Veggie Pot Pies

My fatigue has been really bad lately. I have been running around to the hospital for appointments and tests, picking up prescriptions, and trying to keep Mr.Surly fed. Recently, I have been brainstorming easy, heathfull, quick dinners.  This was just one of my ideas.

If I didn't feel so exhausted and worn out every minute of the day, I would have made my own pie crust. But I cheated and used a frozen pie crust, along with frozen veggies. These are so good and ridiculously quick to make. Dinner in 20-30 minutes; gotta love that.

 These are pretty filling. I only can only eat 1 10 oz ramekin, Mr.Surly can polish off two.
The possibility of veggies and spices are infinite. Use whatever you like.

Oatmeal Crusted Chicken

I am constantly thinking of new ways to prepare chicken. Since raw meat makes me squeamish, I like coatings on chicken when preparing to hide the sight of the raw meat.

I like the idea of an oatmeal coating. I am trying to eat low gluten to help my stomach bloat and I bought rolled oats from Trader Joe’s that claim to be gluten free. Oats are naturally gluten free, but oats are often processed near wheat, and the tiniest bit of wheat will contaminate the oats and be a disaster for anyone with celiac disease.

These oats from TJs claim to be processed in a wheat-free environment. Even if there was a bit of wheat, it wouldn’t affect me since I do not have celiac disease. But for those of you with celiac or a gluten intolerance, these oats might be for you. I know that Bob’s Red Mill also makes gluten free oats.

Anyway, back to the chicken. Regular readers know how much I like the sweet and spicy combo. The cayenne and honey give this chicken that sweet and spiciness that I love. I wanted to eat my entire chicken breast, but my bloated stomach and gastroparesis prevented me. The topping is so good; I wanted to eat it by the spoonful.

Guest Post: Crab Cakes

Recently, I was contacted by Jenny, a seafood writer, about a guest post opportunity on my blog. I love guests posts;t gives me a day off. I'm open to anyone posting, just contact me. This guest post came at a particularly opportune time; I've been suffering from a severe inner ear infection since Sunday, and I don't see my doctor til wed morning. I can't even articulate my pain.

Anyway, I'm off topic. Like I said Jenny is seafood writer. You can check out her blog here. I was excited when she suggested writing about crab cakes. I'm not a big fan of seafood, but I have a weakness for crab cakes. With the cayenne pepper in Jenny's crab cakes
I'm drooling and thinking about making them as soon as I feel better. And now for Jenny and her wonderful crab cakes....



Now Prepare Crab Cakes in Your Kitchen

Have you ever thought of having yummy sea food without rushing to a sea food restaurant? Have you ever admired of having exotic sea food at your own residence? Seafood is really delicious and the best part is when you can prepare it in your kitchen. It’s quite obvious that you will really get wonder-struck when you see exotic sea food on your dining table and your mouth will definitely start watering when you see lobsters or clams grilled in front of you. Now you can prepare delicious crab cakes with great ease and here I will tell you how to cook zesty crab cakes in your kitchen.

Crab cakes are made of crab meat which is really stimulating and yummy to eat. Your guests can’t help praising you and your skill when you serve them with delicious crab cakes at a party. Crabs are really tasty and instead of restricting yourself to a strict diet, start preparing around 10 crab cakes and satisfy your tastebuds.

So, take a look at this crab cake recipe. You just need to collect the ingredients and have patience in cooking.

Wicked Good Salsa

This recipe is courtesy of my good friend, Carolyn. A few years ago she had a housewarming party and this was one of the foods she served. It was so good I couldn’t stop eating it. I had to have the recipe and she kindly obliged. I was skeptical of the Italian dressing in salsa but Carolyn assured me that it was necessary to the recipe.

This salsa is so addicting. I like to use Tostitos Scoops because it makes for an appealing presentation. A perfect snack for a weekend of watching football.

Black Bean Lasagna

This lasagna is something I just threw together the other day when I didn’t feel like making much for dinner. I’ve seen lasagna rolls on various blogs and, one day, wanted to take a stab at making my own. I don’t like ground beef and I knew if there was no protein in this dish there was a chance Mr. Surly would find this dinner neither filling nor satiating. In order to curb and avoid possible post-dinner kitchen foraging, I added black beans for protein.

Now, black beans are on my “avoid” list for the low oxalate diet, but I haven’t been following the diet too strictly recently. My GI doctor ordered more tests, and wants me to eat as I normally would to get accurate results. I have been eating all the chocolately treats I can in the meantime. This accounts for my recent scrumptious Chocolate Stout Cupcakes post.

This meal was easy to prepare, while my noodles boiled I mixed up the filling, and seasoned the tomato sauce. The rolls aren’t too hard to assemble. If you roll too tightly the filling pops out but that’s not a big deal; you just pinch it back in.

Both Mr.Surly and I enjoyed this, though he did comment it could use more spices. I thought it tasted great, but with my GI issues I have acquired a very bland palate, much safer for my GI tract that way.


thanks for the new dish MIL :)

No Cook Pasta Sauce

This is an accidental recipe I made up the other night simply because I wasn’t feeling well. I had been in pain all day and just couldn’t bring myself to make dinner. As the time drew closer for Mr.Surly to come home, I had to think of something. I decided on pasta because it’s easy to make. We don’t eat jarred marinara sauce, I like to make my own. Usually tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, spices, etc simmered together. But this particular evening I didn’t feel like cooking the sauce. I just wanted to throw it together and let it sit on the counter so I could get back to the couch and my heating pad. The following is the result, and it was really good. Light and easy, I’m definitely making this again. I think I allowed it to sit for about 2 hours.

Mediterranean Chicken and Peppers

This is one of my favorite meals for 2 reasons: 1) it's delicious and 2) it's easy. I love bell peppers and this dish is chock full of them. Plus, it has my beloved balsamic vinegar in it. And who doesn't love a dish that you just throw together, pop into the oven, and forget about it. The longest part is chopping all the peppers and that only takes a few minutes.

If you like olives, some Kalamata olives would be a tasty addition to this. I don't like olives, I find them too salty, but Mr. Surly loves them.

I have served this over quinoa, millet, couscous, and rice. Sometimes I add cubed potatoes to the dish. This dish makes a regular appearance in our menu rotation.

Pineapple Teriyaki Chicken

This week has gone by so fast for me! I'm finally getting around to editing photos and getting some posts up. I feel like I'm so far behind! I have missed reading my favorite blogs, and I plan to catch up on that this weekend.

I've been going through a lot of my recipes to see if I can deem them low oxalate. I have made this chicken many times; we really like it. I’m not sure if this is an ideal dish for a low oxalate diet. The soy sauce is on my list of foods to avoid, but I figured using just low sodium would be fine.Besides, I dilute it with pineapple juice, which is on my “good” list. ;)

I've made this with fresh pineapple and canned. Canned is obviously less work and tastes just as good. I really love sweet and spicy combinations. Don’t substitute cooking sherry for the dry sherry, they are different and cooking sherry is loaded with sodium (which is bad for a low oxalate diet). I have grilled it, cooked it in a skillet, and one time I even just tossed everything in an 8x8" glass dish and baked it at 375F. Just depends on my mood, and how tired/lazy I'm feeling.

You can serve this with rice, couscous, millet, almost any grain. I chose orzo since it's a pasta, which is on my "good" oxalate list.

Apple Mustard Chicken with Dates

I haven’t been in the kitchen much recently. Instead, I’ve been studying up on low oxalate foods and trying to come up with ideas of low oxalate dishes to make. One night I decided to throw together some “good” oxalate foods I like for dinner. I just made it up as I went along. I can’t find dates on any "good", "bad" or "limit" list, so I figured they’d be fine. Golden raisins are on the good list, but regular dark raisins aren’t on any list, so I don’t know if it’s a safe oxalate substitution. Doesn’t matter for me, since I prefer golden raisins.

Also I didn’t salt and pepper my chicken since I’m not supposed to have salt nor black pepper. I used wild rice because that is a “good” food for me; brown rice is on my “limit” list.

I think sliced almonds would be a great addition to this dish at the end. Unfortunately for me I cannot have nuts. But if I could I totally would have garnish with some sliced, toasted almonds.

Baked Falafel

This week is just dragging by for me. I think it’s because I’ve been pretty sick and lethargic this week. All I seem to want to do is sleep, and when I am awake, I struggle to keep my eyes open. Needless to say, I haven’t done much in the kitchen. I made these last week and just couldn’t muster up the energy to post about them. Today, I forced myself back in the kitchen and back to the computer.

These don’t look very pretty. They get their anemic, yellow hue from the turmeric, which isn’t necessary to the flavor, I just add it because it’s supposed to be a “healing” spice; a really good anti-inflammatory. I’ll try anything to help aide my GI issues so I usually toss this spice into a variety of foods. I don’t notice a difference in taste, just in color.

These could be fried or sauted in oil in a skillet, but since I try to minimize my stomach pain, I chose to bake them so they wouldn’t be greasy. I served mine with greek yogurt, and chipotle chile yogurt (I mixed a pureed chile and adobo sauce into plain, greek yogurt), but tzatziki would be amazing. I didn't serve them in pitas, we ate them with homemade sweet potato fries.

The hardest thing about making these is remembering to soak the chickpeas in advance, which for me, is difficult. After days of the leaving the recipe and chickpeas on the kitchen counter, I finally had to write a post-it note to myself. Guess subtlety doesn't work too well with me.

Favorite Pizza Dough

Thank goodness it's finally Friday. I have had a busy, stressful week and I'm so glad it's over. I'm exhausted; physically and mentally drained. On nights like this dinner must be easy. Usually on Friday nights we have homemade pizza. I'm not a big fan of pizza, it's always hurt my tummy, even before the GI issues began. But it's such an easy dinner option. Usually during the week I mix up this pizza dough and leave it in the fridge (it will keep up to 3 days) to make on a night when I need a quick, easy dinner. The recipe is a mixture of a bunch of recipes. I took a little from each, and after much tweaking, came up with a my preferred pizza dough.

I top our pizza with homemade pizza sauce, various roasted veggies, and fresh mozzarella cheese. So much better (and less greasy) than take out.

Eggplant Parmesan

After avoiding the kitchen all weekend, it was finally time for me to get back in it and make some food. I’m sick, tired, and still have no appetite. If it weren’t for Mr. Surly, I would be content drinking all my meals via smoothies and weight gainer shakes. But alas, I live with a constantly hungry man. I had an eggplant in the fridge that Mr. Surly bought last week, begging me to make him eggplant parmesan. I decided to make some yesterday to use up some pasta sauce I made on Friday. I really didn’t follow a recipe, I just kinda threw it all together. Mr. Surly raved about this, so I thought I’d post my guidelines so next time I can remember what I did. I prepared the eggplant and assembled the dish in the morning then popped it in the fridge until I was ready to bake it for dinner.

Apricot-Mustard Glazed Chicken

Recently, I bought the Cook's Illustrated Light and Healthy 2010 magazine. I’ve had it for a few months but have yet to make a recipe from it. This is mostly because I have been feeling ill lately and have not felt like trying out a new recipe; I’ve just been sticking to easy recipes I’m familiar with.

Finally, I decided it was time to try a new entrée recipe. I wanted to use up the apricot preserves I had from the fresh fruit tartelettes I made awhile ago, and this recipe sounded perfect; it would allow me to use up the rest of the jar of preserves that has been in my refrigerator for months. The original recipe uses 4 chicken breasts, but since there are only 2 of us, I used 2 breasts. I kept the sauce amount the same because I figured I’d just glaze the heck out of the chicken as it grilled.

I was only able to eat about ¼ of my piece, and Mr. Surly ate the rest of it. He wasn’t feeling very hungry that night (probably due to the intense heat we’ve been experiencing) so he only ate the rest of my chicken along with some fresh corn on the cob and a baked sweet potato. He didn’t comment too much about the chicken that night, other than to mumble it was “pretty good.” However, the next night he reheated the other breast and could not stop raving about how good it was, both during and after his meal. Maybe the glaze had a chance to soak in the chicken as it sat in the refrigerator, I’m not sure. I thought the chicken was really good; the glaze kept the chicken moist and the preserves added a nice sweet flavor, setting it apart from other mustard glazes I’ve used on chicken. Next time I’ll try marinating the chicken in the glaze to see if that makes any difference in flavor.

Spicy Mexican Pulled Chicken and Vegetables

I love this chicken so much I made myself sick eating too much of it. Since my stomach has trouble emptying I have to eat my meals spaced out. Because a few bites of anything causes my stomach to blow up like a balloon, my nutritionist suggested spacing out each part of my meals. I eat the vegetable, wait an hour or so, then eat the meat/protein, wait an hour or so and eat the potato/grain, etc. It’s frustrating, but I’m getting used to it. However, when it came to taco night I couldn’t help myself, I ate 3 tacos, knowing I should only have had two. I should have waited an hour before eating that third one, but it was so tasty I couldn’t wait. My stomach was painfully distended, but it was so worth it.

For lunch the next day I made nachos covered in the chicken and topped with homemade salsa. You can use this chicken as a topping for nachos, a filling for burritos, tacos, or just eat it as is. Less chipotle chiles can be used if you don’t want too much spice. It also freezes well. I usually just freeze it as is, but you could add the filling to some burritos and make frozen burritos. Unfortunately, this was gone in 2 days, with no leftovers to for me to freeze. Speaking of tacos, have you ever tried the Trader Joe’s organic hard taco shells? They are to-die-for. I will never buy the supermarket ones again. The flavor is unbelievable. If you find yourself at TJ’s, do yourself a favor and get a box.

Spicy Peanut Butter Marinated Chicken

I’ve been all about easy meals recently. I saw this recipe and decided to make it since it was easy and sounded flavorful. Yes, it needs to marinate for hours, but I can handle flipping a bag every couple hours for an entrée that will cook up fast and not dirty any dishes. Oh my, does this marinade smell amazing. Every time I opened the fridge I caught a whiff of this and would immediately start salivating. I couldn’t wait to grill this up. The chicken tasted good, it was tender and incredibly moist, but I wish the flavor had been stronger. It wasn’t bad, I just expected more because it smelled so incredible while marinating. Maybe next time I’ll let it marinate overnight instead of all day.

Vodka Cream Pasta

I’ve been bad about cooking lately. I have lots of new recipes to try but just haven’t had much energy to cook. I've been making easy meals that involve little to no preparation. This pasta is one of those dishes. I planted some basil in the spring and finally it’s leaves are big enough to use. Since this dish uses a lot of fresh basil I decided to make it. I halved the recipe because neither of us have had much of an appetite and I didn’t really want a lot of leftovers. I thought it would be heavy because of the cream sauce, but it tasted surprisingly light. Perhaps it was because I used half-n-half instead of heavy cream. I still had leftovers, and it was just as good cold as it was when I made it for dinner. Next time I might try adding red pepper flakes to give the sauce a bit of a kick.

Polenta Vegetable Lasagna

While browsing around on Tasty Kitchen, this recipe for polenta lasagna caught my eye. I’ve had polenta before and I like it, but I wasn’t really too keen on making it. Then on a recent grocery trip to Trader Joe’s I saw they sold premade polenta.

I picked it up and came home to create my own version of polenta lasagna, which turned out really tasty. I was going to freeze some leftovers, but Mr.Surly liked it so much it didn’t last very long. Next time I might try to bake or fry the polenta to see if that would help firm up the polenta a bit so it doesn't fall apart so easily. Fresh basil would be amazing in this, but unfortunately my basil plants aren't quite ready.

Chicken Millet Skillet

I had never heard of millet until I had to go gluten free awhile ago. Luckily my celiac test came back negative, but my GI doctor still had me go gluten free for 6 weeks to determine if I was gluten intolerant (turns out I’m not). 

I learned about a lot of alternative grains/pastas/flours while eating gluten free, millet being one of them. Millet is bland and I wasn’t even sure how to serve it to make it palatable. Desperate to use up some of my millet, I found this recipe on Whole Foods’ website. I made modifications to suit our tastes. I was surprised at how good this was. I really didn’t have any expectations for this, I just wanted to get rid of some millet, but wow, this was so good. Mr.Surly loved it and he requests it often, which I don’t mind because it’s so easy and quick to make.

You could probably use quinoa if you don’t have millet. If you don’t have wine, substitute with chicken broth and, if desired, stir in a Tbsp or two of white wine vinegar with the swiss chard. Kale could also be used instead of swiss chard. Next time I make this, I think I'll add some pinenuts or almonds as garnish before serving.

Mustard Chicken with Potatoes & Leeks

Wow. I love simple dishes that are full of flavor. I also like that this effortless dish is so visually appealing. By steaming the veggies in the parchment packets they come out vibrant in color and deliciously crisp-tender. This dish was so simple to put together. While it baked I was able to make a salad and dessert. The mustard kept the chicken tender and moist. I can’t wait to make this again.

Chicken Tortilla Casserole

Casseroles aren’t normally thought of as healthy, usually due to condensed soup, which this version doesn’t have. I know the picture doesn’t make it look appetizing, but this is so freaking good. It was also quick and easy, which is a plus for me.

Next time I think I may add some cumin to season the chicken. The recipe says it feeds two, but we only ate half of it. I think it could serve 3-4 depending on the portion size. I’m definitely going to be making this again, hopefully, next time I’ll get a better picture.