A Welcome Success – Penne with Greens

After my epic fail of a dinner on Sunday night (vegetable soup), I was ready to redeem myself with Monday’s dinner.

This is a really simple recipe with a great end product. It’s vegetarian, since we added some cheese, but can easily be modified to be vegan (no cheese) or even sounds good to me as neither with a little spicy sausage crumbles or bacon.

Penne with Greens

about 2 servings

Ingredients
4 ounces dried penne pasta
2 tablespoons olive oil
Greens of your choosing – I used two bunches of kale and three baby bok choy.

Optional seasonings: red pepper flakes, garlic… whatever you’d like. Personally, red pepper flakes are not optional.
Optional topping: freshly grated parmesan

1.) Cook pasta. While waiting for water to boil, wash/chop greens and let dry a bit.
2.) Don’t start to cook the greens until you have put the penne in the boiling water.
3.) If using fresh garlic, saute garlic in one tablespoon of olive oil until fragrant and then add in your greens.
4.) Stir fry greens in the olive oil and add a little bit of water. Once cooked to just before your liking, add in the other tablespoon of olive oil, red pepper flakes, and other dry seasonings. Stir fry until done.
5.) Serve over pasta with grated cheese, if desired.

Slow Food Huron Valley – Silvio’s Meet-Up

Tuesday night, myself and Tim headed out to Silvio’s Organic Pizza in Ann Arbor for a meet-up for Slow Food Huron Valley, our local chapter of Slow Food USA.

I had been meaning to get more involved, but have only been able to make it out to one other meet-up so far, that one being back in October at the Grange.

SFHV has a lot of events coming up! I’ve got to add a couple to my calendar. I plan to make sure that I attend more events, volunteer, and hopefully make some more friends in town. (I’m currently almost friendless ).

Changing the Way We Eat: TEDx Manhattan Viewing Party on February 12: I’d really like to go to this, but I’m not sure if I can make it. We’re going to a concert in Royal Oak that night with some friends, and they’ll probably be with us all day.

I’ll definitely be going to the Michigan Good Food Film Festival (February 28th) though. I heard about this last year and I’ve been looking forward to it since then.

Silvio’s was one of the places here that I’d never been to before. I didn’t know until the other day that they had more than pizza, which makes me really happy, since I’m not a huge pizza fan in the first place.

Whole Wheat Pasta with Marinara Sauce
I think I misspoke when I ordered a half order, since I definitely was given a full one! I had every intention of only finishing half and saving the rest, but once I tasted it, that idea was thrown out the window.

Puff Pastry with vanilla filling, chocolate syrup
I think the best way to describe this is just om nom nom nom. So good.

Overall, it was a great dinner and very good conversation. I think Tim has even made a new friend to have okonomiyaki with!

We’ll be stopping by at Silvio’s again in the future for sure. Hopefully some of the vegan pizza or lasagna is in store

Busy Sunday

Busy Sunday.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t do lazy Sundays. Unless you’re talking about Lazy Sunday, which is pretty good. It also makes me want to have a cupcake….

Alright, so back to this weekend and today. On Saturday, Tim, I, and three friends left Ann Arbor at 4:30am to head up to Crystal Mountain for a day of skiing. It was super cold, single digits all day. Thankfully the sun was out and it wasn’t windy. Best part? Getting to stop by the Roadhouse Mexican Restaurant in Benzonia, MI, a couple miles away from Crystal Mountain.

Last week was less than stellar on the working out and getting stuff done. It is really hard for me to feel motivated to do anything when I get home from work and it is dark before you know it. Add in getting to work when it is still dark out and it’s a recipe for disaster.

So today, after breakfast, an Irish Cuisine cooking class at Hollanders, and grocery shopping (Co-op, Whole Foods, and Tsai Grocery), I spent about three hours cooking meals for tonight and the rest of the week.

Spaghetti with meat sauce
Spaghetti with marinara and zucchini
Crushed Lentil Soup
Japanese style curry, with beef, potatoes, and carrot

Tonight we had the spaghetti and marinara sauce, both from Al Dente Pasta (Whitmore Lake, MI). I used some of the ground beef from Tim’s uncle in his, and sautéed up a bunch of zucchini for mine. We have enough sauce leftover for another serving of each.

Bedtime soon, up early tomorrow to work out with Sarah!

Penne with Salmon

I got the idea for this dinner at around 10am. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like making it for lunch… but I spend the rest of the day excited about it.

Penne w/ Salmon & Veggies

2 ounces penne pasta
1/4 cup canned salmon
1/4 cup frozen corn
1 cup baby spinach
1 clove garlic, pressed
About 10 snow peas
1 tbsp EVOO

While penne is cooking (8-10 min, I think), heat EVOO in a pan over med heat. Add snow peas, garlic, and corn. Add a bit of water from the pasta so it doesn’t burn. I added the salmon next, then spinach, gave it a few swirls, and turned the burner off. Put a lid on the pan and let the residual heat wilt the spinach. When the pasta is done, drain and add to the veggie mix. Sprinkle with red pepper flakes.

Noodle Days

Penne pasta
Fire-roasted tomato marinara (w/ LOTS of garlic )
Zucchini
Pesto Focaccia Roll

Tonight was chicken noodle soup made with leftovers from the chicken I roasted on Sunday night. Unfortunately I didn’t have any homemade stock for soup this time, but I definitely will make some within the next few days so I’ll have some waiting for next time.

Noodles tomorrow? Well, probably for lunch….

Time to Change: Food Safety Bill S510

While sitting at my desk and eating my lunch, I’m catching up on the recent passing of the Food Safety Bill S510 by the Senate. Both Michigan senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow voted yes, so that is a good point for the Mitten. I wouldn’t want to have a Senator in my state vote against his constituents having safer food.

How did your Senator vote?

As I’m eating my whole wheat penne pasta with sauce made with organic fire-roasted tomatoes from a BPA-free can and fake beef soy crumbles…. I can’t help but remember that I was not always this way. Junior high was the first time I was actually given a choice about what to eat for lunch and the first time there were choice outside of the one entree hot lunch line.

And what did I choose? A Countrytime Lemonade and a Twix bar. No wonder why I was such a bitchy 8th grader. In high school came the the Mountain Dew, 99cent giant cookies, and popcorn chicken. Or, nothing at all for lunch.

How do you change? How did I change? How did I start thinking that we need to reform school lunches and shouldn’t allow soft drink vending machines in schools? How did the person that put off taking that mandatory semester of gym until spring of senior year start to think that we need phys. ed mandatory every semester? I don’t know really know.

All I know is that there comes a time when you have to start to give a crap.

… and with that, here is my lunch:

Penne pasta w/ ‘meat’ sauce
Clementine
Banana
Strawberry Fruit leather
and a shameless ad for Real Time Farms

Red & Green

Penne Pasta with Italian Sausage and Rustic Roasted Garlic Sauce

pasta: bulk bins at People’s Food Co-op
Italian sausage: Ernst Farms (Farmer’s Market Stand)
Rustic Roasted Garlic Sauce: Al Dente Pasta, Whitmore Lake MI.

I really like Ernst Farms and what I have been able to buy from them– Italian sausage, eggs, stone ground wheat. This year I have pre-ordered a turkey from them to bring to my Gramma’s house for Thanksgiving (that way I don’t feel guilty about eating a turkey whose origins I don’t know). I am a little bit worried about Christmas time, so maybe I will have to bring one again then.

To bring the green part into this, last week I almost got into an argument with someone about whether or not the Keurig coffee maker is wasteful or not. Really? It’s a coffee make that can only make one serving of coffee and leaves behind a little plastic cup and some foil lid each time. Of course this is wasteful. I get it, you’re not wasting a pot of coffee on just yourself, but you’re making more mess doing it.

I googled and I googled and I could not find any source online (at least after a good 30 minutes of looking…) that told me definitively what plastic the cups are made from. The other person’s argument is that they had the “number and arrows” on the bottom so it is recyclable. I did see one at Target on Saturday, but the box of coffee was resealable so I didn’t open it.

Let’s get some facts out there:
1.) “Number and arrows” does not equal recyclable. This means that it is made of plastic and number denotes the type of plastic that it is.
2.) Not all recycling programs take all types of plastic. Most take #1 and #2 (think soda bottles) only. Some take #5 (ex: yogurt tubs).
3.) Just because you put it in your recycling bin, does not mean that it gets recycled.

We’re lucky in Ann Arbor that our recycling program takes almost all types, with the exception of #3. However, most are not like this (ours just changed very recently and became single-stream).

There is a reason why “reduce” and “reuse” come before “recycle” in that little saying–they are the first options you should look at, before recycling.

Needless to say, I don’t think we will be getting a Keurig Coffee thing. We already have an industrial coffee maker (that makes about 10 cups at once) and a countertop hot water heater.

Now to get the styrofoam cups, plastic silverware, etc. out of the office kitchen.