Citrus Granola Parfait

Are you on Pinterest? If your answer is "no", you probably need to be checking it out. I love being able to go to an online resource that allows me to create virtual "boards", label them according to my own personal interests and when I'm surfing the internet for interesting things in line with my interests, I can save them (pin them) to my boards and have the original source to link to. This can be a recipe, a product, a hairdo or even just a great piece of photography. The options are broad and the site is so easy to maneuver. I'm so hooked. I've found new blogs and a wealth of creativity and inspiration.

I could eat breakfast for every meal and be entirely happy. Breakfast for snacks works too. One of the recipes that I pinned this past week was a citrus granola from The Tolerant Vegan that she featured as a parfait coupled with yogurt. I'm not so sure where this compulsion to "make this as soon as possible" comes from but I suspect if you're reading this you totally get it.

This recipe made enough to make 4 generous parfaits but now that I've made it and tried it, the next batch will be multiplied to have enough around to last for a month.

Recipe adapted from Oprah.com

zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 lime
zest of 1 orange
2 tablespoons grape seed oil
4 tablespoons orange juice
4 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoon lime juice
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup raw walnuts, chopped
1/4 cup almonds, chopped
1/4 cup unsweetened dried coconut
1/4 cup flax seed
1/4 cup dried apricots, chopped
1/4 cup dried cranberries
16 ounces yogurt (I used Greek yogurt)

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees fahrenheit.
Combine all of the ingredients except the yogurt together in a large bowl Spread in a 9x13 pan (or cookie sheet)

Bake for 15 minutes and give it a stir. Bake for another 15 minutes. Cool completely. To make

parfaits, layer yogurt and granola finishing with the granola. I love the fresh taste of the citrus in this granola. The lime especially comes through - it'll put a smile on your face and leave you wanting more.

 

Mexican Chicken Casserole

Spring inspires me to get in the cupboards and use up alot of the accumulated cans of things that were so important to get for a recipe that just somehow never materialized. When Psychgrad put up a Mexican style dish it reminded me of how much I've come to love Mexican flavours. I have to admit I honestly don't know but when I think of Mexican food the ingredients that come to mind are beans, chili peppers, tomatoes, and cilantro. I had some ground chicken and turkey in the house so I just started to layer and the end result was amazing. You don't need a recipe to create something fantastic; a good pallet helps and some imagination and you're good to go.

1 lb (450 g) ground chicken
1 lb (450 g) ground turkey
1/2 large onion, diced
1 red pepper, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 14 oz can black beans
1 14 oz can kidney beans
1 28 oz can diced tomatoes
1 7 oz tin tomato paste
1 Tbsp chili flakes
2 Tbp taco seasoning
2 Tbsp dried cilantro (you could use fresh)
taco chips
12 oz mix of pepper jack, mozarella and cheddar cheese
3 Tbsp olive oil

1.  In a large saucepan on medium heat, fry onions and red pepper in olive oil until soft (3 minutes).  Add garlic and mix well.
2.  Add ground chicken and turkey and cook until no longer pink. 
3.  Continue to layer each of the ingredients (i.e. add slowly) combining the flavours as you go up to and including the dried cilantro.  Simmer for 10 minutes.  Check seasonings - add more heat or taco seasoning to your taste.
4.  Put a layer of taco chips on the bottom of a large (11x14) oven dish and top with the casserole mixture.  Top with a layer of taco chips and finish with the cheese.
5.  Bake in a 350 degree oven  for approximately 40 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Note:  This recipe is enough for 6-8 hungry people.  You can easily cut it in half and add or delete ingredients as you wish.  Use jalapeno peppers if you have them and if you want more heat, leave the seeds in the peppers.

Quesadillas & Sweet Potato Chips with Lime

Only a small handful of friends even know that I have a food blog. Usually when I take pictures of food around friends, they just chalk it up to me being strange.  But, when I invited friends for dinner a couple of weekends ago and started taking pictures, they immediately said, "Do you have a food blog?"

Uhhh....what?  I'm just taking pictures...why would you assume that I have a...what are they called....a food blog?

Yeah.  I'm not a good liar.

For this meal, I wanted to be as close to vegan as possible.  I knew that my guests would eat dairy products when out at friends, but I'd really prefer to make my guests feel as comfortable (and unconflicted) as possible when eating at my home.

As an appetizer, I served some melba rounds with preserved bruschetta.  Everyone that I serve this bruschetta to seems to really like it.  Personally, I'm not a big fan.

For the main, I wanted to do something interactive.  I think it sets an informal tone while allowing guests to customize their own meal.  This is particularly useful when you have guests that have food restrictions and are fussy eaters.  Of course, you don't get the 'wow factor' that you might get when you put down nicely plated food or even set out a large dish for a family-style dinner.  But, you can always add in these elements in your side dishes or for the dessert.

For the main, I prepared a mise-en-place of ingredients for quesadillas.  The selection of ingredients included black beans, mushrooms, shallots, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, chipotles in adobo sauce and vegan cheese (Daiya).  

Daiya is a Canadian-based cheese company that is known among vegans as being one of the better options.  It started appearing in Ottawa a couple of years ago.  It melts up well, tastes good and you wouldn't even miss mozzarella if you use it.  

The picture of the quesadilla is a bit shoddy -- due to time constraints.  But, basically, we put one fajita shell on the pan, flipped it after a minute and then added the desired ingredients.  Then, the second fajita goes on top. After a couple of minutes, we carefully flipped the whole thing.  I'd also recommend putting a lid on the pan while it cooks just to get a bit of steam to the cheese.


I think it went over well.  The only issue is that it wouldn't really work if you had a lot of guests because each quesadilla basically requires its own pan and you don't want people eating at different times or eating cold food while they wait for others to finish.

In addition to the quesadillas, I went with Noble Pig's Sweet Potato Chips with Lime.

Easy to make and tasted great!  I thought I might have too much with two pans of thinly sliced sweets potatoes (about 3 large).  But, they shrank down a fair bit and I'm sure if I had made more, they would have been eaten.

My guests brought a nice salad (no picture) and the meal was great!

The dessert was a bit more of an experiment. I thought it would be a calculated experiment to make trifle, which everyone loves, but use soy milk.  But I learned the hard way that soy milk doesn't work with regular instant pudding mixes the same way that milk does.  Apparently animal fat (found in milk) is required for the pudding to actually thicken up.  It probably didn't help the thickening issue that I also bought kosher instant pudding to make sure that it didn't have any gelatine in it.  Next time, I'll buy a vegan instant pudding mix.

In the end, I had to head up the milkshake-like mixture and add a lot of cornstarch (mixed into water).  Even then, it didn't thicken up until it cooled down in the freezer.   Thankfully, it worked out (despite burning some of the vanilla pudding when trying to get it to thicken.  Maybe a bit more of a creme brulee flavour than usual, but still very tasty!

I'll leave you with a photo of a recent knitting project that I completed.  A free pattern of this leaf-patterned baby blanket can be found here (if you're a Ravelry member).  The photo on the left is before blocking and the photo on the right is after blocking.

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