Mediterranean Flavors!

After living the island life for the last two weeks and being lucky enough to have others cook for me or eat out, it's time to get back on track and back to cooking!  I'm not one of those people that looks at recipes first and then buys those ingredients when I go to the grocery store.  I usually stock up on the basics and lots of fruits and veggies when I go to the grocery store and THEN find recipes to match the ingredients I have on hand.  While searching through Pinterest today, I came across this recipe for eggplant and a mediterranean salad that looked great!  I decided to give it a try today!

Here's the Pinterest recipe I used:

http://www.themediterraneandish.com/mediterranean-chickpea-salad-with-zaatar-fried-eggplant/

Here's how it turned out!

Pelau!!!!

If you're looking for a VERY tasty one-pot wonder, then you should try to make Pelau!  This authentic Caribbean rice dish is made lots of different ways throughout the Caribbean, but this is the method that I've adopted for our family and it's one of our favorites!

I like to use my deep dish Calphalon pan to make my Pelau in.  Nothing sticks to it and it's the perfect size for us to have dinner and leftovers in for the next day!  If you've never "browned" chicken, then you should definitely look up how to do it (burning brown sugar in some vegetable oil and then throwing the chicken in over it to get that deep "brown" coloring) or you can even buy "browning" in a jar at a local West Indian shop!  Even Publix here in Jacksonville now has an "International Foods" aisle that has West Indian products in it.  After browning my chicken (drummettes that were previously seasoned with homemade green seasoning and frozen), I throw in chopped onion and garlic, a couple sprigs of thyme and some green onions from my garden, and a whole can of pigeon peas.  I then add a ton of rice over it and mix it all together to get everything nice and brown for a few minutes.  Then I add half a tin of coconut milk, some chicken broth, and some boiled water, salt, and pepper and turn the stove down to slow cook the rice!  I also add about half a bag of frozen mixed vegetables to the mix!  This pot is the BEST when you add some pepper sauce to it directly, but since I always feed my two year old out of what we eat, we've started putting the pepper sauce over our own plates of food instead.  This recipe is super quick and easy and FILLING for the whole family!

Here's how the Pelau turned out!!!!

Completed plat of Pelau with some tomatoes and cucumbers!

Browned chicken, rice, pigeon peas, and mixed vegetable before adding the liquid

Browned chicken and seasoning with the rice

"Browning" or burning of the brown sugar

Here are the products I use!  Gotta love GOYA!

Chopped onions, garlic, thyme, and green onions

I also made a fresh garden salad to go with the meal and some homemade vinaigrette!  I posted the recipe for the salad dressing in a previous post!  It's really good, you should try it!

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!