Sprout & Pea

Last week­end was really lovely — my mom was in town! I dragged her all over Brook­lyn by foot and by ferry and as per usual we spent most of our time eat­ing. Sat­ur­day night, my cousin joined us for din­ner at a deli­cious restau­rant in Brook­lyn Heights called Colonie. I love restau­rants that are con­ducive to shar­ing and Colonie’s menu is tai­lored for just that. We ordered far too many dishes, but we devoured them all. One of the stand­out plates on our table was a roasted car­rot salad with sun­flower sprouts. This was my first intro­duc­tion to these slightly sweet, watery lit­tle greens and I loved them. I adore a dish with sim­ple ingre­di­ents that bal­ance together per­fectly and that’s what hap­pened when I put a lit­tle bit of each ingre­di­ent on my fork. When I came across sun­flower sprouts at the mar­ket this week, I decided to try to recre­ate this dish. Read more:

I love dis­cov­er­ing new food blogs and recently I stum­bled across Have Cake Will Travel. After spend­ing far too much time on my lunch break brows­ing through deli­cious recipes, I stopped on one that really caught my eye, and more impor­tantly my stom­ach. It was a recipe for a vegan peanut but­ter banana bacon sand­wich. The best part about this is that the “bacon” is actu­ally smoky roasted chick­peas. This sounded bril­liant as both a snack and a bacon sub­sti­tute. Read more:

There’s been a wel­come fall chill in the air recently, and it seems that sum­mer may soon be com­ing to an end, but my crav­ings for Mex­i­can food cer­tainly are not. This sum­mer, more than ever, I have been dream­ing of the tangy, spicy cui­sine day and night, and seem to have an undy­ing han­ker­ing for Micheladas. Instead of eat­ing out at my favorite neigh­bor­hood spot the other night, I decided to take on this crav­ing and cook a healthy meal in the form of my take on Mex­i­can quinoa. Read more:

For the longest time, I’ve been want­ing to make sweet potato fries and after whip­ping these guys up last night, I’m not quite sure what was stop­ping me. This is one of the sim­plest snacks to pre­pare and if done right, is pretty darn healthy. All you need to do is chop up some sweet pota­toes, toss with olive oil and sea­son­ings of choice and place them in the oven to bake, flip­ping once or twice. Since I had some time to kill while these were bak­ing, I thought I would make some tasty dips for my french fry din­ner. Read more:

Happy birth­day to my friend Katie in Mon­treal who sent me her recipe for this deli­cious veg­gie chili that I made last night! I’ve really been crav­ing chili recently but I had never made it before. I’ve come across many recipes but they all gen­er­ally sound too heavy. Then, as I was talk­ing to Katie a few days ago about Sprout & Pea, she told me she makes a pretty mean chili these days.
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Arti­chokes are by far my favorite veg­etable. I think I grew up lov­ing them so much though because of the dip my mom always made to go with them. I recently made a steamed arti­choke and this deli­cious but very mayo heavy dip and decided it might be about time to embrace my health con­scious ways and try to make my own, health­ier ver­sion of may­on­naise.
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