Monthly Archives: May 2012

Veggie Wraps with Feta, Hummus and Basil

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Matt and I live about five minutes from work which means that we are able to drive home in the middle of the day to visit Bailey and eat lunch together.  Usually we eat leftovers, lean cuisine pizzas, or lean pockets (my fav is the grilled chicken jalapeno cheddar!) but this week we decided to plan ahead and actually prep food on Monday that we could enjoy all week.  The minimal amount of prep work at the beginning of the week was well worth it and we happily assembled and ate our fresh veggie wraps with feta, hummus, and basil on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

These wraps were inspired by Cosi‘s Hummus and Veggie Sandwich and Panera‘s Mediterranean Veggie Sandwich.  We made a few changes including using soft, pliable flatbread from The Fresh Market and adding our favorite types of hummus.  (I prefer Trader Joe’s Cilantro Jalapeno Hummus and Matt likes TJ’s Mediterranean Hummus.)  The resulting sandwiches are flavorful, colorful, and just messy enough to give you an excuse to lick the excess hummus and melted feta off of your fingers when you’re done eating.  🙂

Veggie Wraps with Feta, Hummus and Basil (makes 6 sandwiches)

You will need…
6 pieces Flatbread or flexible, fresh pita bread
Approx. 1 cup reduced fat Feta Cheese, crumbled
Approx. 1 cup of your favorite hummus
1 Red Onion, thinly sliced into rounds and cut in half
1 Cucumber, thinly sliced on a diagonal and then cut into strips
1 Red Pepper, thinly sliced into long pieces
Handful of Basil Leaves, thinly sliced

Directions:
Place one flatbread on a microwave-safe plate and sprinkle with feta cheese.  Microwave on high for 30 seconds to warm up the bread and slightly melt the cheese.  Top the cheese with 2-3 spoonfuls of hummus and gently spread the hummus over the cheese with the back of the spoon.  Top with sliced onion, cucumber, pepper, basil and a spoonful of feta.  To eat your veggie wrap, fold up the edges of the flatbread taco-style and enjoy!

What do you eat for lunch during the work week?  Please share!  🙂

‘Dock Daze’ on the Nanticoke River

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We’ve had a busy two weeks and I feel like I’ve been neglecting my blog a bit.  I hope to change that in the next few days because I have lots of fun topics to post about including our Memorial Day weekend trip to Quechee, VT, the sure-to-be-delicious chicken cutlet sandwiches with roasted red peppers and mozzarella that we’re going to make tonight for dinner, and all of the exciting developments in my little garden.  To kick things off, I’ll recap our second Dockdogs event of the season, “Dock Daze” on the Nanticoke River.

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Herbed Pizza with Spinach and Feta

Posted in Adventures at Home, Recipes by

We made these delicious pizzas for dinner a few weeks ago just when the spinach in our garden was at its peak.  I picked about 3 cups of baby spinach leaves (almost wiping out the whole crop but that’s ok… I was making room for pepper plants and basil!) and rinsed and dried them well before using them in this recipe.  Fresh spinach leaves from the garden are juicy and bright green – very different from the bagged stuff you buy in the store!  I’ll definitely be planting more spinach when the weather cools off in the Fall so we can continue to enjoy this delicious leafy green.

Herbed Pizza with Spinach and Feta

View the recipe

Bailey turns five!

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Last Friday was Bailey’s fifth birthday so I thought that a post about my energetic four-legged friend might be in order.

Matt and I first met Bailey when she was four weeks old.  She had nine litter mates but choosing her was easy because, unlike her brothers and sisters who were only interested in eating and sleeping, Bailey was constantly bouncing around exploring her surroundings.  Bailey still continues to be an, ahem, “independent” dog (which is a nice way of saying that she’ll completely ignore us if she’s doing something that she deems more interesting) and that bounce in her four-week-old step has translated into a spring-loaded “pop” off the dock when she jumps at Dockdogs competitions.

Bailey at 7 weeks on her first day home with us.

How can you resist that puppy face? Click here to read more!

Smoky Pork Tinga Tacos

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I know that it’s already ocho de Mayo but I’ve been busy at work (and in the garden!) so I’m finally just getting around to posting about our yummy dinner from Saturday night.  Ever since we made BBQ Chicken Quesadillas back in March we’ve been obsessed with La Tortilla Factory’s Green Chile Corn Tortillas and, as a result, we decided to make a meal that utilized these delicious little disks for Cinco de Mayo.  We pulled out our trusty Mexican Everyday cookbook by Rick Bayless and Matt quickly declared that the Pork Tinga Taco recipe sounded like a winner.

After a quick mid-day trip to the grocery store we had the taco filling prepped and in the Crockpot.  Most of the work for this recipe is done during the initial prep stage (6 hours before you eat) which is nice because this means that your dinner is basically sitting their waiting for you once dinnertime rolls around.  In our case we were able to use our “free time” in the evening to enjoy homemade Salsa and Margaritas.  🙂

Smoky Pork Tinga Tacos with Avocado and Queso Fresco (from Mexican Everyday)
(serves an army in one sitting or serves two for dinner and provides 4-5 leftover lunches throughout the week)

You will need…
1 lb. Yukon Gold Potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
2 lbs. Boneless Pork Shoulder, cut into 1 inch cubes
2 – 15 oz. cans Fire-Roasted Diced Tomatoes, undrained
3 canned Chipotle Chiles en Adobo, sliced into 1/4 inch strips
1 tablespoon Adobo canning sauce from Chipotles
1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce
1 teaspoon Dried Oregano
3 cloves Garlic, pressed through a garlic press
1 1/4 teaspoons Salt
1 Medium White Onion, sliced into 1/4 inch thick slices
1 Mexican Chorizo Sausage, casing removed
16 Corn Tortillas, warmed
1 cup Crumbled Queso Fresco Cheese (substitute feta if you can’t find QF)
2 large Avocados, pitted and sliced into 1/4 inch pieces

Directions:
Approximately 6 hours before you plan to eat dinner, line the bottom of your slow cooker with the potatoes and top with an even layer of the pork.  Combine the next seven ingredients (tomatoes thru salt) in a bowl and mix together.  Pour the tomato mixture over the pork and top with the sliced white onion.  Cook on “high” for 6 hours.

Pork Tinga mixture after slow-cooking for 6 hours. After this photo was taken we poured out the excess liquid, reduced it, and stirred it back into the pork to retain the intense flavor.

When your pork is done, brown and crumble the chorizo, drain the excess fat, and stir it into your pork mixture.  Break up the pork into smaller shredded pieces as you stir.  At this point check to see how much liquid is in your slow cooker.  If yours is anything like ours was, it will be way too watery to spoon onto a tortilla.  Rather than throwing away this excess liquid, pour it into a sauce pan and boil rapidly to reduce.  Stir the syrupy reduced liquid back into the meat for maximum flavor.

Warm your tortillas.  An easy shortcut is to sandwich a tortilla between two damp paper towels and microwave it on high for 30-45 seconds.  This makes the tortillas warm, moist and pliable without dirtying a frying pan.  🙂  To build your Smoky Pork Tinga Tacos, place a few spoonfuls of the pork mixture on the warm tortilla and top with queso fresco and avocado.  Enjoy!

Vegetable Gardening Season has Arrived!

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For those of you who follow my blog, you may remember that I got the gardening “itch” way back in March and as a result I planted spinach and beans in my tiny vegetable garden on St. Patrick’s Day.  The spinach (a veggie that actually likes to grow in cold weather) has done great and I have been able to use it in several recipes including my Trader Joe’s style Eggplant Parmesan and my Herbed Spinach and Feta Pizza (coming soon!).  The beans were less thrilled about being planted in the winter and have taken their sweet old time coming up, but now that May has arrived they have suddenly taken off and are starting to look like real bean plants.

It’s amazing what can grow in 10 days! Garden on April 15th (left) and April 25th (right).  You can see the spinach in the front and the beans in the back.

Matt and I enjoy listening to Mike McGrath’s organic gardening show “You Bet Your Garden” on NPR (the archived podcasts are great entertainment for long car rides) and we’re trying to take some of Mike’s advice to improve our garden this year.  According to Mike, a good “yard waste compost” (a mixture of shredded fall leaves and nitrogen-rich green matter that has had time to break down to a soil-like consistency) makes the best mulch and also provides great nutrition and disease control in the garden.  We’ve been religiously composting our kitchen scraps all winter and now that it’s getting warmer out we’re hoping to start seeing some fresh compost in our spin bin composter soon!

Potted cherry tomato plant that has been “mulched” with partially composted shredded leaves to retain moisture.

I have several plants around the patio in containers, including two cherry tomatoes from my neighbor, a planter with chives, marjoram, marigolds, and a day lily, a combo of sweet and chocolate mint, and a serrano pepper plant.  I’ve been really impressed with the brightly colored orange, red, and yellow marigolds so far — they’ve been blooming continuously for a few weeks and have a lovely fragrance.  Apparently they repel insects so they’ll come in handy when our summer mosquitoes arrive!

Chives, Day Lily, Marjoram, and Marigolds on the patio

Now, back to those beans…  When I planted them in March I imagined having fully matured bean plants by now so I planted them across the entire back half of my garden.  Since the bean plants are clearly not ready to sprout beans anytime soon and I want to plant my basil in that same exact spot, I decided to transplant the strongest beans to my new strawberry patch.  Apparently beans and strawberries are “companion plants” so I figure that they will enjoy cohabitating the same small strip of my ever-expanding garden.

The transplanted bean plants are now scattered throughout my new strawberry patch.

Perhaps the most exciting additions to our garden this year are our two upside-down tomato plants.  I know that the whole upside-down growing gimmic is a bit of a fad and I’ve read lots of criticism about it on the internet, but after having a giant tomato plant take over my garden last year with its long, snarled branches and watching its tomatoes sit on the ground and get eaten by bugs, I decided that hanging plants sound pretty promising!

Hanging tomato plants with thyme and parsley.

Rather than purchasing the tupsy-turvy type of hanging tomato bags, we selected two large galvanized buckets from Home Depot and Matt drilled holes in the bottoms for the tomato plants to feed through.  When it came time to actually plant the tomatoes, we lowered the buckets to below eye level and Matt held each plant at the proper height (burying the stem up to the first true leaves) while I carefully added soil-less potting mix.  We topped off each bucket with herbs (thyme and parsley) and then covered the surface with partially composted leaves from our compost bin.  I’ll be interested to see how these plants do over the next few months!

Close up of the bottom of one of our hanging tomato plants: We threaded pieces of an old t-shirt around the base of each plant to hold the dirt in and drilled holes around the perimeter of the buckets for drainage.

Overall, I think I spent about 12 hours working in the garden last weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it.  I had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of vegetable gardening season all winter and I am so excited that it’s finally time to start planting!  What are you planting in your garden this Spring?

Mint plants on April 15th (left) and May 5th (right).

Related posts:
Gardening Update – One Month Later 4.17.12
Gardening… On St. Patrick’s Day! 3.17.12

Fire-Roasted Tomato Salsa

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Although Matt and I certainly don’t need an excuse to make a Mexican-themed meal, the fact that yesterday was Cinco de Mayo inspired us to choose two new recipes from our Mexican Everyday cookbook.  Mexican Everyday was written by Rick Bayless (the chef behind Frontera Foods) and I love that Rick included a whole intro section that describes the use and preparation of various Mexican ingredients including chipotles en adobo, jicama, tomatillos, and queso fresco (all ingredients that I had never worked with before buying this book!).

For our Cinco de Mayo feast we snacked on chips and Fire-Roasted Tomato Salsa as we prepared dinner and then enjoyed Smoky Pork Tinga Tacos with Avocado and Quesco Fresco as our main dish.  We also shook up a batch of delicious Margaritas on the Rocks using lime juice, tequila, triple sec, and simple syrup.  This post will cover our  salsa… more on the tacos coming up next!  🙂

Fire-Roasted Tomato Salsa (from Mexican Everyday)

You will need…
2 Jalapeño Peppers
3 cloves Garlic, unpeeled
1 – 15oz. can Fire-Roasted Diced Tomatoes, undrained
1/3 cup While Onion, finely chopped, rinsed, and drained
1/3 cup loosely packed Cilantro, chopped
1 teaspoon Fresh Lime Juice
Salt, to taste

Directions:
Place the jalapeño peppers on a grill over direct medium-high heat.  Allow the peppers to roast for approximately 10 minutes, turning occasionally, until the skin becomes dark and splotchy in spots.  At the same time, heat a small skillet over medium heat and lay the unpeeled garlic cloves in the skillet.  Allow the garlic to roast for approximately 15 minutes until dark and splotchy in spots.

Dry-roast the Jalapeños until the skin becomes blotchy and blackened.

Pull the stems out of the roasted peppers and remove the garlic cloves from their skin.  Place the roasted ingredients in a food processor and pulse until finely chopped.  Add the tomatoes with their juice and pulse a few more times until the mixture reaches your desired consistency.  Pour the tomato mixture into a medium bowl.  Add the onion and cilantro and mix well.  Taste and season with lime juice and salt.  Enjoy with corn tortilla chips and a nice cold margarita.  🙂

First Dockdogs Event of 2012!

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When I started this blog, one of my original goals was to document and share the results from Bailey’s Dockdogs events.  Of course, I started the blog in January (definitely the Dockdogs off-season since Bailey has no interest in jumping into cold water!) so up until now I haven’t had anything Dockdogs-related to share.  That’s all going to change now because the Dockdogs season has officially begun!

Last weekend we drove down to Virginia Beach for the 5th Annual Care-A-Lot Pet Supply National Sportsman’s Series Event.  Despite chilly temperatures, a steady wind, and a nice rain storm on Saturday, Bailey managed to jump into the pool twelve times.  Sometimes when it’s cold she’ll come to a screeching halt at the end of the dock so this was a big accomplishment all by itself!

Rocket had several jumps over 28 feet.

For me, the highlight of the event was getting to watch two top-ranked Belgian Malinois throw down some enormous scores as they each came within inches of breaking the world record (29’3”).  Rocket, a handsome reddish male from York, PA, had several jumps over 28 feet.  The other malinois, a slim, muscular male named Baxter, traveled all the way from St. Louis, MO for this event!  Baxter is the current world record holder and he too came within inches of setting a new record with several jumps in the 27-28 foot range.

World-record-holder Baxter won the Pro Finals with this 27+ foot jump

Bailey’s best jump of the weekend was 22’2” and she ended up in 4th place in the semi-pro finals.  Not her best showing but I’m hoping that this event was more of a warm up since it was her first competition since November.  Regardless of Bailey’s performance on the dock, we had a blast at the event visiting with our Dockdogs friends and showering Bailey with treats and swag from the Care-A-Lot vendors.  That makes the event a success in my book because having fun is really what it’s all about!  🙂