Island flavor

I'm almost reluctant to post this, because it doesn't look very appealing in the picture. But Island Papaya chicken is one of our favorite dinners. It's comfort food around here -- chicken sauteed with papaya with a sweet and spicy marmalade sauce on top of coconut rice. I suppose it would look better sprinkled with cilantro, as the recipe calls for, but I can't bring myself to buy a whole bunch of cilantro for garnish. Trust me, it's so good. For the coconut rice, we make jasmine rice, substituting low-fat coconut milk for half the water and adding some sugar.

Cooking Light in 2009

Brent received the Cooking Light 2009 recipe collection. It's helpfully organized by month, so we can always stay in season. The January-February recipes include lots of dried fruit, which we paired with broccoli and sauteed spinach. Brent has just finished In Defense of Food and informs me that we need to branch out from eating brussel sprouts every night. We started with pork with orange-apricot sauce:

Rather than buy an entire pork tenderloin for the two of us, I substituted thin-sliced pork loin, which worked great. We then had Moroccan chicken with fruit and olives. I served it with pine nut couscous and spinach, which I sauteed with leftover onion and garlic from the chicken.

We'll be returning to this cookbook all year.

Winter feasts

We headed to the grocery store in advance of our first storm of the season in search of inspiration. We found lamb chops, which we grilled and served with roasted brussel sprouts and creamy goat cheese polenta. It wasn't quite my dinner at Tonto, but it was pretty close, at a small fraction of the price.

Then we pulled some whole wheat pizza dough out of the freezer and topped it with our favorites: roasted sweet potato, caramelized onions, cranberries and goat cheese. We used herbed goat cheese, rather than spending a fortune on fresh herbs. It worked great.

Color me Red

I needed to make dessert to take to some friends' for dinner tomorrow night. Ipso Fatto had recently made Red Velvet Cake for a Christmas party, and I remembered that Brent had brought me Red Velvet Cupcake mix many moons ago. Now normally everything here on the blog is from-scratch, but these are pretty darn close.

And with leftover roast chicken, we dined on chicken tortilla soup:

King Cake

To celebrate, Epiphany, I made King Cake for Godly Play. It was too lemon-y for many of the kids. It was beautiful, though! Next time, I think I'll make a pure cinnamon-roll type dough.