Tuesday, January 13, 2015

A family favorite

Around here, I made dinner for Kelsey and Jake Monday night. We often try to do that once a week, but the holidays had put us off of our normal routine. Kelsey texted and requested her fave pasta, so a quick trip to the grocery store this afternoon was required.

I started with a salad. Since green leaf lettuce was on sale for .99 per bunch, I bought that kind. I've decided I don't like the 'wang' of pre-prepared salad stuff. I cut that up and added peeled and chopped cucumbers, sliced strawberries, and chopped pecans. I added a fabulous lite strawberry vinaigrette that I found at Kroger and would highly recommend. Chilling the salad in the fridge once it was prepared helped make it seem more restaurant quality, so you might try this if you don't like the way your salads taste at home.  (Ignore my laundry basket and steam mop in the background - real life people, you know.)

Kelsey also requested one pot pasta, a recipe that I came up with a few years ago when she first decided to be a vegetarian. It's super simple, but the mix of flavors is pretty great. Cook bow tie pasta until tender, then add 1 small jar of basil pesto, 1 can of black olives (rinsed, drained, and sliced), 1 can of chickpeas (rinsed and drained), and 1 can of artichoke hearts (rinsed, drained, and torn into pieces). Add the mixture to the warm pasta and stir until well-coated. You can also add sundried tomatoes, baby corn, mushrooms, and rotisserie chicken if you'd like. Tonight, I kept it simple with just Kelsey's fave ingredients.

I also baked a loaf of Kroger's French bread and dotted it with butter.

Dinner tonight was really easy, but I thought it was a worthy recipe to share with you. If you're looking for a 15 minute meal for your family, you might give this one a try.

3 comments: