Make This Now: New Summer Favorites

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Hi, hi!  I’m currently in a stage where I only want to try new recipes and that’s okay.  Old favorites can wait till I feel inspired to make them again — lookin at you, Summer Squash and Basil Pasta! — and in the meantime, I’ll be delighting in burrito bowls, grilled chicken, punchy salad dressings, creamy desserts and elevated BLTs.  I really hope you find something new to try here and feel as inspired by it as I did!

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Spicy Black Bean Burrito Bowls with Cashew + Hemp Seed Chipotle Sauce

If you have black beans already cooked and waiting in the freezer (or heck, just a can of beans in the pantry), this recipe is such a breeze to make!  We took it up a notch by making Cilantro-Lime Rice and assembled with the beans, corn, salsa, cabbage slaw, cilantro, avocado and most importantly, THAT CHIPOTLE SAUCE, this was damn delicious.  I worship at the shrine of Illegal Pete’s but at first bite, I was like “Illegal Pete’s who?”  It was that good!

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Peruvian-Style Spatchcock Chicken with Creamy Cilantro Sauce

I pledge allegiance to the recipes of Jeff Mauro!  The directions for this chicken tell you how to do it in the oven but look, the last thing I need in my air conditioner-less home, is to have the oven on for an hour so we made this on the grill — just put the cast-iron straight on there — and it worked perfectly!  Also, it tasted incredible.  Super juicy, super flavorful and really extra good dipped in that cilantro sauce.

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Corn & Chickpea Bowl with Miso-Jalapeño Tahini

Not to dismiss this salad, because it is very good, but the shining star here is the miso-jalapeño tahini dressing.  It’s flavor-packed, creamy, and very ginger-forward.  So if you’re not that person just straight eating the pile of fresh ginger that comes with your sushi, maybe this isn’t for you.  But I AM that person, so I found this dressing to be just incredible.  It’s such a bold and bright note to contrast with the rich goat cheese and avocado in this salad and Joey and I both really really loved it, so we hope you do too!

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No-Churn Ice Cream

Raise your hand if your house is tiny and you just do not have room for yet another kitchen appliance.  I am raising my hand high.  Even though an ice cream maker sounds fun, it’s really a question of where I’m going to store it.  So, when I saw a recipe for no-churn ice cream, I was VERY VERY EXCITED.  I didn’t even know this was an option.  Turns out, you just have to make some whipped cream, fold it into some sweetened condensed milk, toss in some mix-in and let the whole thing chill for a few hours and you are rewarded with thee absolute creamiest ice cream I’ve EVER tasted.  The recipe post includes lots of flavor combination suggestions but I’m here to tell you mini chocolate chips and peppermint extract is DELIGHTFUL.

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Egg-in-a-Nest BLT Sandwich

I’m hesitant to share this recipe because, well, it’s a BLT.  But it’s better than a BLT because there’s also an egg cooked into the bread!  What a perfect mashup!  Also, you basically make a mayo-bacon guacamole to spread on the bread and it tastes pretty incredible.  Joey and I were very impressed by what seemed like a quick and easy dinner but ended up tasting like something special.  Also, I was thisclose to buying regular white bread instead of sourdough but am so glad I didn’t because it tasted extra good!

Happy Friday!

Weekend Things

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Raise your hand if you stayed out way past your bedtime on Monday night and felt exhausted for the rest of the week.  No?  Just me on that one?  This is my way of justifying a lounge-y laid-back weekend that involved many naps, though we took my niece to see The Little Mermaid at the BDT Stage last night and it was midnight by the time I crawled into bed so I apparently did not learn my lesson.

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Post couch-nap on Friday, we headed to the Rockies game.  It felt like it’d been so long since we’d been to one, so Coors Field looked extra beautiful to me.  We saw a bat (the animal kind, not the baseball kind), my friend Ari and a Rockies win so it was a good night!

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We woke up Saturday morning and headed straight to Stowaway because we hadn’t been there for breakfast since… Easter?!  Can that be right??  I was starting to get the shakes just thinking about how long it’d been.  We had the shaded patio to ourselves and it felt so cool and peaceful out there as we shared a chai peach muffin, sipped coffee and ate up our entrees.

Afterward, we scoped out some work our company did at Improper City, which was having its opening weekend then did a little bit of garden clean up back at home.  We harvested our first yellow squash!  Andi seemed quite content to just be propped up in Joey’s hands 😛

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A bit later, I left Joey in the backyard and headed in to bottle some kombucha.  Lori got me this kombucha book for my birthday and I am feeling SO inspired by it!!!  There’s a whole section with flavor suggestions that I never ever would have thought up on my own.  I want to try them ALL!  I went with watermelon (blended up and strained to concentrate the flavor) and vanilla bean (look closely and you can see the flecks!) and I can hardly wait to see how it turns out.  Since I had already blended up the juice, I used the leftovers to make some salted watermelon juice, which is really just the preamble to salted watermelon margaritas, right?

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Spent a couple of hours at Kyla’s bridal shower after that and how cute is that balloon champagne display??  I got to visit with both sides of Joey’s family, drink a glass of sangria, watch a very funny game of pin the tail on the donkey (except not pin the tail on the donkey :P) and I even won a bottle of wine!  Can’t wait for the wedding, come August!

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I hit up a Sunday morning yoga class and between getting up semi-early and a super dreary rainy day, I basically felt how Andi looks in the picture above.  Our enthusiasm over the World Cup was about the same level too.  Is it just me or do soccer players have the most hipster haircuts of all athletes?

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After a mainly lazy day, I headed over to my parents’ to see my niece!  She opened birthday presents from Joey and I — a light blue bouncy cow that we named Claudia and decided is cousins with our cow and a modelling clay set — and she and I were both very into that clay.  Then my sister came over and we took her to the show!  I don’t know what game BDT is playing at by having a kid-friendly show start at 7:45 PM on a Sunday but we all managed to stay awake.  They actually did a GREAT job with the set, considering it’s a story that mostly takes place underwater.  “Under the Sea” was my favorite part!  Really appreciated the show’s desire to stay relevant by changing the words to “each little crab here knows how to dab here, under the sea.”

Hope you had a wonderful weekend, Happy Monday!