Apparently three this evening and a recipe from Melissa Clark from the NY Times!
I just wanted to take a quick moment and share some new blogs that I’ve discovered and a few of their amazing recipes.
And by the way all these recipes are really simple and don’t take much active cooking time at all.
So what did I eat tonight?
Coconut Oil Roasted Butternut Squash
Spicy Mixed Greens Salad with Dried Cranberries and Poppyseed Dressing
Bird Seed Bread with Salt Kissed Cinnamon Pecan Butter
My Dinner
I, of course, did a bit of tweaking on some of them, because well I just can’t help myself. You can follow the recipes exactly and I’m sure they will still be delicious.
Let’s start with Melissa Clark and her recipe. She writes the “A Good Appetite” section in the NY Times. This particular article was about the benefits of Coconut Oil. I have been hearing a lot about coconut oil and have been wanting to try it. I was at Whole Foods the other day and I saw a jar of it and picked it up. Her recipe calls for Sweet Potatoes, but I had some left over butternut squash diced up in the fridge just waiting to be used, so I thought, why not? Very, very yummy! And just a light hint of coconut, so if you’re worried it will overpower your dishes, don’t!
Onto my salad…
The recipe here is for the dressing. I love poppyseed dressing and have been wanting to find a recipe so I could start making it. I tend to like sweet dressings as I often buy spicy or peppery greens — I think they pair well together. This one I found on a fellow Foodie Fantasy Finalist’s blog, Food for Scot. (I had to check out my competition). And this blog has a lot of great sounding and looking recipes – I have bookmarked it for further use! The only thing I changed here was that I halved the recipe, added a bit more poppy seeds and left out the red onion.
The bread is from Macheesmo. This is not a new blog to me, but it is my most favorite bread in the world. It reminds me of the seeduction bread at Whole Foods. The only thing I change on his recipe is the flour. He calls for 17 ounces of bread flour — I use 10 ounces of whole wheat bread flour that I buy at my farmers’ market and 7 ounces of regular bread flour. I find it makes a heartier more flavorful loaf. The seeds I put in mine are poppy, sesame, millet, sunflower and flax. I also use the pumpkin seeds on top as he recommends.
And now my favorite new discovery – HOMEMADE NUT BUTTER!
I am never going to buy nut butter again and neither will you once you try this.
I found the recipe I used through Make It Naked, another new blog that I have bookmarked. She has some amazing nut butter recipes and also links to a different blog, Edible Perspective, that has even more recipes for nut butter. The recipe I used was actually from Edible Perspective and it was so yummy! I can’t wait to try all of hers and Make It Naked’s recipes for nut butter. Next on my list are Maple Cinnamon Almond Butter and Clementine Cashew Butter.
For the Salt Kissed Cinnamon Pecan Butter, I doubled the amounts of nuts, used 3/4 tsp of cinnamon, 2 1/2 tsp of vanilla, 1/4 tsp grey salt and no oil. It got creamy all on its own and didn’t need the extra help. Serious deliciousness!!!
How many bloggers made your dinner tonight?
yummy….simply yummy