CEiMB -- Baked Shrimp with Tomatoes and Feta

Well, today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. For Craving Ellie in My Belly this week, we can choose any Ellie recipe we want. Since I'm sure there will be lots of delicious, heavy food at Thanksgiving, I decided to pick a light seafood dish--Baked Shrimp with Tomatoes and Feta from The Food You Crave (page 234). This dish is amazingly simple yet delicious and will definitely be a regular in my house.

Basically, you cook up some onion and garlic in olive oil, then add two cans of diced tomatoes until the mixture thickens. Throw in some shrimp, parsley, dill, salt, pepper, and feta, and put the whole thing in a 425 degree oven for 12 minutes. That's it!

I decided to serve the shrimp with brown rice, but it would also be great with pasta.

CEiMB -- Whole-Wheat Pasta Salad with Walnuts and Feta

This week's CEiMB recipe is whole-wheat pasta salad with walnuts and feta hosted Kayte of Grandma's Kitchen Table. I may not have taken many photos, but I loved it! While the pasta boiled, I chopped up spinach, onion, feta, as well as the sun dried tomatoes I added in. I set the mixture to the side while I toasted and chopped the walnuts before adding them to the party.

The dressing was incredibly easy to make, though I used olive oil rather than walnut oil. I doubled the amount of dressing and combined everything.

It was very tasty that evening, as well as for lunch the next day. The only thing I would change is using less onion. I used half of a small/medium red onion and it was overpowering--and I LOVE onions. I also added some dried cranberries to the lunch leftovers and it was delicious. I will definitely be making this dish again.

CEiMB -- Spaghetti Frittata

Growing up, one of my aunts would always make a spaghetti pie for holiday dinners. It always scared me, so I never tried it. When I saw this week's recipe for Spaghetti Frittata, hosted by Marthe at Culinary Delights, it reminded me of that spaghetti pie. I knew I had to make it and finally try it out!

Since the past few weeks at work have been hectic, this was a good recipe to make because it was so straightforward and uncomplicated. While I cooked the pasta, I chopped up my onion and set it to cook, then chopped up the spinach, sundried tomatoes, and garlic to add to the pan. After combining the pasta and sauce, I added that mixture to the veggies and cooked up. Finally, I added the eggs. The recipe calls for broiling the mixture after adding cheese, but I wasn't 100% sure that my pans could handle it so I put the oven temp up as high as I knew I could. It took a bit longer, but it seemed to work.

Pre-oven:

Post-oven:

I was scared it was going to be some weird eggy pasta "thing" but it was good! I wish I had added more salt and maybe some herbs for additional flavor, but my husband liked it as it was.

CEiMB--Apple Brown Betty

So this week was my pick for Craving Ellie in My Belly--Apple Brown Betty. Even better, I was able to make this recipe over the weekend with my mom since my parents were visiting! There was quite the selection of apples at the farmers market. Even though the recipe calls for Golden Delicious apples, I decided to use Nittany apples from the market--mostly because my husband went to Penn State and is a huge PSU football fan (if I had known how poorly the game was going to go later that day, I may have chosen differently!).

This recipe was quite easy to put together. The most difficult part was thinly slicing the apples, but even that became easy once I remembered I owned a mandoline slicer (that is why my cut up apples all look different). I added the apples, apple cider (also from the farmers market and crazy delicious), some of the brown sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon to a large pan to cook up.



I was concerned that the apples wouldn't fit in my pie dish, but they cooked down nicely and fit into my pie dish without any trouble.



Since I was enjoying time with my family, I didn't realize until it was too late that I did not have any bread at home. Luckily for me, I did have some panko bread crumbs! I combined those with melted butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon for the topping, and popped the whole thing into the oven.



After 30 minutes, the topping was a nice, golden brown. Dessert time!



My husband surprised us by picking up some low-fat vanilla ice cream to go with the Apple Brown Betty. It was a great combination, especially since it was a pretty warm evening.



The recipe makes a lot of servings, definitely more than six unless you have pretty big portion sizes. The four of us each had some, and I actually ate the Apple Brown Betty cold later on in the week. It is delicious cold as well, even without the ice cream!

You can find the recipe on the Food Network site for Ellie's Apple Brown Betty, as well as on page 241 of So Easy.

CEiMB: Baked French Toast

This week's CEiMB recipe was Blueberry Almond French Toast, hosted at Chez Zero. As you may gather from the post title, it's a baked French toast dish, and one where I left out two of the main ingredients--blueberries and almonds. Why would I do such a thing? Well, my husband doesn't care for almonds. Since raspberries were on sale, I swapped them out for blueberries. Sometimes, recipe tweaks are great. In this case, I should have stuck closer to the original.

Since there are only two of us, I sort of halved the recipe. I kept the bread, vanilla, and cinnamon amounts the same, but decreasing everything else.

Bread, meet egg/milk/etc. mixture

One thing I really liked about this recipe was that it was prepared the night before. It was especially helpful since I had quite a few loads of laundry to take care of the morning I made this.

After pouring the egg/milk/etc. mixture over the baguette pieces, I added some raspberries, covered the dish, and popped it in the fridge for the night.

The next morning, I put the French toast into the oven. Truthfully, I panicked that the cold glass dish would break apart in the hot oven, so I heated it up in the microwave at 30 second intervals to take the chill off. I wouldn't recommend it.

Since I was distracted by laundry (and thoughts of exploding glassware), I forgot to top my baked French toast with brown sugar until there were only about 15 minutes left.

I baked for about 50 minutes, then cut out some pieces to eat for breakfast.

It was okay. The raspberries' tartness was a bit overwhelming in the dish, so poor choice on my part there. I put in 1/3 cup of real maple syrup, but couldn't taste it at all. I'm not giving up on baked French toast just yet, but I may try making the actual recipes (blueberries, almonds and all) in the future.

BBQ Chicken Pizza

While I love being able to save draft blog posts, I need to remember to actually go back and finish posts I start. I promise I wasn't holding my leftover BBQ chicken for a month. Though I suppose we can pretend I froze it, and then thawed it for this pizza!

I have wanted to try out Trader Joe's pizza dough for quite awhile and I figured no better way to use up some BBQ pulled chicken leftovers than by making a pizza! I also look for any excuse to eat pizza.

Stretching out the dough took longer than I thought it would, but it was pretty fun. The crust may not be even, but I managed not to tear it. After shaping the dough into what looked sort of like a pizza crust, I spread some BBQ sauce over it. I then added some of the leftover BBQ pulled chicken. I don't normally like heavily topped pizzas, but I figured it is BBQ chicken pizza.

Then it was time for my favorite part of any pizza--the cheese. I used a mixture of mozzarella and colby jack because we had open bags of both in the fridge. I may have overindulged in the cheese a bit.

About ten minutes later, the pizza was done! To be fair, I put it under the broiler for a minute to try and crisp up some of the cheese on top before serving.

If I were a good or experienced blogger, I'd have some sort of recipe to share. Alas, I am a lazy bum blogger who winged the whole thing. Winged...wings...buffalo chicken pizza may be next.

Macaroni Salad

As promised, here's the info on the macaroni salad I paired with my slow cooker pulled chicken. Growing up, I would not touch macaroni salad. I was a picky eater in general, but all the mayo in macaroni salad made me want to run and hide. At some point as an adult, I must have tried macaroni salad and it wasn't bad! In fact, I sort of liked it.

Since the husband is not a fan of store bought macaroni salad, I decided to try my hand at making it myself. The hardest part of making macaroni salad is chopping up the vegetables. Well, that's the second hardest part. The hardest thing is waiting to eat it!

Step one: combine all ingredients except pasta.

Step 2: Add pasta, stir, and put in fridge.

Step 3. After waiting patiently, serve and eat!

Macaroni Salad, adapted from Classic Macaroni Salad

2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni

1/2 cup light mayonnaise

2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar

2 tablespoons white sugar

1 tablespoon and 3/4 teaspoon prepared yellow mustard

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/2 large red onion, chopped

1 stalk celery, chopped

1/2 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped

1 tablespoon relish

dash of paprika

While pasta cooks, mix all other ingredients. Add cooked and drained pasta to mix and combine. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours.