Recipes I've been Making Lately

 It's been quite a few months since I've shared a recipe round-up of the new foods we've been trying out. Some of these recipes I find through fellow bloggers and some I find on Pinterest.. I rarely follow the recipe exactly but we often get good results!

I used this healthy quinoa salad recipe one day as a guideline for a new salad. I say guideline because I just eyeballed the vegetables and used whatever ones I had on hand, adding in some apples and chickpeas as well.

Evan tried making this honey BBQ sauce subbing out maple syrup for the molasses (since we didn't have any) and everyone seemed to like it much better than the vinegar based sauce he made a few months ago. 

I made whole wheat pizza dough for our pizzas one night and really liked this easy to follow recipe. 

I made some stuffed butternut squash; roughly following this recipe (though I did omit the meat, used farro in place of the rice, and added sundried tomatoes instead of craisins for that lovely pop of red). 

We tried making this mediterranean coleslaw and I loved this no mayo version-- I did add a couple of diced tomatoes to mine and cut both the cabbage and the carrots slightly bigger than normal to compare in size with the red pepper and olives.

I've been making up several different homemade Italian dressing mixes and this fat free version is a family favorite.

We tried a loosely-based version of this bacon & rosemary chicken pasta-- I used leftover chicken and bacon and less liquid since I was using almond milk plus I added in some leftover broccoli/onion/ mushroom sauté I had in the fridge but never the less the flavors were fantastic when combined. 

I doubled this recipe for the Perfect Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes for Alec's graduation party. Then decorated as I wanted; they were a HUGE hit! 

We tried Holly's Rolo Ritz bars for our get together at the beach. Now I don't eat marshmallow so I can't attest to how good they are but the boys all seemed to love them and they were so easy to make! 

We really liked this orange juice marinade for chicken; though I did use it for marinating chicken tenderloins. I mixed up the marinade and they sat in it in the fridge all day. They were really flavorful cooked on the grill but I bet they would have been just as great in the oven or the air fryer. 

My mother in law brought us a lot of Roma tomatoes fresh from her garden and we decided to make some tomato sauce using this recipe. We only had 2.5 lbs of tomatoes but we followed the how to part of recipe exactly. We used the same amount of olive oil, and garlic but then added oregano, basil. parsley, and an onion, some salt, pepper, and even a tiny bit of sugar to cut the acidity. Put everything on to boil at the same time and it was delicious!

We had some fresh basil and made this amazing basil marinade for our chicken. I did sub out sunflower oil and red wine vinegar for the oil and vinegar in the recipe since that's what I had on hand. We all loved this marinade; even Ian who doesn't like chicken said it was good!

We made a version of this pesto crumbed fish; I didn't measure out the ingredients exactly since I had a lot of fish and chicken to cover but I did mix together pesto, breadcrumbs, and even a bit of parmesan cheese then baked at 400 for 15 or so minutes until a thermometer read 165 on the chicken and 145 on the fish. I had sprinkled some lemon juice on the fish since I didn't have lemon zest. It was delicious!

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