Sausage and Broccoli Rabe and Pistachio Pesto Pizza

This recipe was inspired by two things: a pizza seen on a newly discovered (to me) blog, Healthy Food For Living, and my favorite pasta dishes at a restaurant that I love outside of Boston called Tre Monte. I love the flavors of broccoli rabe and sausage together, and I learned tonight that it doesn’t have to involve pasta for it to be awesome. Enter the weeknight pizza. A rich pesto made out of blanched broccoli rabe, pistachio nuts, pecorino and ricotta cheeses, spread atop whole wheat pizza dough and covered in browned chicken sausage and shredded cheese. I learned from Lauren at Healthy Food for Living that the frozen whole wheat pizza at whole foods is the bomb. It really is. I may never make pizza dough myself ever again. Hooray for that!

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Stewed Black Beans

I love beans. Breakfast, lunch or dinner – I would like a side of beans, please. One of my favorite simple breakfasts, in fact, is a dish of over-easy eggs with some black beans and spicy green salsa on the side. Yum. But that’s neither here nor there (even though these stewed beans are great with eggs the next day…as I had this morning). These quick stewed black beans are a perfect side dish to anything even remotely tex-mex flavored. I will be making these often.

Turkey Chorizo and Sweet Potato Tacos

I’m all about tacos right now. I made some healthified tacos for the kids this weekend (not sure if I’ve ever “formally” discussed this before, but my boyfriend and I have his teenaged kids every other weekend so I get to put my mommy hat on from time to time). Mmm, I’ll have to blog those tacos someday, they were GOOD. BUT, today we talk about tacos for grown-ups. These tacos feature homemade chorizo sausage, spicy poblano peppers, and sweet potatoes — one of my favorite vegetables. Add some pickled red onion, greek yogurt, and pepperjack cheese and you’ve pretty much got a party. You can of course substitute with regular chorizo (the mexican kind, which comes uncooked), but I wanted to lighten this up a bit.

Butternut Squash, Caramelized Onion, and Goat Cheese Wellingtons

First, let me apologize for the dreadful picture. We had a couple friends over for dinner last night and I just plain did not feel like taking the time for fancy pics. Hence what you have here. BUT, as I was eating it, I said to myself that I couldn’t not post this recipe. I really toiled for a quite a while trying to find a vegetarian entree suitable for entertaining, and I was pretty psyched with how this turned out. The original recipe I found had mushrooms, but me and mushrooms aren’t getting along right now so I decided to switch it up. Goes to show that really any recipe can be customized to what you like. Get to it.

Sweet Potato and Andouille Hash

I love it when meals like this totally materialize out of what’s in the fridge/pantry. This hash was absolutely delicious, minimal effort, and no special shopping trip needed. I always keep sweet potatoes around for their good looks and even better nutrition. I frequently buy the smoked andouille chicken sausage from trader joe’s (excellent in dishes like this), but often have at least one or two links leftover to use up.  These two humble ingredients, combined with the cumin and cinnamon, are to.die.for.

Mini Brie and Dill Popovers

When I saw this recipe I immediately thought of my mom as she looooves popovers. Since my lovely mother is on an extended one-month vacation in Puerto Rico right now (jealous…), I decided to make these to hopefully make her a little jealous in return 🙂

(I’d rather be in puerto rico, but these popovers are addictively delicious)

Herb Breaded Tilapia

Fish tacos were on the docket tonight. You see, I do my menu planning a week in advance and sometimes I’m just not feeling what I originally planned. Tonight was one of those nights, but since I had bought the fish and needed to cook it up while it was fresh, I went with a simple breaded recipe. I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but I did a quick google search for breaded fish to see if anything surprising popped up. The usual suspects came up — baked and breaded, breaded and fried, and the like. I had already decided at the gym that I had earned at least a pan-fry instead of baking, and I stumbled upon a recipe on Ella Says Opa! that incorporated some herbs. Perfect.

I must say, this fish was the bomb. Ready in 10 minutes flat, crispy, flaky, pretty much exactly what I wanted. I served it along with some rice pilaf (total comfort food for me) and an apple-pecan salad with goat cheese. Yum!

Cool Ranch Buffalo Chicken Nachos

I love football so much. Actually, not really, but I do love that it lets me get away with serving food like this for dinner.

My Usual Breakfast

Since my last post was a yummy weekend breakfast treat, I thought I’d share what I typically have for breakfast during the week. Well, sometimes I’ll definitely have an egg or two with some black beans or a slice of sprouted grain toast instead and save the protein shake for after a workout, but lately this has been my morning choice. Maybe because I’ve been hitting the gym more than usual lately, but my body definitely enjoys the protein blast. Anyway, this shake is really tasty (I promise) and definitely keeps me full for several hours. And I love squeezing some greens in at breakfast time :).

Bacon & Egg Quesadillas

This breakfast was sooooo good — perfect for a day when I’m home sick with a little bit of a cold. The only good thing about feeling crappy and being home is that I get to make a slightly more involved breakfast than I would on a normal weekday. Since I bought a package of about 2,000 tortillas as Costco last week, I’ve been trying to come up with ways to use ’em up. Now, I’ve certainly made egg quesadillas before, and I’m usually less than impressed. I think it’s because they seem too wet or something — probably from the scrambled eggs. The over-easy egg is definitely the way to go! Throw in some cheese, bacon, and black beans — YUM. Combine this with the fact that Feds circa 1988 is on TV right now (one of my favorite movies ever!), I’m a happy, albeit sick, girl.