Dinner tonight!

So for my birthday, a friend of mine decided to make me a very cool gift basket that she made and filled with different types of pastas and pasta sauce.  It was a great gift, but its been sitting on my counter for about a month now and I decided that tonight was the night I was going to try it out!

I do want to say that I haven't actually had to cook much this week because my mom was in town and I had plenty of leftovers and then yesterday was Eid!  We did some of my favorites yesterday - Panera for breakfast and Zoe's for dinner!  I do want to say that I don't go out to eat very often here in Jacksonville mostly because I hate being disappointed when I pay money to eat somewhere (yes, I'm a food snob! NYC will do that to you if you let it!!!).  The other reason is simply because Jacksonville just has a ton of big chain restaurants and not the mom and pop places I was so spoiled with when I was living in NYC.  That being said, my husband discovered Zoe's a few months ago, and I actually love it! I think the food is simple and fresh and love the shrimp kabobs and their hummus - so that's what we did for Eid dinner last night!

***I do have a few FAVORITE places to eat in Jax that I'll probably share in another blog, but for now, here are some of my faves: Casbah (middle eastern), Black Sheep (American), Moxie (American), Hawkers (Asian Street Food), and a recent favorite, Picasso (Italian).

So back to dinner tonight....

I decided to try a new pasta that was in my gift basket and the sauce that was also in there.  Everything was written in Italian and I didn't really understand any of it, so I just made pasta the way I know how!  15 minutes after making the sauce, I realized I HATED it....just had a bad taste to it...so I dumped it out and just did my own thing.  I'm not a fan of canned sauces and never usually use them, I prefer to make my own using herbs, olive oil, and crushed tomatoes, but thought I'd give it a try - bad decision.

So instead, I went out into my garden and grabbed some herbs, blended it with some onion and garlic powder in some olive oil and voila - sauce for the cool new pasta.  I threw in some sun dried tomatoes and cut up some basil from my garden and then shredded some parmesan over it - perfect!  Made a big, green salad to go with it and my homemade greek salad dressing (check a previous post for the recipe) and that's all!  Here are some pics!

Threw in a few black olives too!

Garden salad with some added chick peas and parmesan!