Balsamic Dressing

I invited my lifelong best friend's parents over to my parents house for dinner last weekend so that we could ask her dad to officiate our wedding. I was NERVOUS! LeGreg was making his spaghetti sauce and asked that I make a salad. I opted for a cucumber/tomato/mozzarella salad and assumed my parents would have some of my mom's homemade dressing in the cupboard. Ok FINE, that's a lie, I didnt really think about the dressing at all until we got home from the store, too late to turn back to buy some. After we got home, I twiddled my thumbs a bit and tried to figure out what to do. I took to my Isabel's Cantina cookbook and found just the right recipe for balsamic dressing. It was super easy, and I tossed it over the salad with a little fresh basil on top. 

1/2 c. balsamic vinegar
1Tbl packed light brown sugar
1 Tbl minced fresh rosemary
2 garlic cloves
1 c. extra virgin olive oil

Mix the vinegar, brown sugar, rosemary and garlic together. As your whisking (I used an immersion blender, which worked wonderfully), drizzle in the olive oil.

That's it!

Done!

And deelish.

Cranberry Sauce

I made this cranberry sauce last year for Thanksgiving and it was LEGIT. I went to look up the recipe to make it again this year and apparently I didn't blog about it?!?! What the WHAT?! Sometimes I fail myself.

Ingredients

• 12 ounces cranberries
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup orange juice

Directions

In a medium sized saucepan over medium heat, dissolve the sugar in the orange juice. Stir in the cranberries and cook until the cranberries start to pop (about 10 minutes). Remove from heat and place sauce in a bowl. Cranberry sauce will thicken as it cools.  

 

I mean...seriously? Does it GET easier than that?! No. No it does not. I'm far from opposed to can-shaped cranberry jello, but this one takes the cake. And sounds fancy. You could be all "Oh, this? It's homemade cranberry sauce. I made it at home and it's fancy", when it actually only took you 3 ingredients and 10 mins. I doubled the recipe last time and it made a TON. We had....12 people? -ish? I probably didn't need to double it, but the leftovers were great on...everything. All the things. 

Easy Pesto

There once was a boy named LeGreg. Soon after he started dating his girlfriend, he met her mom and they discovered their mutual love of cooking and gardening. "I have to buy her this special basil plant! She'll love it!" he said. His girlfriend thought it charming that he wanted to buy her mother a gift, so she went along with it. The two of them raided every nursery in Chico to find this one variety of basil. Pesto basil, he says it's called. "It doesn't have that weird licorice taste that regular basil has and it makes really good...PESTO!". His girlfriend wasn't convinced that it was worth all the effort to find, but he insisted. And find, he did.

He gave my mom the little basil plant. It has light green leaves, with a creamy white trim. He certainly didn't need any additional points with her, but she loved the gift and planted it not in the herb garden, but right smack dab in the middle of the yard for all to see.

The plant likes her yard about as much as she likes him and grew to be a huge shrub (at the bottom of it in the pic, you can see a brick for size)! I couldn't let ALL that basil go to waste, so yesterday was the day that I was to make pesto for the first time everrrrrr. DUN DUN DUN!! I dug around and settled on this recipe.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup almonds
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 1/2 cups fresh basil leaves
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 pinch ground nutmeg
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C). Place almonds on a cookie sheet, and bake for 10 minutes, or until lightly toasted.
2. In a food processor, combine toasted almonds, garlic, basil, olive oil, nutmeg, salt and pepper. Process until a coarse paste is formed.

I doubled the recipe and it made about 1-1/2c of sauce, and I used a blender. My mom made her own version, the typical garlic/pine nuts/Parmesan cheese. MINE WAS TOTALLY BETTER!! Super good. The almonds gave it a nice nutty flavor (bonus: they're good for you!!). I haven't actually eaten it on anything yet, but the taste test was delish and I'm super stoked about it. Since I used a total of about 1/100th of that basil bush, I'll probably be making a ton more soon. Success!

Charbroiled Carne Asada Tacos

Once again, my pal Isabel pulled through!

Ingredients

-¾ cup canola oil
-1 cup teriyaki sauce
-6 garlic cloves, minced
-2 lbs skirt steak
-12 6-in corn or flour tortillas
-1 cup grated monterey jack cheese
-1.5 cups salsa
-avocado
-chile verde sauce

Directions

Combine the oil, teriyaki sauce, and garlic in a glass baking dish. Add the steak, turn to coat, and cover with plastic wrap. Marinate overnight, turning once or twice (I just marinated it for a few hours, but it was plenty).

Remove the steak from the refrigerator 15-30 mins before cooking

Preheat your grill to med-high, or heat a grill pan over med-high heat

Remove the steak from the marinade and discard the marinade. Grill the steak for 4-5 mins per side for med-rare. The steak should have grill marks and be pink in the center. Let the steak rest on a cutting board for about 5 mins. Keep the grill on.

Slice the meat thinly, across the grain, then cut into 1-in pieces.

Heat the tortillas on the grill for 1 min, turn, and sprinkle each with some grated cheese. When the cheese has melted, remove the tortillas from the grill and fill each with some steak (the recipe actually calls for you to make some avocado chile verde sauce stuff. nah. I just broke it up and added each separately. Bomb, dude).

Oh man, the meat was SO good!! That may or may not have partially been due to the fact that I went to buy the meat at like 6:30am on a saturday just as the butcher was putting it out. A little bat of the eyelashes and he went back and got me the freshest that he had. Pretty sure it was still pulsing. Awesome. The marinade is so flavorful that I was actually kind of shocked that I made it! And it was super easy. A keeper, for sure. Looked and tasted totally impressive and it was a cinch to make!

Salmon with Papaya-Mango Salsa (serves 4)

From Isabel's Cantina

Salmon seems to be the easiest fish to make. That’s probably because it’s the only fish I’ve made. Whatever, it’s good and I know I like it.

Ingredients

-4 6oz skinless salmon filets
-3 Tbl canola oil
-½ cup soy joy sauce (recipe below)
-2 cups baby spinach or arugula (arugula is kinda spicy and, while I don’t mind it in mixed greens, the flavor is a bit overwhelming on it’s own. In my opinion)
-Papaya mango salsa (I used pre-made salsa)

Directions

Heat a large saute pan, preferably nonstick, over med-high heat until hot. Rub the salmon fillets on both sides with the oil. Place the salmon in the pan and cook, undisturbed, for at least 3 mins before turning. Continue to cook until the fish is slightly underdone in the center (use a fork to pull apart the flakes for a peek inside), about 3 mins, depending on the thickness of the fish. Drizzle the soy joy sauce over the fish, turn the salmon over, and swirl the pan to nicely coat the salmon with the sauce for a minute or two. The fish should be crisp and caramelized on the outside and moist and flaky on the inside.

Divide the spinach among 4 plates and transfer a piece of salmon on top of each plate of greens. Top each piece of salmon with some salsa.

Soy Joy Sauce

Ok, I thought that this was different than it is, and I totally didn’t have all the ingredients. It was still really good though. I pretty much threw all of the following (that I had) into a blender: What I managed to whip together was totally worth licking the plate! The cookbook says that it is a ‘million and one uses’ sauce, great as a marinade, stir fry sauce, etc.

-¼ cup soy sauce
-2 Tbl dark sesame oil (uh nope. I think I used canola oil)
-2 Tbl honey
-2 Tbl minced fresh ginger
-1 garlic clove
-½ cup fresh cilantro (didn’t have any and don’t really like it soooo….I left it out)
-½ teas chile flakes
-¼ cup cold water