Who Needs Meat?

I feel so good after eating a delicious vegetarian meal, but I haven't found a wide range of dishes that are truly satisfying. Until now. 

This is one of those dishes that you can enjoy completely and after eating it there will be no thoughts of how nice it was to have eaten a vegetarian meal. Those thoughts won't exist because you won't even know that you didn't eat meat. 

I think it's because there are so many flavours happening in one yummy dish that I don't miss the meat, but I'll let you decide yourself after eating it. Read on for the recipe. 

Dill-icious

Dill is very much like cilantro in the sense that you either love it or hate it. I am in the love it field and embrace the flavour with open arms, especially when it comes to salmon. I love dill paired with salmon!

Today's recipe is a perfectly dill-icious sauce to serve with salmon. The only thing you should remember when you're making it is that it's really important to use Greek yogurt or your sauce will be really thin. 

Homemade Nutella

Sometimes the best things in life are free, or at least less than if you bought them already made. Nutella has always been one of life's little treats and now I've learned how to make it at home. 

I love smearing my toast with this chocolaty goodness in the morning and the little specks of salt from the real hazelnuts make the extra amount of work to make it from scratch worth it. 

Come on, you know want you want a bite. Read on for the recipe! 

A Whale of Kale Goodness

I don't think that anchovies, a tiny little tin of them, can count as meat. To me it's more like using chicken stock, just a little flavour enhancer. I know true vegetarians won't agree with me, but for me it works. 

Do you want to know the real best part of this meal, a part no one can argue with me about? It's that this dinner took only 20 minutes to get it to the table. And that included the prep time! 

Celebrate!

I don't have anything specific to celebrate right now, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't celebrate. I think that celebrating is something that should be done on regular basis. Maybe I'm only celebrating a beautiful day or the fact that I finally got caught up on laundry, but I'm celebrating all the same. 

This lasagna was inspired by a recipe I found on Chatelaine's website and they called it Celebration Lasagna. I wasn't sure why it was named that until I took my first bite. 

Thigh in the Sky

Some sauces taste so good that I don't want to try making them. I expect that they'll be difficult and have too many ingredients.

Today's chicken thigh recipe proves that not all great sauces have a lot of ingredients nor are they always hard to make. Plus, the best part is that there's no cream in this sauce, I really thought something this good would have cream!

Not Your Grandma's Gremolata

This is one of the most eye catching meals I've made in a long time. I'm not trying to toot my own horn (not much anyway) but I think it looks really pretty and colourful. 

This is my second recipe of the week for chicken thighs and its completely different from the stuffed chicken thigh dish I shared a few days ago. So I hope you don't let a big container of chicken thighs scare you the next time you see them on sale! 

Read on for the recipe, Chicken Thighs in Tomato Sauce with Polenta and Gremolata. 

Big Buy

This week I am all about buying in bulk and using everything up in new and interesting ways. When I shop, I almost always buy in bulk because it makes food less expensive. And I love the challenge of using the same ingredients in lots of different ways.

I know everyone's different though, and there may be some people who'd rather have a list of recipes instead of racking their brains for new and creative things. So, that's why I have sharing some of my big buy recipes this week.

And this week's topic is a winner, chicken thighs. First up is a chicken thigh stuffed with sun-dried tomato and cheese.

Smothered

Some sauces are meant to be messy and that's just because they taste so delicious that they make you want to dive into a big bowl. However, instead of diving into the sauce, it's a bit more normal to just smother everything in sight with it. 

That's this sauce. It has everything I crave in it - curry, coconut cream, citrus, and peanut butter. You might not think that all these would go together, but they do. You'll just have to try it to believe me. 

Sweet on Veggies

Lately I've seen quite a few pizza recipes that include squash and at first I really wasn't sure it would be that great an idea. I mean its a carb on a carb, right? But then I thought about it again. It's a carb on a carb!  And there's cheese! I love those things! 

So I came up with my own version of a Butternut Squash and Arugula Pizza that's as pretty as it is delicious. It even doubles as a light dinner or a perfect veggie appetizer. Really it can't be beat. 

Eating Smarter

As with every year I am trying to incorporate more vegetarian cooking into my meals, but I am also giving myself a few more resolutions. When I eat meat this year, I am going to eat smaller portions of meat and larger portions of veggies. I am going to try and eat local veggies more often. 

You might think that this is going to make things harder for me, but I think it will actually give me more opportunities to succeed. I'm not going to succeed at all my goals at every meal, but I hope to succeed at one goal at most meals. 

In today's post I am sharing a recipe that succeeds at begin vegetarian but not made from anythign local. I first tried a similar salad at a potluck and thought I would try to make it at home. I think it turned out great!

Nutty About Beets

This beet salad is one of the best salads that I've ever made. It had soft and sweet roasted beets, tangy cambozola cheese, and crunchy roasted hazelnuts. And it doesn't need much than that to be perfect. 

I also love that this salad is delicious served warm as a side dish, or even a main dish, and that it's equally delicious served cold for lunch the next day. Very few salads can achieve this kind of perfection. 

En Croute

Anything covered in pastry sounds like a delicious dinner to me and when someone starts using fancy words to describe their food, en croute or compote, I get really excited. I am not sure exactly what it is about fancy foodie words that excites me, but I think it might be that I feel like someone has gone to a lot of work and I really appreciate that. 

Today's recipe sounds fancy, but when you use frozen puff pastry and realize that the list of ingredients isn't very long, you'll figure out that some fancy sounding foods aren't as complicated as you might have though. 

Read on for today's recipe, Saumon en Croute (or Salmon in a Puff Pastry Crust)...

Bubba Gump's Shrimp Co.

I'm going to let you in on a few secrets, just because we're friends. I've never eaten okra before making this recipe and I've never watched Forrest Gump in it's entirety. Those were just two things that I had never wanted to do before.

However, after eating this Shrimp Gumbo and learning that okra can actually be quite tasty, I think I might give watching Forrest Gump a try.

Read on for a delicious Shrimp Gumbo recipe. And if you're not interested in trying okra, you can always omit the slippery veggie and replace it with zucchini instead.

Abundance and Plenty

Many people wish for abundance and plenty on for the New Year and, since fish produce a very large amount of eggs at once, they're a typical New Year's food. To celebrate wishes such as abundance and plenty, I'm going to share a few seafood recipes with you over the next couple days. 

I don't know about you, but even though I feel blessed and very satisfied with my life, I won't stop wishing for plenty of happiness for the new year. 

Read on for today's recipe, Salmon and Corn Chowder, a true bountiful catch of the day.