Sprout & Pea

My absolute favorite meals are those made on the fly with left­over ingre­di­ents in my refrig­er­a­tor. This week I just so hap­pened to have a lot of left­over food and it some­how all mag­i­cally meshed well together. Don’t ask why, but I had an insane amount of feta cheese sit­ting in my refrig­er­a­tor so with that in mind, I entered my kitchen and with the food before me, I started to sali­vate over the idea of mak­ing some kind of pesto. Read more:

Sum­mer has arrived! My apolo­gies for the lack of post­ing this past week, but the warm weather and some fun events have stolen away any recent com­puter time. It has been time well spent though. I’ve catered a wed­ding party, planted a gar­den and spent a day cel­e­brat­ing my incred­i­ble grand­fa­ther as a mem­ber of the first grad­u­at­ing class of Queens Col­lege. Of course, a girl’s got to eat in between all of this. Inspired by all of the water­mel­ons in the mar­kets and plant­ing some myself last week­end, I decided to make a salad out of one. As it may be well known by now, I’m a sucker for sweet and savory so I cre­ated a clas­sic dish of water­melon and feta, tossed on some shal­lots and a lit­tle home­made dress­ing. There’s noth­ing like a warm sum­mer breeze and that first bite of a deli­cious fresh salad, and this dish cer­tainly hits the spot. Read more:

This week was one of re-​​using left­overs and dishes inspir­ing new dishes. It all started with a deli­cious Fen­nel, Leek & Red Beet Salad. With some leeks left­over from this, I decided to buy some arti­choke hearts and feta which I suc­cess­fully made a great arti­choke dip with– one that rivals the tra­di­tional mayo-​​tastic party food in both taste and health fac­tor. With the tasty fla­vors in this dish lin­ger­ing in my mind, I decided to use the very same ingre­di­ents the fol­low­ing night, this time incor­po­rat­ing pasta and lemon. Read more:

I had some leeks left­over from my fen­nel, leek and red beet salad, so I thought I would attempt to make one of my favorite dips-​​healthy style. Mayo-​​packed arti­choke dip is one of my favorite dips to serve at par­ties. I fig­ured that there had to be a way to make this dish a bit health­ier, so I ditched the mayo and sim­ply com­bined chopped up arti­chokes, leeks and feta with a lit­tle olive oil in the food proces­sor and blended and baked. Read more:

Quinoa has become one of my favorite meals over the past year, so I am con­stantly try­ing to think up new ways to pre­pare this won­der­ful super­food. I had pur­chased a large pack­age of com­pari toma­toes about a week ago that I never got around to using so I thought I would make use of them before they went bad and roast them with some gar­lic and olive oil (deli­cious on their own).

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I hosted my first din­ner party since the start of our lit­tle blog and I didn’t poi­son any­one. I’ve always liked exper­i­ment­ing with cook­ing but it wasn’t until I cooked New Years Din­ner for 20 friends, that I real­ized I really enjoy enter­tain­ing. It was that night that I also real­ized that if I could cook din­ner for that many peo­ple, I could def­i­nitely stop eat­ing out so much and start mak­ing myself din­ner most nights– and so my cook­ing spree began. Here’s a lit­tle flash­back from the lovely evening that started at all:

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