Special Occasions

{Tazo Cookoff} Iced Ginger Tea with Honey-Macerated Fruit

{Tazo Cookoff} Iced Ginger Tea with Honey-Macerated Fruit

  iced-tea.jpg

For the third and final week of the Tazo Cookoff, I faced a bit of a dilemma: the pears that I had been presented to use in my recipe weren’t as ripe as I would have liked them to be. They would have been fine in a few days, but I was headed out of town and only had one night to get my recipe done. To make matters worse, the only thing I felt like eating was a sandwich — which put a quick end to my idea of poaching the pears in tea and making them into a chutney to eat with lamb chops and polenta (I mean, I like to cook, but I’m not about to make something like that when I’d be happier with a simple panini!)

As I tried to think of ways to incorporate the tea and pears into my sandwich or a side dish, I remembered the sangria-like iced tea that I had at Radiance Tea and Bookstore this spring. It seemed like the perfect accompaniment to my sandwich as well as a great way to use up some other fruit before I headed out of town.

The resulting tea was a nice change of pace from my standard unsweetened black tea, and I plan to make it again often. I especially loved the way that the ginger flavor infused the fruit — it was unexpected and extremely refreshing. Eating the fruit at the bottom of the glass was just as much of a treat as drinking the tea!

fruity.jpg

iced-tea-glass.jpg

This is your final chance to win a great Tazo gift pack including a one year supply of tea and a selection of tea-brewing essentials! You’ll be entered one time for every comment you leave on one of my Tazo recipes. This is recipe # 3 of 3. Previous recipes included

Vanilla Rooibos Quinoa Pudding with Cherry & Pistachio and

Tea-smoked Salmon with Lavender and Honey Glaze. On September 1, I’ll randomly pick a winner from all of the comments left on those three recipes. (Only commenters with valid US addresses are eligible to win) Every comment you leave will also help me win a $1,000 gift card to Williams Sonoma.

Click to continue reading Iced Ginger Tea with Honey-Macerated Fruit –>

Smokey BBQ Baked Lentils, Cedar Plank Salmon

Smokey BBQ Baked Lentils, Cedar Plank Salmon

bbq-baked-lentils-with-ceda.jpg

What is it about holidays like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July that necessitate barbecues? Sure Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, but our grill has already been going strong for weeks. Still, I felt the need to prepare some sort of traditional backyard fare. Shawn suggested burgers, but that seemed like a waste of a good day off. We can have burgers whenever. I wanted something a little more creative. Something that actually required some thought. I settled on salmon grilled on a cedar plank and BBQ baked lentils.

Yes, that’s right: lentils. I don’t really care for baked beans. They’re too starchy or too soft something. My mom makes what everyone considers pretty awesome baked beans – they’re requested at every family get-together – but I never ate them. When I was little, there was one kind of baked bean that I would eat. They came from a can. They were BBQ. And they contained a melange of various beans rather than simply relying on navy beans. I still remember the day when we stopped being able to find them in the grocery store. It was heartbreaking. This past Easter, we sat down to dinner and I saw that my mom had made her beans. They looked amazing. Plump, succulent beans swimming in a lightly spiced sauce, all capped off by a perfectly crisp layer of meaty bacon. It was the bacon that did me in. Those beans have been in the back on my mind ever since.

unbaked-lentils.jpg baked-lentils.jpg
Click to continue reading Smokey BBQ Baked Lentils, Cedar Plank Salmon —>
Chocolate Pasta with Light Cream Sauce and Chiles

Chocolate Pasta with Light Cream Sauce and Chiles

  IMG_9219.JPG

Chocolate pasta. Cream sauce. Chile peppers. Sound Good? What if I told you this fabulous meal would set you back a mere 350 calories and a half our in the kitchen?

A few weeks ago I spent some time wandering around Boston, where I stumbled upon Hotel Chocolat.  As the name would imply, this adorable little shop sold delicious (and very expensive) chocolates. I almost made it out empty-handed. Almost. As I was on my way out, I caught something out of the corner of my eye: cocoa pasta. At first I thought it was just chocolate in the shape of pasta, but then I realized it was actually pasta that contained cocoa powder. There was obviously no way I was leaving without some of that!

I almost immediately decided that I wanted to pair the pasta with a cream sauce. If you’re cooking chocolate pasta you go big or go home, right? I was afraid of it being too rich though, so I used a lightened-up version of cream sauce. I added some chile peppers to the sauce for good measure and to help cut through the richness, then tossed it all together with some zucchini ribbons and grilled chicken. The final dish as every bit as delicious as it sounds and is definitely worthy of being on a menu somewhere.

IMG_9200.JPG IMG_9198.JPG

The flavor of the pasta itself was really interesting. There isn’t any sugar in it, so it isn’t sweet like you might expect it to be – it’s just normal semolina pasta with added cocoa powder. Once it’s cooked it has an intense chocolate aroma, but the flavor isn’t overpowering at all. It’s subtle yet complex, like a good mole sauce might be. The dried pasta can be purchased through the link above, but google also returns a few recipes if you want to make the pasta yourself (this one looks simple enough – avoid any dessert pastas that call for sugar).

Because I replaced much of the cream in the sauce with skim milk, it takes a little longer than normal to thicken. Be patient though – it will get there! The sauce is done when it’s thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold a line drawn across it with your finger. [....]

IMG_9207.JPG
IMG_9221.JPG
Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin