An Easy Pasta Side Dish {Secret Recipe Club}

January 7, 2013 By

“Grumpy’s Honeybunch” , aka Shelby, writes about her life and the people she loves, and those subjects often revolve around food. Her extensive collection of recipes includes quite a few that caught my eye, including Sour Cream & Chive Potato Bites, Baked Pumpkin Doughnuts, and her Mom’s Cheese Ball (I love family recipes!).

I was in need of a simple side dish for dinner and was thinking that pasta would work nicely, so I decided to make her Pasta with Garlic and Oil, originally by Mark Bittman, one of my faves. Whenever I typically make a simple pasta side dish, I just drizzle it with olive oil and add a few herbs, but adding the garlic takes it to a new level of deliciousness that’s elegant enough for guests yet retains its simplicity. I took out the chili peppers because we don’t eat those around here, but I kept with her idea of basil because I love basil! I wish I hadmore fresh basil on hand, because nothing beats fresh basil, but I supplemented my little bit of (frozen) fresh basil with some dried. It was still delicious, but the fresh basil would take it over the top!


Pasta with Garlic, Herbs and Olive Oil

Ingredients

  • 1 pound pasta, cooked
  • 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • pinch of salt
  • 1/3 cup fresh basil, or 1 TBSP dried basil

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil and garlic with a pinch of salt in a pan over medium-low heat until the garlic is golden, shaking the pan gently to stir as necessary.
  2. Pour the garlic sauce over the noodles, adding extra oil or reserved water from cooking the pasta if it’s dry. Add basil, salt and pepper to taste, and serve.


The Secret Recipe Club is a great way to find new blogs and bloggy friends… and of course, some pretty awesome recipes! Find out how to join here.



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Stuffed Shells… With Pumpkin, Naturally!

October 10, 2011 By

Even though I love stuffed shells - Who doesn’t? It’s pasta in a cute little package. - I have never actually made them, not even once in my entire life. I’ve collected quite a few recipes for different variations thereof - chicken, tuna, fish, and more - but I’ve never actually buckled down and really tried one of the recipes.

The only thing holding me back? The shells. I know, silly, right? For one thing, I usually prefer to buy pasta that is whole grain or semi-whole grain, and those varieties don’t usually come in the jumbo shell size. For another, I almost never buy anything at the grocery store unless it’s on sale, and for some reason, jumbo shell pasta never goes on sale. Soooo… I never bought shells, and therefore never made any stuffed shells.

pumpkin stuffed shells

The Secret Recipe Club this month was the impetus I needed to actually get to the store, buy some shells and try a stuffed shell recipe for once! Funny how a deadline will do that for you. I found an amazing recipe for butternut squash and sage cannelloni on my assigned blog, Katherine Martinelli, and knew instantly that it would work perfectly for my October theme of Pumpkins, Spice and Everything Nice.

What does that have to do with shells? Just do a mental leap with me from cannelloni to shells; it’s not really that far of a leap, both shapes of pasta having that desirable stuff-able quality. For one thing, my store didn’t have cannelloni, and for another, I decided to fulfill my lifelong dream of making stuffed shells.

And I did, only I didn’t use butternut squash, I used - and I know this just shocks you - pumpkin! And, um, I didn’t use sage either; I had a bottle of Chinese 5-spice in my cupboard that had been calling my name and seemed like the perfect enhancement for a savory pumpkin dish.

And, Katherine, I really did make your recipe, I swear it! But the adaptations didn’t end there. Since I am currently dairy-free right now, I had to come up with substitutions for the dairy products. What I used:

  • chicken broth instead of heavy cream
  • faux buttermilk instead of sour cream (I would have used plain non-dairy yogurt if I had it on hand)
  • extra-virgin olive oil for the butter
  • rice milk for the whole milk
  • mozzarella for my DH (because that’s what I had) instead of parmesan; no cheese for mine

I call my version of the Bechamel Sauce “Poor Man’s Bechamel”, not because rice milk is any cheaper than regular whole milk - unfortunately, that is not the case! - but because rice milk is a rather poor imitation of the real thing. If you drink cow’s milk, do yourself a favor and use that instead. But if you’re dairy-free for any reason, non-dairy milks make a fair representation of bechamel sauce.

pumpkin stuffed shells


Pumpkin Stuffed Shells with Chinese Five-Spice

adapted from Katherine Martinelli

Ingredients

Pumpkin Filling:

  • 2 small-medium pie pumpkins
  • 1/2 head garlic
  • 1 tsp Chinese Five-Spice Powder
  • 2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
  • 1/2 cup “buttermilk” (milk or non-dairy milk with lemon juice) or plain yogurt or sour cream
  • salt and pepper to taste

Poor Man’s Bechamel:

  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • 4 cups rice milk
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp Chinese Five Spice Powder

Shells:

  • 6 oz. jumbo shells
  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese, optional

Instructions

  1. Use a sharp knife to poke holes in the pumpkin. Microwave for 1 or 2 minutes, and let cool. Using a sharp knife, cut each pumpkin in half; scoop out seeds and pulp. Place cut side down on a baking sheet. Wrap the garlic head in foil and place on the sheet with the pumpkins. Bake at 350F until pumpkin can easily be pierced with a paring knife, and garlic is cooked through, about half an hour.
  2. Scoop out the pumpkin flesh into a large bowl. Squeeze the roasted garlic, one clove at a time, into the bowl. Add Chinese Five-Spice Powder, and stir all together, mashing the pumpkin flesh as necessary until you have the texture you desire. (You can also use a stick blender to puree it.)
  3. Pour the pumpkin mixture into a pot, and stir in the broth and buttermilk or yogurt. Bring to a boil; then simmer until desired thickness and consistency is achieved. Salt and pepper to taste; set aside.
  4. Heat oil in a large deep skillet over medium-low heat; add flour one TBSP at a time, whisking until well blended. Slowly stir in rice milk until it is incorporated. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly and simmer until for about 10-15 minutes. Stir in seasonings.
  5. Cook and drain shells according to package directions.
  6. Spread a thin layer of the bechamel sauce in a 9×13 and a square pan. Place the shells on the sauce. Gently stuff each shell with a spoonful or two of the pumpkin filling. Spoon the remaining bechamel sauce over all the stuffed shells. Bake at 350F for about 20 minutes; add mozzarella cheese if using, and bake for 5 minutes or until cheese is melted and lightly browned.


I absolutely love Katherine’s whole concept of using squash as the filling for the pasta, and my next butternut squash is going to go to making this recipe with her chosen flavors of squash, sage, and nutmeg.

pumpkin stuffed shells

This is not my normal QUICK dinner recipe, which is what I love about the SRC: It forces you to step outside of your comfort zone on occasion and try something new.

It’s also not super EASY, with the multiple steps. Katherine’s cookery is a lot fancier than my usual lazy style, but I also love to have recipes like this for special occasions and guests.

It’s not CHEAP, either, that’s for sure. Like I said, pasta shells are not usually in the budget, and I had to use a whole carton of rice milk for the bechamel. Totally worth it, though!

As far as pasta recipes go, though, it’s pretty HEALTHY with the super-food pumpkin serving as the main component.

Does the Secret Recipe Club Sound like fun? Read more about it here.



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Tuna Pasta Salad for Spring

April 9, 2011 By

Move over, mayo! We don’t need you anymore. Not when we have deliciousness like garlicky vinaigrette to dress our salad! Not when the weather is {finally} whispering spring into our ears. Not when lighter fare beckons our taste buds.

Oh, no, we don’t need mayo. Not for tuna pasta salad, anyway!

Tuna Pasta Salad with Vinaigrette

adapted from Real Simple magazine

12 oz. bowtie pasta

1/2 cup olive oil, divided

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 carrot, peeled and shredded

1 stalk celery, finely chopped

2 TBSP dried parsley (or 1/3 cup fresh)

2 TBSP lemon juice

1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1/2 tsp salt

2 6oz cans tuna, drained

Cook pasta according to package directions. Drain, and leave in colander. Using pot from the pasta, heat 1/4 cup olive oil over medium-high heat. Add garlic and heat for about 30 seconds. Add in carrot and celery and stir and cook until vegetables are softened. Add parsley, lemon juice, remaining olive oil, salt and pepper. Stir together well, then add tuna. Remove from heat and stir in the pasta until thoroughly combined. Serve warm or chill for several hours and serve cold.

Need a QUICK weeknight dinner on a beautiful spring day? This is what you’re looking for! Definitely less than half an hour start to finish, and you can’t really ask for more than that!

It’s just as EASY as traditional tuna salad, despite cooking the veggies just a bit. And did you notice it uses only one pot? Less clean-up!

The fact that it doesn’t use meat makes it a CHEAP dinner. I try to serve pasta once a week because it is a great frugal option that keeps me from having to buy quite as much meat.

It’s HEALTHY as is, and can be even healthier if you add more vegetables (peas come to mind). Be sure to use a whole grain pasta, or one like Barilla Plus, which is my personal favorite. Homemade is even better (but negates the quick and easy aspect!).

Sharing at Katherine Martinelli’s, and Ultimate Recipe Swap.

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What to do With Leftover Chicken

August 5, 2010 By

If there’s a good enough sale, I love to buy chicken in bulk because there’s so much you can do with it, and every part is useful, down to the bones and skin. I can’t always indulge in huge packages of chicken due to limited freezer space, but I love it when I can! Recently I bought a large package of chicken leg quarters, which is not my favorite cut of chicken, but is not without its merits. I cooked up the majority in the crockpot, which we ate for dinner and lunch the next day, and then cooked up the remaining pieces in the oven. I saved the bones and skin to make some chicken stock, and used the leftover pieces of chicken for dinner the next night. A lot of mileage out of that one package!

I really wanted to make this Creamy Lemon Pasta with Chicken with the extra leg quarters of chicken, but I had no goat cheese so that didn’t work out. On to plan B (find another yummy, delicious recipe for Chicken Pasta Salad), which proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. Searching through hundreds of online Chicken Pasta Salad theme and variations was exhausting and yielded a great deal of recipes calling for ingredients I either didn’t have or didn’t want to use. The search was not without its benefits, though, as I began to collect ideas from individual recipes and eventually combined them into one yummy best-of-all Chicken Pasta Salad.

I was nervous about the dressing in the salad up until the very moment it was served, but that was unnecessary worry on my part: it was creamy and delicious with just the right tang and flavor. This pasta salad would be great with other vegetables like tomatoes, carrots or cucumbers, but it’s delicious just as it is. Experiment to come up with your own best-of-all Chicken Pasta Salad!

Best Chicken Pasta Salad
1/2 lb pasta, such as fusilli or macaroni
1 cup cubed or shredded cooked chicken
1 small-medium zucchini, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1/2 cup buttermilk or buttermilk substitute (1/2 cup milk with 2 tsp vinegar or lemon juice)
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 TBSP lemon juice
1 tsp dried dill weed (or 1 TBSP fresh dill)
1/2 tsp garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste

Cook Pasta according to package directions. While it is boiling, place chicken and vegetables in large serving bowl. Mix remaining ingredients together well. Drain and rinse the pasta and add it to the serving bowl. Pour dressing over all ingredients and stir until well combined. Chill before serving.

This is a great weeknight dinner, served with fresh fruit or raw vegetables on the side, and perhaps some muffins or rolls. It’s also very refreshing for those dog days of summer, most of which seem to happen in August!

If you already have leftover cooked chicken, this is a great QUICK recipe that makes good use of it. Buy chicken in bulk, cook it at once, and freeze the extra for quick weeknight suppers like this. Also, this is a great make-ahead recipe: we ate it for lunch the next day and it was even better!

It’s EASY, too. The most labor intensive part is chopping up all the vegetables, so if you really want to avoid that, buy some already chopped up.

Using up leftovers is always CHEAP! And using meat in a pasta dish like this extends its serving size by quite a bit, bulking it up with the pasta and vegetables.

It’s very HEALTHY, too: no mayonnaise or bottled dressing in the sauce, which means you don’t have to worry about extraneous unhealthy ingredients that might be lurking about. The more vegetables you use, the healthier it will be. Make sure the past is a nice healthy pasta with at least some whole grains.

Find more cheap dinner ideas at:

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Chicken with a Tang

March 10, 2010 By

Spaghetti is never on the menu around here, because my DH can’t have tomato sauce. Stinks, doesn’t it?! For most people, spaghetti is a good old standby for dinner, reliable, easy, quick, and cheap. Don’t feel sorry for me, though, because I’ve been forced to get creative, and that’s always a good thing. I’ve learned how to make all kinds of different sauces for spaghetti noodles, some of them good, some of them… well, not.

This one is one of the more successful ones: creamy and tangy with lots of flavor, and pretty healthy to boot. It’s also very quick, especially if you have shredded or cubed chicken on hand. (Hint: Buy whole chickens when they’re on sale, cook them in your crockpot all day, and store the shredded chicken in the freezer to use for quick weeknight dishes like this. Added bonus: use the bones to make some yummy chicken broth.)

Tangy Yogurt Chicken
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cooked and shredded
2 cups chicken broth or stock
1 tsp lemon pepper
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup plain yogurt

Whisk together chicken broth, lemon pepper and flour in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring until thickened. Blend in yogurt and stir until smooth. Add shredded chicken, stirring to combine.

You can serve this sauce over some healthy spaghetti noodles (I like Barilla Plus; whole wheat is even better) or over mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, or even rice.

See what a great QUICK recipe this is? No time at all, especially if the chicken is already prepped and ready to go.

Very EASY, also, I think just as easy as the typical tomato sauce… but a lot more fun!

Just as CHEAP as regular spaghetti, especially if you use homemade chicken broth, which costs next to nothing.

Pretty HEALTHY, especially with the use of yogurt. Add a little lemon juice for extra tang… and vitamin C!

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You Know it’s Autumn When…

November 2, 2009 By

…you eat pumpkin at every meal. Or practically every meal. That’s what it’s been like around here lately, not that I’m complaining! I love pumpkin. And I will miss it when it’s gone for the winter… sniff sniff.

Pumpkin is definitely not reserved for pumpkin pies anymore. It seems like every year, people discover new things they can do with pumpkins: muffins, waffles, pancakes, pies, custard, pudding, mousse, the list goes on and on. You may have noticed most items on that list were desserts, but pumpkin is not even reserved for the dessert tray anymore. It has become the featured star in a number of entrees and side dishes for the dinner table.

Because of my DH’s colitis, he cannot have any highly acidic foods, including tomatoes and tomato sauce. (On a side note, he can have ketchup, which is odd, but I guess that’s because the life has been boiled out of the poor tomato by the time it becomes ketchup!) As you can imagine, that eliminates a lot of Italian food, especially that standard busy-mom classic: spaghetti. Nope, no spaghetti around here. When we have pasta, I have to get creative with sauces, which is actually not a bad thing, because I like to be creative.

So when I found this recipe for pumpkin pasta sauce in my January 2009 Woman’s Day, I was super excited! I was skeptical, to be honest, but variations of Alfredo sauce get old and I was ready to try something new. I was mostly nervous that my DH would hate it, but fortunately, that fear did not come true: he actually loved it! The first time I made it almost exactly as the recipe requires, including the sausage, the sugar and the sweet spices (the alliteration was not intentional, by the way!). I left out the broccoli because that is yet one more thing DH cannot have, but it was great anyway.

This time around, I did not have sausage and I wanted the pasta to be a side dish, not the main meal. So I eliminated the sausage, sugar and sweet spices (there goes that alliteration again) and made it a savory pumpkin sauce instead. Can I just say: YUM! My DH even said that it reminded him of mac ‘n’ cheese, which, as my sister says, is high praise from him, seeing that mac ‘n’ cheese is pretty much his all-time favorite food ever. Even though I used fresh pureed pumpkin, it wasn’t a real strong flavor, which is good if you’re not a huge pumpkin fan. The dish basically tasted like creamy noodles with a slightly spicy flavor.

Savory Pumpkin Pasta Sauce
1 lb pasta noodles (I used elbow macaroni; any short sturdy noodle will work)
1/2 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup milk
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder
dash of paprika
1 TBSP freshly grated parmesan

Cook the pasta noodles according to the directions on the package. While the noodles are boiling, mix heavy cream, whole milk (you can use 1 1/4 cups half and half to replace those two ingredients) and pumpkin in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Stir until smooth, and bring to a boil, stirring often so the milk doesn’t burn. Allow to simmer for several minutes, stirring often, until mixture is slightly thickened. Add spices and stir to blend well. Drain noodles and dump them into a serving bowl. Pour sauce over noodles and stir to cover them completely. Sprinkle freshly grated Parmesan cheese over noodles and serve.

Optional: Because I was using fresh pumpkin and it was still somewhat stringy, I put the sauce in the blender and pulsed it a few times before mixing it with the noodles. If you’re using canned pumpkin, this step is unnecessary, although I did find that it made the sauce thicker and creamier.

Also, you can adjust the amount of spices to your taste: I have to be careful, again because of my DH, but if you like things a little spicier, by all means, spice it up!

This is one of the QUICKest of QUICK recipes! I know sometimes my idea of “quick” isn’t the same as someone else’s, but I dont’ think anyone will quibble with me over this one! It’s pretty much just as fast as heating up a jar of spaghetti sauce - and much tastier, too!

This is even EASY-er than a white sauce or the mock Alfredo sauce I often make (I’ll have to blog about that recipe one of these days). Dump in the pan, mix and heat: easy!

CHEAP, more or less. Here’s what I paid for mine:
1/2 cup of heavy cream @ $2.85/quart: $0.35
3/4 cup whole milk @ $2.99/half-gallon: $0.28
1 cup of pumpkin @ $1.50/whole pumpkin: $0.75
1 box pasta @ I have no idea how much I spent, let’s say: $0.75 (I try to pay less than $1)
TOTAL: $2.13 (not including spices)
Not bad, especially since one whole box of pasta feeds us for several meals!

Pumpkin is a super-food, so yes, this recipe is very HEALTHY. Even the heavy cream and whole milk are healthy! As long as you’re not taking in too many calories throughout the day, fats like this are not going to make you fat.

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