Pasta with Butternut Squash Sauce, Sausage & Spinach

It was Mardi Gras yesterday. A day to essentially eat guilt-free before giving something up for the next 40 days. As a result, I decided to make one of my favorite new dinner recipes - Cavatappi pasta with pureed butternut squash sauce, sauteed spinach and seared chicken sausage.

Ingredients:

Sage 
Garlic
1 Shallot
1 tbsp Butter
Cavatappi Pasta
1 Butternut Squash
Grated Parmesan Cheese
3 Handfuls of Spinach
1 Package of Chicken Sausage 

Boiling squash in action!

To start, peel the skin off the squash, cube it and throw it in a pot of boiling water to cook and soften. Once it is cooked through, use a food processor to puree the squash until it is a smooth and creamy consistency. If you don't have a food processor (like I didn't up until this past Christmas) simply mash the squash thoroughly - you will thin it out later on in the recipe.

At the same time, cook the chicken sausage in a pan with garlic for 7-9 minutes. Break the sausage apart and cut it up into large chunks as it cooks. As the sausage starts to brown, add a tsp of butter and the finely chopped shallots.

There are a lot of moving parts to this recipe and you want to be boiling the pasta in the same water that you used to boil the squash as the sausage, shallots and garlic cook. Save a cup of the water before draining the pasta as you will need it to thin the squash into a sauce.

Add the squash, spinach and sage to the sausage mixture in the pan. Stir thoroughly and sprinkle some grated parmesan cheese into the sauce. Also add the cup of pasta water that you saved as that will thin the squash into a creamy sauce. Once the sauce is heated through, pour it over the drained pasta and mix everything together.

This is a delicious meal for a cold night and is guaranteed to give you lots of leftovers for lunch and dinner during the week - or at least it did for me. Bon appetit!

All American Meal: Sweet Potato Fries & A Burger

So what I've gathered from looking at which posts are read most often, is that everyone (and by everyone I mean the small fraction of the population who's reading this) enjoys food as much as I do. I guess that just means I'll have to keep trying new recipes and that those tips to make time fly at the gym are going to really start coming in handy...

To cater to your needs and have something to write about I decided to try my hand at making healthy, baked sweet potato fries. I swear I didn't do it to satisfy my own cravings. And since you can't have just sweet potato fries for dinner, I made a turkey burger to go with them.

For the fries, you will need: 1 sweet potato (per person), olive oil, salt & pepper and an oven preheated to 450 degrees.

Step 1: Use potato peeler to remove all of the skin from the sweet potato. Once the sweet potato has been peeled, cut off each end. Chop up the remainder into thick, fry-sized chunks.  

Step 2: Throw your cut fries into a plastic bag to season. Coat the sweet potato chunks with olive oil and add in sea salt and pepper. I kept it simple for my first go at these but you can play around with different spices. I'm thinking that brown sugar might be interesting to throw in the mix to give the fries a sweet & salty taste next time. 

Step 3: Spread the fries out on a baking sheet and make sure to arrange them in a single layer. Next, throw them in the preheated oven to bake.

 

Step 4: Bake for 10 minutes, flip the fries and bake for another 15 minutes. I've read that corn starch will help the fries crisp up a bit more but I didn't find it necessary.

I used ground turkey for the burger and seasoned it with minced garlic, Worcestershire sauce, salt & pepper. Form the ground turkey into burger patties and grill for about 5 minutes on each side. Turn the heat down to low and add on a slice of swiss cheese to heat until melted. Finally, top with a slice or two of avocado and serve with the french fries!

I was able to use leftover sweet potato in this the next night but first things first, bon appetit! Of course I've made myself hungry just writing this now... Comment and let me know if you try them with different seasoning!

Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail

That saying may seem a bit dramatic in some respects but I've found it rings true for me when it comes to planning meals and not wasting the food that I buy each week. I'm very selective at the grocery store and try to buy things that I know I can get a few different meals out of - like chicken, ground turkey and vegetables.

When I can, I try to plan out my dinners for the week ahead of time. While it's easy to use a simple piece of paper, you can try these free weekly dinner templates. (Why not?! They're free!)

Here's what's on my dinner menu this week - I'm excited to have my healthy dinner for one again on Thursday and maybe I'll even have leftover peppers from other meals to add:

Hope you can use these too and plan to succeed this week!

Dinner (For One) Is Served

Following a recipe is easy. Cooking for one is hard. I say this even after taking finding the time and energy to cook a meal after work out of the equation. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, but how often do you readily find recipes for one?

As a result, I frequently find myself cooking enough food to feed a small family...and then eating the same thing for a week straight (or eating too much in one night). Do you have this problem, too?

I've found that I have the most success making something healthy and making more appropriate portions when I experiment. I tend to buy a lot of the same ingredients each week and try to switch things up a bit or use different seasonings. Salad, chicken, ground turkey, eggs and all sorts of vegetables tend to be staples in my diet. Not sure why brussels sprouts got such a bad rap growing up since they're one of my favorites now and vegetables are the easiest to cook to me.

Lately, I've been making a mixture of quinoa, corn, onion, chickpeas, brussels sprouts and parmesan cheese seasoned with some garlic salt, pepper and tarragon topped with a poached egg. This would be a perfect filling for stuffed pepper's like my friend Lacey's (minus the bulky brussels sprouts) but recently I've been making a meal out of this combination of ingredients.

Dinner is served

I'm not one for measuring out ingredients when I'm experimenting so you can use as much or as little of each or substitute ingredients as needed. I just boil and simmer the quinoa for about 20 minutes; roast the brussels sprouts in the oven at 400 degrees; then mix these ingredients together with the vegetables and seasoning on the stove as I poach the egg. Voile!

When all else fails, you can always pull a Sandra Bullock from "Two Weeks Notice" and order takeout for one! I'm certainly guilty of it once in awhile...

Bon appetit!