Shrimp with Feta and Tomatoes

In continuation of my Ellie binge...

I really liked this Ellie Krieger recipe: Baked Shrimp with Feta and Tomatoes. It is somewhat of a complete dish that you could serve with just a green salad and some toasted french bread for a light meal. I think this would also be nice with some herbed orzo served alongside. Other than that, I don't have more to say. I think the picture speaks for itself.

I guess I do have one more thing to say: I didn't use tomatoes with no-salt added because I don't stock those in the house. Regular canned tomatoes worked just fine. Just be careful about when you season to taste, remember the feta is salty too.

Ellie's Jerk Chicken

Another one from Ellie Krieger's The Food You Crave, this Jerk Chicken was slightly disappointing. I've certainly had better versions of Jerk Chicken before. It was the sauce. I can't quite pinpoint it, but I think something was off balance. Not terrible, but it just didn't come together like a really savory, mouth-watering jerk sauce should. I loved the pineapple salsa with cucumber and mint though. Pineapple/mint is a new flavor combo for me. I should have figured it would be good because mint has that same aromatic coolness about it that cilantro does and pineapple/cilantro is dreamy. So I'll probably come back to this salsa but not the jerk sauce.

Two from Ellie

I'm a big fan of Ellie Krieger and her book The Food You Crave. I've had some great success with the recipes and I tend to go to the book when I'm looking for a not-too-evil meal. One afternoon at lunch, when I found myself with none of my usual lunch foods available, I went to her book looking for a healthy little meal. I came up with Salmon Cakes with Creamy Ginger Sauce. A recipe using canned salmon and water chestnuts which I had in my cupboard.




If you have cats or ever owned a cat, you might have trouble with canned fish. I do. I can't get over the 9-Lives smell when I open the can. But I knew I'd be combining the fish with cilantro, whole wheat bread crumbs and green onions and making a dipping sauce. So I hoped the finished product would not be too fishy. These asian salmon cakes turned out really well. They have good flavor from the onions and the water chestnuts give them some textural interest. The sauce is made up of mostly yogurt, but a little mayo, sesame oil, soy and ginger that combine to make a nice compliment to the cakes. I used a small 7 1/2 oz can and made a quarter recipe. It produced 4 little cakes. I ate two for lunch and my husband ate the other two (with gusto!) This is also a really inexpensive dish that could easily make an economical dinner for two.

The second recipe is another cost-friendly dish that comes from Fine Cooking's latest issue #97. Ellie Krieger did an article on how to make a nutritious and tasty fried rice using brown rice. I was so happy to see her in my favorite magazine! The great thing about this Five Treasure Fried Rice is you can use up bits of things you might have hanging around in your vegetable drawer, freezer or fridge. She recommends using peeled, broccoli stems. You might also use a half a red pepper, a few carrots, some frozen corn, peas or edamame. If you had some pea pods or sugar snap peas, they would work great too. This recipe isn't vegetarian because it uses a little canadian bacon, but you could easily leave that out. There's also some egg in here for protein. But some leftover cooked chicken, pork or some cubes of firm tofu could be thrown in at the end and warmed through.

I think this rice is best served as a one-dish meal. It is filling and satisfying and has everything you need in a meal. However, today I served it as a side dish to some tilapia. The rice is a breeze to make, but some prep work is involved. There's a lot of chopping (small dice) so it isn't quick to put together. And you need to use cold rice; so it needs to be made well in advance, preferably the day before. And brown rice takes a lot of time to cook, don't forget. Also you absolutely need a 12-inch non-stick pan. If you only have a 10-inch, I'd recommend halving it. But if you make the whole recipe, you'll have a great healthy lunch for the next day.

Tuscan Roasted Chicken with Vegetables

Here's a seasonal dinner from Ellie Krieger's Food You Crave . It's Tuscan Roasted Chicken with Veggies, an all-in-one dish that you can put together easily and just stick in the oven. You can even play with your kids outside if you can hear the oven timer. Reading over the recipe, a few things concerned me, but since I had everything I just figured I'd go with it and adjust as I went along. More on that later.

This chicken is cooked on the bone but with the skin off. Good - because I end up just pulling the skin off before I eat it anyway, and because she instructs you to roast this at 375 - which will just give you flabby unappetizing skin anyway. On-the-bone gives you juicier chicken, so that appealed to me. You make a nice rub of garlic and lemon and put that all over the chicken. The chicken is placed on top of chunks of zucchini, tomatoes, and fennel (and I added some squares of red bell pepper too) that have been seasoned and tossed in olive oil. And into the oven it goes for 30 minutes. Then you add some herbs (rosemary, I added some thyme) and let it go for another 30 or so.

All good in theory. But the chicken and vegetables weren't really roasting. They were baking and there was no browning occurring at all. So I ended up turning the oven up to 400. If I wasn't out in the yard, I might have put it up to 425 and watched it closely. But at 400, the chicken got a little golden, as gold you could expect skinless chicken to get, I suppose. And the vegetables started to get some appetizing color too. In the end, it all tasted pretty good. The zucchini didn't get too mushy, as I feared it might. The tomatoes, fennel and peppers cooked down and softened. The juices from the veggies and the chicken co-mingled to make a delicious jus to spoon over everything. BTW, the fennel really benefited from cooking with the chicken. Fennel is great raw and sliced thin in a salad. But it's also amazing slow roasted in broth, cream or chicken juices. It mellows out and is just so savory and interesting. It made this dish notable.

I will probably make this again. (I might add some onion into the veg mix next time.) It is just one of those no-brainer, no-sweat, healthy meals that everyone needs in their repetoir.

Ellie's Mom's Turkey Meatloaf

I had a craving for meatloaf. Just one regular morning .... I woke up and my inner voice called to me and said "Meatloaf for dinner." I would have written this off as just another typical craving, but you see, I don't even like meatloaf. Never have. As a kid, my mom would make me a hamburger when the rest of the family was having meatloaf for dinner. It was just something about that thickness of ground beef that turned me off. And by all accounts, my mom makes a darn good one, don't get me wrong.

But as it was with mayo, mushrooms and fish, out of the blue the cells in my body did a 180 and my tastebuds suddenly became more ingratiating to a formerly distasteful food. So it is with meatloaf.

Since it had been so long (forever) since my tastebuds had even tasted meatloaf, I didn't want to spoil them right away with the beefy, porky, wrapped in bacon-type loaf. So I decided to try turkey meatloaf. For the record, there are nearly 292,000 turkey meatloaf recipes currently on the internet.

Ellie Krieger's meatloaf from her book The Food You Crave is where I started. She and her book have yet to disappoint. As far as I can tell, the unique thing about this recipe is that she uses quick oats for a binder instead of breadcrumbs. She promises they will be undetectable. This is true. There was no oat flavor in the meat at all. The meatloaf is also studded with flavorful vegetables, like onion and pepper, which add to the flavor and texture but is off-putting to children, both the 4 and 11 year old variety. But otherwise, dear husband and I really enjoyed it. It uses two pounds of meat which made it a little large. I would halve it next time, or maybe just reduce it to 1 1/2 lbs because the leftovers were great. There's a little ketchup mixed in but the top is sauced with tomato sauce and that gives it a saucy Italian flavor. I really thought the 4-year old meatball-eating champion was going to go for it.

I liked this recipe and wouldn't hesitate to make it again. But there are so many recipes out there that I think I'll try some different ones before I revisit this one. Barefoot Contessa has one that interests me. But it uses 5 lbs of turkey. Yikes! Maybe if you had a family of ten. If you have a recipe that you like, I'd love to know more about it.

Uncompromising Apple Muffins

Let me start out by saying, I am not a fan of lowfat/low calorie baking. Unlike savory foods where you can just pick recipes that, just by their nature, lean toward the lighter side, baked goods require substitutions for the fat and the sugar that make them taste good and have a tender crumb. Lowfat/low cal baked goods always seem to have a "compromised" flavor and rubbery texture. Why bother? I just prefer the real thing. Perhaps a smaller portion or less frequently, but real butter, please. But this recipe has really made me call that principle into question because these Apple Muffins are one of those recipes that substitutes applesauce for butter and includes whole wheat flour to increase nutritional value. And yet, these taste great. They're from my new favorite cookbook author and Food Network show host, Ellie Krieger and her cookbook The Food you Crave. We had these for breakfast Easter morning. They use half whole wheat flour and half regular unbleached white flour. And there is only 1/4 cup of canola oil in the whole recipe; but you get 12 generous, full-size delicious muffins. The muffins are studded with small apple chunks and have a cinnamon, brown sugar, pecan topping.

Ellie Krieger's Energy Bars

Ellie Krieger is a nutrition-ist who has her own cooking show on the Food Network. Her show isn't the greatest, but I appreciate her approach to eating well and she sometimes makes things I really want to taste. I haven't been baking much and I really had an itch to make something one recent afternoon. I decided I needed to give these Energy Bars a try. These bars are her homemade substitute for a nutrition bar. They're full of dried fruit, nuts, oats and wheat germ that is all ground up together to make an appealing granola-type bar. The result is a sweet, chewy textured bar "cookie" that is very satisfying alongside a midafternoon cup of tea. And each one (coming in at 133 calories per bar) is a solid, if a bit small, snack that will tide you over until your next meal. Both I and dear husband liked them a lot. He tends to eat two per serving. However, as expected, it was a no-go with the kids. I have frozen them and pull a few out as needed because they defrost quickly. I like a good Zone Bar as much as the next person, but these are nice because I know exactly what is in them and they have a homemade comfort-food quality that I appreciate.