This Week's Postings

Fortunately, as well as unfortunately - this week I won't be posting at all :( I have staff training for my job that starts the next week.

I'll post sometime next week - and probably include a few recipes :)

See you all next week!

2 Affordable Recipes using Fresh Garlic

For today's post, I'm going to share two quick, easy and affordable recipes that use fresh garlic.

The First Recipe:

Vegetable Chow Mein

Growing up, my mom made a lot of stir-fry - which I loved as a child, and still to this day. However, Brian isn't as fond of stir-fry as I am (unless it has massive amounts of meat in it). With this in mind, I looked in our fridge and thought "seriously....what am I going to make for dinner tonight." I looked over at Brian and said "hunny, how can we not have anything in the fridge already?" and his response "I don't know". Typical man, but I love him. :)

Okay, so onto the actual recipe.

Ingredients

• 4 cups cooked angel hair pasta or spaghetti pasta noodles (this works best if they are left overs with no seasoning or sauce already on them)
• 1/2 cup soy sauce (personally, Kikkoman is my favorite, but use what ever brand you prefer).
• 1 tbsp corn starch
• 1 tbsp olive oil (or a little more depending on how big your pan/wok is)
• 1 clove fresh garlic, minced
• 3 eggs
• 2 chopped bell peppers (I used one green and one red, and of course, other vegetables can be used as well)

How to do it

1. Heat oil and minced garlic over medium heat
2. Let the garlic and oil do a little dance until the garlic scent really comes through
3. Add 1/4 cup of the soy sauce
4. Let the soy sauce marinate with the garlic and oil
5. Add bell peppers (and/or other vegetables)
6. Cook vegetables for 10-15 minutes, or until they are soft and yield to the stab with a wooden cooking spoon

1. Add noodles and the other 1/4 of soy sauce

1. Push everything in the pan/wok onto the top side, leaving room on the bottom side
2. Crack 3 eggs onto the bottom side of the pan and whisk them together

1. Allow the eggs to scramble until they are almost all cooked (you want them wet, not dry)

1. Combine with noodles and vegetables
2. Turn onto low heat, stirring every so often
3. Serve with some other awesome food and you've got an affordable and quick meal

The Second Recipe:

Homemade Garlic Noodles

This is a pretty simple recipe - using only 5 ingredients.

Ingredients

• Noodles (any type to be honest, I used angel hair pasta since that's what we had) (make as much or as little as you want - I made about 4-5 cups of cooked pasta)
• 1 tbsp Butter
• 1/2 tbsp Olive Oil
• 1-2 cloves Fresh Garlic - chopped (not minced) (1-2 depending on how garlic-y you want them)
• 1/2 tbsp Salt (I used Hawaiian Red Sea Salt because I like the complexity of the flavor, but use whatever you have)

How to do it

1. Boil noodles as if you were cooking noodles normally, strain and return noodles to the pot
2. Combine the butter, oil, salt and chopped garlic with the cooked noodles
3. Stir until everything is blended together well
4. Serve

Reasoning Behind Using Garlic

Honestly, the only reason that I started using garlic recently was because it was something I had sitting on my kitchen counter and I didn't want it to go bad.

I'm not a huge fan of unwrapping garlic because it always feels sticky to me, and the skin always gets stuck to everything...yuck!

Anyways, these recipes are by no means perfect, and things can always be added to them to make them even better - this is just the way that I make them and have found to taste pretty good :)

My Recent Obsession

For the last week or so, I've been cooking a lot more things from scratch. I love to cook, and I love seeing how happy it makes Brian when I make something especially for him in mind.

Recently, I've been obsessed with cooking with fresh garlic. I know what you're thinking "uhhhh she's a weirdo" and to some extent you're entirely right. But at the same time, I've realized that fresh garlic is AMAZING to cook with and really enhances the flavors within a dish.

Friday's food post is actually going to be a collection of recipes that I've made in the last few days. All of the recipes call for garlic, so I thought that it would be appropriate to post them all together.

Currently, there are only two recipes that I'll be posting: Homemade Chow Mein (Brian says it's better then any other chow mein that he's ever had!), and Homemade Garlic Noodles using fresh garlic.

Check back here on Friday afternoon to read my post!