quick, simple and delicious I am delighted. Oh, I should also mention that Wren loved it so in our family that’s a real winner. One of my favorite quick and easy meals is to dress up a store-bought ravioli and RP’s out of Madison is one of my favorites. Nicole recently blogged about a simple recipe she creates using RP’s pasta, feel free to check that out too! Continue Reading »
Announcing Emerson Ann
After a couple of months off preparing for the birth of our baby girl I am back! For my first post in a very long time I thought I would introduce you all to my newest one, Emerson Ann Dennis. Emerson was born on January 31, 2012 weighing 8 pounds, 13 ounces and measuring 21 inches long. I was hoping for a big baby and that’s what I got! Continue Reading »
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