Northern Italian Pumpkin Lasagna (Pumpkin, a Super Food for All 12 Months of the Year)
I made this on Saturday. This was the 3rd dish of the week that had Graziano Sausage in it. I thought it was missing Ricotta, and without the sausage, it would've been kind of bland. However the sausage made this dish. The two pounds of pumpkin that it used was good as well. It reminded me of the meals from my mom where she snuck vegetables into pretty much everything that she could. Make your own Béchamel sauce and then combined pumpkin, onion and sausage...it wasn't bad at all. Anyways We both enjoyed it, though it did fill up my pan just a little to much, because it overflowed the side just a little. to make adjustments, I'd swap out a cup of mozzarella for a cup of Ricotta, but that's cause I love a good Ricotta. I would make this again. And I have quite a bit of pumpkin left too, so it may get made again.
Chicken Breasts covered in the Yuzu sauce combined with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, honey and sautéd in a pita
Again, the cooking of the sauce broke apart the heat that it has. I suspected this would happen so I combined the yuzu with some yogurt. I don't think I added enough (about a 1/2 teaspoon to about 3/4ths a cup of yogurt), but you could tell that it was there. So maybe that is more of the way to go. Created in a sauce? Maybe it would go well in hummus or some other dipping sauce.
Spicy Orange Chicken Stir-Fry
This is how this went: prep, prep, prep, execute eat. Shannon asked for some fried rice, so I did my best to sort of duplicate it, and did a pretty good job at it, though I didn't have all the ingredients that I needed to make it like I wouldn't liked to. But I did use some leftover onion and some fresh garlic and a couple of eggs to make it up right. It's pretty easy to do. The Orange stir fry turned out pretty well, but I don't think I got enough zest in there, but holy crap that's easy to make. And quick too.
Italian Sausage Meatball Heroes
For some reason, I had forgotten to eat on Sunday. Well not exactly. But I quick ate a ham sandwich before I went grocery shopping and that was pretty much it. Then after that we headed to go see Da Vinci, The Genius at the Science Center of Iowa. I was kind of distracted and didn't really follow the directions.
I forgot to add the parmesan cheese. I used Muir Glen pizza sauce and diluted it a bit, and followed the recipe for the most part. It made for a good, if messy thing to eat. I must say I did feel a lot better after eating.
Penne with Triple Tomato Sauce
This recipe was weird. after quickly reading it, before I started making it, the thought in my head was, "really, raw garlic without any cooking". And this turned out to be pretty much the big drawback of this dish as a whole. We both commented about the strong garlic taste, and it really did stick with you for quite a while. Which is not really a good thing. However, it was better microwaved after the fact. It made the garlic calm down and become a better dish over all. So, my suggestion? Less garlic or cook the garlic first.
Pasta with Sausage, Basil and Mustard
This was surprisingly good. Though how could it be that bad? Mustard, Graziano Sausage, makes for a delicious meal. I used Grey Poupon Harvest Ground mustard to make it, and it turned out great. A fun thing about this was that when I was eating some leftovers at work, one of my co-workers identified that it was a white wine used, and tried to guess at the type, but didn't do so well on that one... I used a Riesling, cause that was pretty much the only white wine I had left in the house.