Drooling for Days

Ever since I started reading Mindless Eating, I can't stop thinking about peanut butter cups. Well, actually, I came across Heather Eats Almond Butter's post about the "World's Most Brilliant Combo" and my mouth hasn't stopped watering since. I've been trying to be good lately, aka keeping the sweet, chocolaty goodness to a minimum, but yesterday afternoon I broke down and made my own version of that delectable Reese's favorite.

Almond Butter Coconut Cups

Ingredients:

85% Cocoa Dark Chocolate
Almond Butter
Coconut Butter (grind unsweetened coconut in the food processor until buttery, about 8 minutes)

Paper Muffin Tin Liners
(I used enough chocolate to make two massive candies: I made a limited quantity, one for me, one for M, to keep my chocolate habits in check)

I melted the chocolate over medium heat using a ghetto double boiler method (a metal bowl floating in a small frying pan), and poured the melted chocolate into the muffin liners. The first pour should be enough to cover the bottom of the liner, and to coat the sides.

After freezing the muffin liners for about 30 minutes, I mixed together about one Tbsp of almond butter and one Tbsp of coconut butter and put a dollop of this mixture into each chocolate cup, and covered with the rest of the melted chocolate.

After an hour, I had the biggest peanut butter cups EVER. I might have gotten carried away with the chocolate...


They were about the size of the muffin liners...huge. The sweetness of the almond butter coconut mix was essential to balance the bitterness of the chocolate (I mean bitterness in the most delicious way possible). The almond butter cups were so rich that M and I could only eat half of a half each! Maybe I'll make a pact with myself to only eat chocolate candy that I make-- that way I know what's in it, and I have to go through the "trouble" of preparing it myself. That should keep my peanut butter chocolate peanut butter craving in check.

On another note...Chester and Jack look kind of like dark chocolate and peanut butter...no?

Please pardon Chester's alien eyes...

No chocolate for Chester!

Buffalo 'n Beets

One of my favorite "in moderation" foods is buffalo chicken. M makes a pretty meal grilled buffalo wing--which I adore--but my heart lies with the greasy fried goodness of buffalo chicken tenders. Every now and then I will convince M to add them on to our take-out order (I pretty much try every time we order Italian takeout, but M has this Jedi mind trick to get me to not want them anymore) and I bask in the bready, fried, blue-cheesy glory that are buffalo tenders.

In an effort to healthfully satisfy my buffalo craving, I decided to make baked buffalo chicken tenders:

Gluten-Free Baked Buffalo Chicken Tenders
(sheesh...what a name!)

Ingredients:

• Chicken tenderloins (or a chicken breast sliced into tenders)
• Almond meal (I used the Trader Joe's variety)
• Franks Red Hot
• 1 Tbsp unsalted butter
  

• Blue cheese dressing for dipping

I started by rolling each tender in almond flour (frowny face unintended)

After spraying both sides of each tender with olive oil, I placed them on a baking sheet. Then I placed them in the oven at 450 for 10 minutes on each side. It was about 90 degrees in Boston last night, and about 120 degrees in our kitchen...

In the meantime, I poured some of our gigantic container of Frank's Red Hot into a frying pan along with about 1Tbsp of butter over medium heat

When the tenders were finished baking, I coated each of them with the buffalo sauce

Voila: Gluten-Free Baked Buffalo Chicken Tenders

To go with our chickens, I decided to make a beet salad using beets I picked up at the Copley Farmer's Market.

I cut off the beet greens to save for another day

Then washed and wrapped each beet in aluminum foil and placed in the oven at 450 for about 30 minutes.

While the beets were roasting, I put together a salad of mixed greens, goat cheese, walnuts and blueberries

Once the beets were done, I rinsed them in cold water. The skin comes off easily in cold water after roasting--all you have to do is gently rub the beets.

Voila: Beet Salad

I was so excited that the beets worked out! They were a great way to spice up a salad that we make fairly often. Plus, beets are in season in Massachusetts right now! We needed a nice, cold salad to offset the spicy hotness of the buffalo tenders: it was, in my opinion, the perfect summer salad.

Pecan Crusted Chicken with Kale Chips

I'm all about trying out other blogger's recipes right now. Most recently, we attempted Everday Paleo's Pecan Crusted Chicken and a kale chip recipe found on Oh She Glows.

Pecan Crusted Chicken

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup spicy brown mustard (preferable of the organic variety)
• 2 Tbsp raw honey
• 1 cup pecans
• 4 Chicken Breasts

For this recipe, I used my favorite honey:

Honey Gardens Apitherapy Raw Honey from the town next to my hometown in Vermont, The Green Mountain State.

I combined the mustard and the honey in a bowl:


Chopped up the pecans in the food processor:

Next, I coated the chicken in the mustard/honey sauce and rolled in the pecans. I placed the chicken in a greased (olive oil) glass baking dish (aka my pie pan)...


...and baked the chickens at 350 for about 35 minutes.

While the chicken was baking, I washed and de-stemed one head of kale that I picked up at the Copley Square Farmers Market. I laid the kale out on a baking sheet, sprayed with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt.

I popped the tray into the oven at 350 and baked for about 10 minutes per side, until the kale was crispy.

The results were delicious!


I will definitely be making both of these dishes in the future. The meal was so good that when I packed the leftovers in my lunch this morning, Chester went into my bag and attempted to open the tupperware containing the chicken! He was caught in the act (thankfully), and while I don't have a picture of the actual incident, he looked something like he does after destroying his "baby."

Note the mutilated baby in the background

No chicken for Chester!

An Extravagant Brunch

Last Saturday, I decided to make a delicious brunch. I was inspired by yet another gifty from IIN, gluten-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free blueberry maple muffin mix from Purely Elizabeth.


All I needed to add was maple syrup (I used 1/2 of the recommended amount), olive oil, blueberries and vanilla. Easy-peasy. I stuck some blackberries in with the blueberries to make them a little more exotic and I thought about using coconut oil instead of olive oil, but I really wanted the brunch to be niiiiice, so I followed the recipe...

I popped the mini muffins into my ancient oven. (You can't really tell from this picture, but there are no numbers on the burner dials...they have two settings: inferno and gas leak).

The mini muffins came out perfectly!

Some glamour shots:

To round out our brunch, I made some scrambled eggs (two eggs, two whites each), and bacon, because, as we know, no brunch is complete without bacon! I also sliced up a peach I had lying around.

It was a protein packed, blueberry muffin-y brunch! The muffins were great: they had a very unique taste-- maybe it was the chia seeds and millet flour. I used to be some sort of muffin freak (I would eat a dunkin' donuts reduced fat blueberry muffin every morning before work in the olden days), and I really liked these! I'm not sure if I would buy the mix myself, but I definitely plan on using it as a model for my own healthy blueberry muffins.

More Adventures in Home-Cooked Goodness

Last night, we decided to embark on another kitchen adventure. I've been scouring the world wide web for new ideas and recipes, and last week I stumbled upon the Everyday Paleo blog post for homemade plantain chips with guacamole. I was surprised to find the recipe, because for some reason, M and I were under the impression that we had invented the combination of plantain chips and guacamole...we pretty much thought we were culinary geniuses...but apparently, everyone eats plantain chips with guacamole...who knew?

Anyway, after a quick jaunt to Whole Foods, we had all of the ingredients to make some plantain chips to go with our beefy taco salad. I modeled the taco salad recipe after one that I found on the Whole9 Blog. The plantain chips were produced by two methods: lightly frying in coconut oil a la Everyday Paleo, and baking with olive oil, a la Martha Stewart's recipe for baked potato chips. I also baked up the last sweet potato from over the weekend...

Plantain Chips (& Sweet Potato Chips)

(please disregard the wine and ping pong balls)

Ingredients:

Ripe plantains-- I used two and had plenty of chips for two people
2-4 Tbsp Coconut oil*
Sea Salt to taste

* For the baking method, replace coconut oil with olive oil (or another oil that's liquid at room temperature.)

If frying, place coconut oil in a pan over medium heat. Slice the plantains either width-wise or lengthwise with the peel still on (a tip from Everyday Paleo: the plantains keep their structure better with the peel). Remove peel and place in oil, and fry until brown on both sides.

If baking, line a baking pan with aluminum foil and spray with olive oil. Place the chips on the tray making sure that they do not overlap. Spray the chips with oil and salt them at your own discretion. Bake for about 25 minutes rotating the tray once. (Follow the same protocol for sweet baked sweet potato chips, but bake for about 30 minutes).

The baked chips came out great! Some were crispy and some were chewy. All of them were deliciously sweet and salty!

The fried plantain chips were, in M's words "sinful." The first thing he said when he tried one was "these can't be good for you..." I mean, they're not great for you...but they're better than...some other things. Frying the plantains in coconut oil seemed to caramelize them more than baking them. The browned edges of the chips were almost like candy, but the added salt balanced the sweetness perfectly. They were a little bit thicker and chewier than their baked brothers, but we ended up liking these more.

To go with our plantain chips, we also prepared a nice, taco-y salad:

For the meats we used:

Four hamburger patties (leftover from our weekend BBQ)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cumin
1 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (we lika da spicy foods)

M ground up the hamburger patties in a bowl, added the spices and then cooked the meat in a pan with some olive oil and a little water to moisten it up. In the future, we'll probably just buy ground beef instead of using already formed hamburgers...but we were trying to be thrifty.

I cut up some tomatoes, red pepper and red leaf lettuce for the salad base. We topped our salads with salsa and some guacamole from Whole Foods.

It was a great, homemade Mexican-ish feast with plenty of leftovers for another day. We both ate too much and walked off our bellies with Chester after dinner. Isn't it great to eat too much of a meal that you made yourself? To want to eat more of something you created? It's kind of a new experience for me...and I love it!

Introducing Whil Wheber and Some Sick-Nasty Kabobs

For our birthdays this past year, M and I decided it was time to buy each other a grill. Not just any grill...a Weber Spirit E-310.

(Source)

We've named him Whil Wheber to honor Wil Wheaton of Star Trek fame via Family Guy (first runner up went to Gril Weber). Yes, it's a little nerdy. What's NOT nerdy is how awesome M is at grilling stuff. Most of the meals that we cook at home now involve the grill in one capacity or another. We love having people over for BBQs (recently mostly indoors because of the terrible New England Weather) to share the grill wealth.

Last night, we had the most de-li-cious grilled chicken kabobs that I've ever had-- and that's saying a lot as considering I am somewhat of a chicken kabob connoisseur. M marinated the chicken over the weekend using Organicville Island Teriyaki and Sesame Teriyaki marinades. These sauces are amazing! Not only do they taste great, they are also gluten free, and made with agave nectar.


We chopped up some red bell pepper and red onion and skewered:


Whil Wheber in action:

We also tossed on some tomatoes and some Cajun Chicken. Plenty of food for dinner, lunch and another dinner.

The end result:

On the side we had a salad with some lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and mushroom. (Paper plates equal me not being in the mood to do dishes...)

These were, by far, the best chicken kabobs I've ever had...and we made them at home, which makes me really happy! Have you ever noticed that when you cook a really great meal at home, you feel one thousand times happier than when you get a great meal at a restaurant? M and I have been trying to cook at home a lot recently, and, if I do say so, our creations have been phenomenal. We feel more nourished and like we've accomplished something after we cook a nice dinner.

Yay for Whil Wheber! He makes us delicious food and saves us money!