Have you ever had a frozen hot chocolate? It's one of my favorite summer treats. They're icy and cold - like a cross between a milk shake and a slushy. Frozen hot chocolate might seem like an oxymoron, but these really do taste like hot chocolate and not at all like a regular chocolate shake.

You can make them with your favorite hot chocolate mix, but I like to make mine with milk and cocoa powder. If you decide to use a mix instead, keep in mind that it will get diluted by the ice. Adding in some melted chocolate chips helps it retain an intense chocolatey taste.

I love chocolate and hazelnut together and I decided that frozen hazelnut hot chocolate sounded great. Instead of adding in melted chocolate, I added Nocciolata organic hazelnut spread. Nocciolata is one of the products presented at the recent Fancy Foods Show, and they sent me a jar to review/play around with. The spread is very similar to Nutella, but it's organic. It's also thinner. At first I didn't know how I felt about that - I like the thick, frosting-like consistency of Nutella. But then I realized it means that the Nocciolata is really easy to spread....meaning you can cover more surface area with less spread and save yourself some calories. It also meant that it blended very easily into this frozen hot chocolate and didn't all end up in one blob.

I like that the ingredients are simple: sugar, hazelnut paste, sunflower oil, skim milk powder, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and vanilla flavoring. That's all. I think that the hazelnut flavor is also more pronounced in the Nocciolata than it is in Nutella, and the spread isn't quite as sweet. It's definitely not something you want to be eating every day, but it does make a very nice treat.

Click to get the recipe for Frozen Hazlenut Hot Chocolate -->

When I was approached about doing a review of Sally Bee's The Secret Ingredient ($17.90 on Amazon), I was a little hesitant. The book was originally published in England, which isn't exactly known for its amazing food. Plus, the recipes are heart-healthy and I was afraid that might mean that they would be bland. But her story had me intrigued, so I agreed to accept a copy.* Boy am I glad I did — this book has quickly become one of my favorites!

In 2004, Sally Bee was working as a writer and a British television personality when she suddenly suffered three major hart attacks in the span of one week. She had never smoked, didn't drink, and was generally healthy and fit, but she found that she had been born with a heart defect that had gone undetected her whole life. To make a long story short, she wasn't expected to survive, but she did! In order to keep her health up, she needed to pay very close attention to what she ate — but she didn't want her kids to "grow up thinking a diet of mung beans and spinach was normal." So she learned how to cook heart-healthy meals that were also enjoyable and "normal."

The recipes in The Secret Ingredient focus on fresh fruits and vegetables and are bursting with flavors, thanks to the generous use of herbs and spices. The dishes in the book are fast and easy to make and don't require any ingredients that you can't find in your neighborhood grocery store. Since the recipes focus so heavily on fresh foods, you don't have to worry about needing ingredients that are only available in England. I also really like that Sally Bee has a similar philosophy to me when it comes to not totally eliminating ingredients that have a reputation of being "unhealthy." In moderation ingredients like butter, cheese, and red meat can add a ton of flavor to a dish without rendering the whole dish off-limits. Sally Bee includes small amounts of ingredients like these in her recipes; she also makes a note on each recipe to identify whether it's an "everyday" dish or a "treat" that should be limited to once a week. The recipes are also accompanied by absolutely gorgeous full-color photos.

I tested out the recipes for the "Marvelous Moroccan Chicken" (Shared below), the "Spicy Couscous," and the "Healthy Spring Vegetable Risotto" all three meals were fresh, delicious, and easy (and cheap!) to make. The risotto was packed full of vegetables and was very filling — it also had some pesto stirred in, which was wonderful and a trick that I'll be using often! The flavors in the Moroccan Chicken were unlike anything I've ever eaten before, but we both loved it! The warm spices in it were amazing and the whole house smelled wonderful while it cooked.

Of course, there are a few negatives, but they're really more mild annoyances that anything. The majority of the recipes require using the oven — which is fine most of the year, but not really an option in the current heat. I also felt that the dessert chapter was a little too long — some of the ideas in it looked nice, but if I'm going to have dessert, I don't want fruit. I want dessert. So while it's nice for the healthy options to be included, I doubt I'll ever make anything from that chapter. There are also a few things that are weird just because the book was originally published in England: metric weights are listed first and some ingredients are referred as they are known over there (for example zucchini is "courgette" and cilantro is "coriander" — though the American English names are given in parentheses). Also, the risotto could have used a little salt (although that would have been pretty inappropriate for a heart-healthy cookbook!)

But, the most important question always is Would I Buy the Book? Absolutely. The recipes are easy enough to be followed by beginning cooks, but are full of inspiration for more advanced cooks who want to use them as a jumping off point for their own creations. The ingredients are healthy and real; the final dishes are simple but elegant. And the photos are stunning. Let me put it this way — for me, flipping through this book is like flipping through a "Healthy Delicious" cookbook... are at least its everything that I would want a cookbook like that to be. ;)

Click to get the recipe for Marvelous Moroccan Chicken -->

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.

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.

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. [....]

When we go to one of our favorite local Mexican restaurants I always order the same thing - tacos de carne asada. Sure I order them because the grilled steak wrapped in a warm tortilla is delicious and the absense of cheese makes them one of the healthiest items on the menu...but really I get them mostly for the onion and cilantro salsa that comes on the side. The salsa is the perfect compliment to the taco, with crunchy little bits of onion balanced out by tons fresh cilantro to keep it from being too strong. I'm not generally a raw onion fan. I pick them out of salads and take them off of my burgers. In this salsa though, they work.

The other night we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do for dinner and I thought about going out for tacos, but it was so nice out and the restaurant doesn't have any outdoor seating (and I absolutely love to eat outside when it's nice out). Plus we had just bought gas for the grill... the next thing I knew, I was juicing limes to make a marinade for the steak. I found two poblanos that I had forgotten I had bought, so I decided to grill those up with some onions and make fajitas instead of tacos. I also added some minced jalapeno to the salsa to kick it up a notch.

For the amount of flavor that these fajitas pack you would expect that they would be labor intensive or use expensive ingredients, but it's very much the opposite. This is a super cheap and easy meal that will be one the table in well under a half hour. If you have any leftovers or don't like tortillas the salsa, marinated steak, and grilled vegetables also go great on a salad topped with a splash of lime vinaigrette.

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When I was really little, we would go to my grandparents house for Easter. At breakfast, they always had this really good bread called babka. I had forgotten all about it until a few years ago, when something triggered the memory. I went searching for some, but I could only find one bakery that had them and it was way more than I wanted to pay. Ever since, I've looked for them each year at Easter to no avail. This year, I decided I would just make my own already. A quick search of the internet showed me that this was easier said than done - recipes were few and far between, they seemed to have crazy differences (some had tons of sugar and few eggs, others few eggs and tons of sugar), and most recipes seemed like they would feed an army.

  

I can hardly believe it, but I missed the 1 year anniversary of me starting Healthy-Delicious.com! I can't believe it's been a year already. I've had the blog for much longer than that, but I only started posting regularly last winter, and it was last March that I moved it to my own domain.

Anyway, CSN stores offered me a product to giveaway and I thought it would be a fun opportunity to give away a great gift to one lucky reader in celebration of the blog's birthday. This is a good one, folks! I spent hours pouring through the CSN websites choosing the perfect gift... they have everything imaginable: from cooking gadgets to board games, and dog beds to tv stands. It's all divided up into smaller stores though, so it's pretty easy to navigate. They also have some really awesome deals and special values on some of my favorite cookware. So what did I choose for you? You'll have to read on to find out. ;) You won't want to miss this one! (pssst... it's something from Le Crueset!)

First, see all that delicious food up there? Remember last year's 24-hour NYC food whirlwind? Well, we did it again, and this year it was even better! I met up with Mo, Sarah, and Carol on Saturday and we proceeded to eat our way through NYC (sharing portions here and there so as to not be completely gross about it!). Our first stop was the Radiance Tea and Book House, where we shared a pitcher of the most amazing iced tea I've ever had (It was sweetened oolong tea with honey soaked fruit in it - it was almost like sangria with all that fruit!) and I ordered a side order of soupy pork dumplings. I love dumplings, and these were some of the best I've ever had. Sarah had an awesome looking ice cream sundae with homemade green tea, red bean, and mango ice creams and Carol ordered a really fun sticky rice and bean dessert with coconut milk and toasted nuts. I had a bit and it was SO GOOD! This place was a real find... not too crowded for a Saturday afternoon, it was the perfect place for a nice leisurely chat so we could all catch up. We did some sightseeing and stopped at the cutest little cheese shop for a snack - nothing like eating cheese on the sidewalk! Did some more sightseeing before we parted ways for dinner. Mo, Sarah, and I headed back to Mo's neighborhood for a repeat of last year's roast pork - which as even better this year! We also shared a few pitchers of sangria. [....]

• You need to mix the batter a lot more than you think you should. It's ok! Start out quickly and the slow down — it should take around 50 strokes. When it's folded enough, the batter will flow like magma, and a line drawn in it with a knife will disappear after about 10 seconds.
• Use a scale. It's much more accurate than trying to measure your ingredients.
• Parchment paper works better than a silpat. I don't know why, but it does.
• Don't crowd your oven. Bake one tray at a time, turning it halfway through so they cook evenly.
• It's much easier to put your "toppings" on before the macarons bake. I don't now why I thought I would be able to get stuff to stick to them once they were baked last time!!

There's an Indian restaurant around the corner from my house. In addition to having great food, they're one of the few Indian restaurants in town that have a weekend lunch buffet — and sometimes they even have a coupon for buy one, get one free! Needless to say, we find ourselves there on Saturdays fairly often. All of the options are spectacular, but I always head straight for the chickpeas. They do them a few different way, but whenever I see "the one with the onions" I know I've hit the jackpot. This dish is glorious: hearty but not heavy and with the perfect amount of spice to make it noticeably hot without being too much. And the chickpeas — oh, the chickpeas. I'm always jealous of how they get their chickpeas to be so silky smooth.

So, me being me, I decided to try reproducing it at home.

I searched for a while, but wasn't able to figure out what exactly this dish is called. So I used a combination of recipes and memory to come up with this recipe. I'm calling it chana masala, which from what I can tell is a broad description that translates to something like "chickpeas in curry sauce." It isn't exactly the same as the restaurant's, but it's delicious nonetheless. Caramelized onions and tomatoes give the dish a great depth of flavor, and a combination of spices and cream give it a luxurious earthiness.

The trick to getting those velvety chickpeas is to start with dried beans. I have nothing against canned chickpeas. In fact, I use them all the time. But when you really think about the texture of them, they have sort of a grittiness or a sandiness to them. Dried beans take a lot longer to prepare, but the texture is entirely different — they're soft and plump, with a smooth, creamy center that doesn't have a trace of grittiness to it. I've tried making dried chickpeas a few times before but they've never come out quite right. You need to be patient with them. Soak them overnight in lots of water — they'll plump up to at least double their original size. Then, simmer then slowly for at least an hour until they are tender and creamy.

If you're in a rush, you can use canned chickpeas and have a delicious dinner in a few minutes. But if you have the time and patience to start with dried beans, you'll be in for a real treat.

You may find chickpeas being sold under their other name — garbanzo beans.

One day last weekend, I was looking for an excuse to not leave the house so I decided to braise something. I feel like although I've been doing a lot of braising this winter (thanks to Julie and Julia, which has us all craving Boeuf Bourgignon in August!!), I hardly ever use my oven. I obviously use it when I bake, but it's so rare that I do something like roast a chicken and the oven just never gets used for cooking. I takes so long! You have to wait for it to preheat, then it takes forever to actually cook your food.... so it's the stovetop for me the majority of the time. Every once in a while if I'm snowed in (or want to pretend I'm snowed in!) I take advantage of the time at home to make a delicious braised dish. Like these short ribs, which simmer away all afternoon until the meat falls right off the bone and is tender as can be.

Instead of doing a traditional Italian braise, I decided to put a southwestern twist on my ribs, using beer and tequila as my liquids and adding a jalapeno and some chili powder to the pot. The flavor turned out great - it wasn't spicy or beer-y at all, but it had a nice little southwestern kick. In order to develop the recipe I used the "Create your own" feature on the Fine Cooking web site. The feature walks you through the recipe and lets you drag different combinations of ingredients into the "pot" - then at the end it gives you a recipe that you can follow to recreate the dish n a real kitchen. I always play around with the feature, but I had never actually cooked one of the recipes before. I was impressed! Although you ned to pay attention to what flavors will go well together and make sure you have a good balance of richness and acidity, it's a great way to put a fun, personal twist on a recipe that you aren't that familiar with.

For any of you that have never had short ribs before, it's similar to pot roast with a slightly firmer texture - fork-tender and succulent meat, with vegetables that cook down into a nice sauce. I served these with mashed potatoes (with sour cream instead of milk) to serve with my ribs. They were a great way to soak up the extra sauce! [....]