Five Friday Favorites – New Favorites Food Edition

I need to talk about food.

OK, I always need to talk about food. But over the last couple of weeks, we have celebrated both Passover and Easter with all kinds of great new things to eat.

Of course we’ve eaten a lot more than five things recently – a lot more – but here I’ll offer up our five favorite new things.

Here we go…

1. Favorite new homemade salad dressing: White Balsamic Vinaigrette from Barefeet In the Kitchen. I discovered this blog not too long ago and have already made quite a few things from Mary’s posts – every one of them has been an awesome find and many of them now live on my Pinterest site. This dressing showed up as a stand-alone post in addition to the salad post that features it. My big kitchen endeavor lately is making things at home rather than buying a store-made product so this dressing caught my eye right away. I also loved that it gave me a reason to use the abundance of white balsamic I ended up with this summer when I inadvertently bought two bottles for one little recipe. This is too easy to pass up – olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, sugar, salt, pepper. Shake. Done.

I did not take a photo of the dressing in its jar – although it is pretty – but here’s a slight adaptation of the salad from Barefeet in the Kitchen. The dressing is there…just look really close.

The original calls for caramelized almonds, lettuce, parsley, and clementines – we used caramelized almonds, kale, clementines, and dried cranberries. So. Good. I also had it a few days ago for lunch with some leftover chicken and feta cheese tossed in.

2. Favorite Passover side dish that could be an entree if it wanted to be: Cranberry Quinoa Stuffed Zucchini from What Jew Wanna Eat. I love Amy Kritzer’s blog and we’ve happily eaten many of her recipes, but this one is a huge hit. During Passover, foods are prepared without leavening to commemorate the Israelites’ dietary circumstances during their flight from Egypt. There are loads of traditional holiday staples, but I like to find new and interesting ways to feed the Fab Hub and Kidzilla during Passover that aren’t just the same old stuff. Enter Amy’s blog. Amy re-creates her Bubbe’s recipes with a more modern spin and the results are amazing. This recipe was intended as a side dish, but honestly if you choose larger zucchini or just serve a couple of the smaller ones, it really could be a very nice and rather filling vegetarian option. Picture little zucchini boats stuffed with quinoa, cream cheese, cranberries…never mind, just take a look for yourself:

Two slight variations to note here: I used kale in the stuffing rather than spinach just because that’s what I had in the veggie drawer at the time. And we used Philadelphia brand cream cheese rather than the Temp Tee Amy suggests. Our store had the Temp Tee (who knew?), but the Fab Hub is partial to the Philly brand. (Note: we could not locate a Kosher for Passover indication on the Philadelphia cream cheese. If you are strict about Kosher for Passover certification, you may want to stick to the Temp Tee or another approved brand.)

3. Favorite new muffin that looked complicated but really wasn’t: Honey and Goat Cheese Filled Fig Muffins from Eating Well. I almost didn’t make these because getting the goat cheese filling inside the muffins just looked like too much effort. And honestly, I didn’t know who would eat them besides me and my Super Sister. But I decided that was enough to work with and gave them a shot. These muffins were surprisingly easy to make and the filling part worked out just fine. We served these at our Easter brunch and many guests enjoyed them. Kidzilla liked them a lot. I would love to pop a photo up here, but I never took one. Sister and I were too busy sampling the goods to photograph. I am pretty sure I’ll behaving one of the leftovers for breakfast this weekend, If I remember to grab a shot, I’ll add it to the post. In the meantime, Eating Well has a great photo on the original recipe page.

4. Favorite chicken recipe that I never would have thought of: Honey Horseradish Chicken from What Jew Wanna Eat. Yup, hop back over to Amy’s blog. She had a post with 30 Passover recipes – this is just the second of about six of hers that we tried. The recipe post calls for a whole chicken but we are not a whole chicken eating household, so we opted to try this on skinless boneless breasts. We did some major adaptation for this one and, admittedly, will have to fine-tune those adaptations the next time we make it, but this is a definite keeper.  Rather than stuffing the bird with the lemon, garlic, onion, and rosemary we went for a marinade-style preparation. We did not marinate nearly long enough. In the oven, we hoped the horseradish, honey, olive oil, salt and pepper mix would make the breasts nice and golden brown like Amy’s whole chicken, but it really didn’t. We ended up taking them out and giving them a quick finish in a skillet to get some nice color on our poor little chicken. The results were just fine at dinner that night and for lunch leftovers afterwards. This was one of  Fab Hub’s votes for favorite recipes of Passover 2013. Fab Hub’s one piece of constructive criticism was that he was hoping for more “infusion of flavor” in the chicken. I really think that could be solved by marinating the breasts longer and perhaps starting them in the pan for browning before finishing in the oven. All in all, a great flavor combination and even without final perfections to our breasts-only version, we loved it. Head over to Amy’s blog and check out her beautiful original – and more!

5. Favorite unique spin on grilled cheese: Caramel Apple Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Bacon from Closet Cooking. This is another blog I’ve been stalking lately. We’ve made a couple of things from Kevin’s roster and so far they have all been great. This sandwich, though, is ah-maz-ing. What’s not to love? It’s grilled cheese. Enough said, right? But then it’s grilled cheese and there is bacon involved. Even better. Apples? Not unheard of and a very nice addition to the taste combination here. But then it gets outrageous. Add homemade caramel sauce to this little baby and you have something fantastic. Caramel sauce on a grilled cheese sandwich? That’s what I thought. But I promise you this is fabulous. Try it.

How terrific does that look? Kidzilla and Fab Hub had theirs on whole wheat bread with Jazz apples; I had mine on Ezekiel bread with Granny Smiths. We didn’t have any cheddar in the house, but a nice thin-sliced Dutch Swiss worked just fine. I would definitely try it again with cheddar and turkey bacon would be a great alternative to the pig. Was the caramel sauce weird? Not at all. It gave it that little something extra and a very little bit is all you need.

Whew. That was a lot of food to show you. Hungry yet? I know.

Bonus goodie! Favorite thing Kidzilla said while I was cooking: “She’s ah-mazing!” This was in response to her Fab Dad telling her that Mamma was making homemade caramel sauce to go with dinner. There’s nothing quite like cooking for people who appreciate it.

Happy Friday, friends!