Whole Wheat Shells with Four Cheeses

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "after this therefore because of this"
We clearly spent way too much of our lives watching West Wing.

One must be mindful of not falling into this fallacious logic trap.  But sometimes, sometimes - one can be fairly sure that event "b" is indeed caused by event "a" based purely on the order in which these events happened.

Like, for instance, when you are at the beach and there is a snack stand.  And you order the bestest, most obvious of options - fries covered in some sort of spicy fake cheese sauce.  And you consume them.  And then a half hour later your stomach hurts.

Not that this happened to us or anything.

We all know that the cheese fries led to the stomach pains.

Yet after eating noodles slathered in a creamy, cheesy sauce, I feel so happy.  Joyful, really.  And I know it is precisely because of eating cheesy noodles that I am full of overwhelming joy.  In fact, I even contemplate the possibility of a benevolent supreme being who reveals a divine grace just by the mere existence of noodles and a sweeping array of cheeses.  It is precisely because of eating this most perfect of combinations of food that endorphins flood my entire being. I am sure that is not a logical fallacy.

Ingredients
1 pound whole wheat shells
3 cups half and half
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon hot sauce (like Frank's Red Hot Sauce)
1 cup grated Monterey Jack cheese
2 cups grated good quality cheddar cheese
2 tablespoons Taleggio cheese
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Instructions
Cook pasta in a large pot of salted water according to package directions.  Drain.  If, like me, you want to save on dishes, keep the cooked pasta in the colander and use the pot to make the sauce.  Melt 2 tablespoons butter over medium heat.  Add the half and half, cheeses, Dijon mustard, and hot sauce.  Stir, once the cheeses have melted and the mixture is nice and warm, pour the cooked pasta into the sauce and mix together.  Adjust salt and pepper levels to taste. Let the noodles mingle with the sauce over low heat until the sauce has thickened.

A Not So Usual BLT Sandwich - Creative Cooking Crew Challenge

I am not an imaginative person. Whether this is caused by, or results from, similarly unimaginative dreams remains to be seen.  But because of this personal failing, I had to actually Google ideas for playsets to encourage Max in imaginative play.

One suggestion that popped up a few times was the ever so vague "office worker."  It was suggested I place a not-loaded stapler, a rolodex, some paper clips, and junk mail, amongst other things, in a box for a child to pretend to be an office worker.

I kinda get it.  I love office supplies with all my heart and walking through an office supply store is like attending a place of worship for me.  

But - really?  This seems more like an imagination killer.  I have to believe that there are better ways of encouraging fantastic, epic play, the kind of play that as an unimaginative adult I have yet to think of.  Better than shoving a stapler and junk mail in a child's face and telling them to "be creative."     

And then maybe I wouldn't be so completely bereft of ideas for "imaginative play" that I have to resort to looking up things on the internet.  And perhaps I wouldn't have needed to lug out cookbooks and flip to the index, looking through all the words that start with B, L and T.  Because all of a sudden, I couldn't think of any foods that started with a B or an L or a T.

This month's Creative Cooking Crew Challenge is a sandwich, one built around three ingredients that start with the letters B, L, and T and are not bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

After frantically rifling through glossaries just to even think of foods starting with these three letters, we finally came up with a BLT combination of berries, liver mayonnaise and leaves, and turkey.  Works really well, actually. 

Here is this month's round-up of all the BLT sandwiches made by the Creative Cooking Crew this month - definitely check it out!

Ingredients
Berries, sliced (we used strawberries and blackberries)
Liver aioli
Leaves (arugula and mint)
deli Turkey meat (we used smoked turkey)
slices of multigrain bread

For the liver mayonnaise:
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup diced onion
1 small sprig rosemary
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 pound chicken livers
1 cup mayonnaise (homemade or store-bought)
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Instructions
To make the liver mayonnaise:
Melt the butter and oil in a small pan over low heat.  Add the onions and rosemary.  Cook until the onions are nice and soft, about 8-10 minutes.  Add the garlic and cook until fragrant, about a minute.  Increase the heat to medium and add the chicken livers (add more oil if needed).  Cook those until they are cooked through and no longer red, about ten minutes.  Once the livers have cooked, take off heat. In a bowl, combine the liver and onion mixture with the mayonnaise and puree with an immersion blender until everything is smooth. Chill until ready to use.

To assemble the sandwich:
Toast two slices of bread.  Spread the liver mayonnaise on one of the slices.  On the other, stack slices of the turkey, arugula leaves and a bit of mint, then the berries.  Top with the remaining slice of bread and eat!

Rise and Shine Breakfast Sandwich and Hidden Valley Sandwich Spreads & Dips

We are big fans of the breakfast scene.  So to celebrate this most wondrous of eating occasions, we made a Rise and Shine Sandwich with avocado, strawberries, chopped scallion, bacon, and a touch of Hidden Valley Spicy Chipotle Pepper Sandwich Spread & Dip.  

Hidden Valley now has four Sandwich Spreads & Dips – Country Herb Ranch, Oven Roasted Garlic Parmesan, Smoked Bacon Ranch, and the Spicy Chipotle Pepper – to to help you create craveable sandwiches.  

To get the recipe, head over here to Relish!  

Click here to enter the "Create Craveable Sandwiches" Sweepstakes - You could win $1000! 

Thank you to Hidden Valley™ Sandwich Spreads & Dips for being a sponsor. I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Coach Farm Cheese Naming & Giveaway!

Would you like a sample of the new aged goat's milk cheese from Coach Farm? I couldn't say no to that offer, and I'm guessing you can't either! The wonderful cheese magazine Culture is hosting a naming contest for the new cheese and invited me to describe it. Head over and read my post, then you can submit your own ideas for names.

"The new cheese reminds me of snow on a spring day, bright and clean quickly dissolving like snowflakes in my mouth. It's mostly crumbly, soft and smooth but has a creamy layer (aka paste) just beneath the rind."

 I'm also giving away a special package of Coach Farm's goat cheese! The winner will receive three cheeses: Fresh Farmstead Goat cheese, Triple Cream and a sample of the new aged goat cheese.

Share your favorite way to use goat cheese in the comments section, and one lucky winner will receive the Coach Farm gift package containing three cheeses. This giveaway ends at midnight PST on April 24, 2013. One entry per person, please. I will draw a winner at random on April 25. Open to US residents only. Please note that if you register your comment with your email, only I will see it.

Disclaimer: Culture magazine and Coach Farm's provided me with this cheese, I was not paid for this or any other post. 

Quaker Big Chewy Granola Bars, Chocolate Fondue, and a Night of Television

Seth is often found working late nights and weekends.  Sometimes, however, a Saturday bestows on us a bit of serendipity and magnanimously opens itself up with freedom.  When that happens, we run into it and embrace it, in all its weekend glory.

The day quickly fills up.  Some hours are wiled away on errands and chores that had been put off, but others are used for fun - pit stops at the beach, playground time, lunches at a favorite restaurant - to make the most of our time together.

By the time we get home, it is toddler-late, and time to scoop him off to bed.  And toddler bed time means Seth and I get to do “our thing.”

“Our thing” has two components:

            1.  Our television show of the moment

            2.  Food!!

It is our time to watch our shows, or our “stories” as we like to say.  We generally have room in our hearts for one dramatic series at a time.  But there have been so many wonderful love affairs through the years - The Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, House of Cards, Damages, Breaking Bad, Mad Men... just to name a few.  And in this Netflix era, we can bring up our show of the moment with the click of a Wii remote and binge on back to back episodes.

And while we watch our stories we like a snack.  A snack that doesn’t involve expending a lot of energy, as that attribute has been depleted during the day’s activities.  A snack that will curb our hunger with some whole grain goodness, but a snack that is still delicious.  A snack like Quaker Oat’s Big Chewy Granola Bars.  

We love chocolate chips (seriously, we love them), so we get the Chocolate Chip Big Chewy Granola Bars.  But the snack doesn’t stop there.  We cut the granola bars and put them on a plate with some fruit - bananas (for me, we all know about Seth’s strong aversion to anything banana), strawberries, tangerines.  And a dip.  A chocolate fondue to be exact - one made with coconut milk and a hint of cardamom.  

It has been awhile since we mentioned our love of dipping.  So active! So communal! So fun! And can possibly lead to some intense debates about what the precisely most delicious combination of foods is to combine with the dip.

And while we snack on our granola bar bites and our fruit slices and fondue, we can sit side by side, watching our stories, discussing camera angles and character development, analyzing plot twists and turns, and arguing about the morality of actions that characters have taken.  And life is good.

Quaker is on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest - so follow/like them!

And now that you totally need some of these granola bars in your life right now, you need to know where to find them - look here for product locator and here for more information about the bars.

This post is brought to you by Quaker.  We were financially compensated for this post by Quaker via AOL Media.   

A Chocolate Fondue

Ingredients

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1/2 cup coconut milk

1/8 teaspoon cardamom

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch fleur de sel

Instructions
In a small pot over low heat, warm the coconut milk.  Take off heat and stir in the chocolate chips.  Once they are melted, stir in the cardamom and vanilla.  Sprinkle fleur de sel on top of the fondue for serving. 

Broccoli Quesadillas - "Our Usual" and the "Fancypants"

Seth's dreams are epic dreams.   A fact that can turn bleary mornings into family story hour.  Seth regales me with a recitation of his most recent nocturnal tale while I greedily lap it up.

Tales of survival in a post apocalyptic world.  Heroic tales of saving lives - sometimes people, sometimes kitten. Tales of living life as a whale (whether that whale was a blue or a grey yet remains unclear) and fighting to stay alive in the face of killer whale attacks.  These are the dreams that Seth's subconscious produces.

I'm so eager to eat up these dreams and absorb them into my memory.  Perhaps I hope my own subconscious mind will start to produce similar results through osmosis.

Mine, are well, mundane.  At best.  If I can even remember them.  Which is a seldom occurrence in life.  The ones I usually remember are those anxiety-ridden ones, the ones where you are late and despite your best attempts to get to where you are going, you are stymied every step of the way.

Once I dreamed of a loaf of bread.  That's it.  It was the Platonic ideal of a loaf, just floating in front of a black background.  No events actually happened.  Just a floating loaf.  I strangely didn't even eat the bread, a surprising thing for me to do since I have a deep and abiding love for the stuff.

Seth's dreamscape couldn't be more different from mine.  Our quesadilla preferences suffer from similar discrepancies.  But this disparity runs the other direction - mine are the more epic quesadillas.  I started adding a mango and black bean spread to add some extra levels of flavor.  Our usual quesadilla involves broccoli and jalapeno with scallion, cilantro and cheese.  I wanted more.

When offered the quesadilla with "more," Seth determined that he still wanted his usual and not the "fancypants."  I long for more in my dreams.  Seth apparently does not feel the same about his quesadilla.  Somehow, we make it work.

Ingredients
Mango and Black Bean Spread:
1 can black beans and their liquid
1/4 cup olive oil
1/3 cup chopped mango
1 teaspoon spice mix (below)
3 garlic cloves, minced
pinch salt

Spice Mix:
1/2 tsp roasted Saigon cinnamon
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp pepper
1/8 tsp ground coriander
Pinch cumin
Pinch ground ginger
Pinch ground star anise

For the quesadillas:
black bean spread
sliced jalapeno
about a 1/4 cup finely chopped broccoli florets per quesadilla
chopped scallions
chopped cilantro
grated cheddar cheese
crumbled cotija cheese
flour tortilla
canola oil, for cooking

Instructions
For the spice mix:
Mix all the spices together in a small bowl.  Keep leftovers in an airtight container.

For the mango black bean spread:
Place all the ingredients, including the spice mix, in a medium pot over medium-low heat.  Let everything cook together, and after about ten minutes, take off heat.  Use an immersion blender to puree.  Set aside.

For the quesadillas:
Take the flour tortilla and spread the mango and black bean mixture on half of the tortilla.  Then layer the jalapeno slices, broccoli florets, scallions, cilantro, and cheeses on top of the spread.  Or if you are being Seth, then just skip the mango black bean mixture part.  Once all your ingredients are in, fold the tortilla.  Heat canola oil (about a tablespoon) in a cast iron skillet.  Place the quesadilla in.  Once a side has a nice golden brown color, flip it over.  Once both sides are golden brown, take off heat and serve.

Eco Friendly Shopping Tips + Contest + Giveaway

Shopping eco friendly is easier than you might think, even at a bargain focused store like Grocery Outlet. Recently Grocery Outlet gave me a $30 gift card to see what great eco friendly bargains I could find for Earth Day. Here are my top picks:

Eco Friendly Shopping Tips

1. Buy fresh produce 

The less processed and less packaged, the better. Grocery Outlet sells some beautiful greens, I found these greens for just 99 cents a bunch. 

2. Choose recycled chlorine free paper products

Recycled paper products are better quality than you might think these days and using them is an easy way to go green.

3. Invest in stoneware and ceramic baking dishes 

Made from silica or clay and water, not noxious chemicals, they will last a lifetime if cared for properly with no warping or flaking of non-stick coatings. These beautiful pieces were only $4.99 each.

4. Pick reusable products

I found coffee "pods" for use in Keurig coffee makers and water bottles with water filters.

5. Look for products with minimal packaging

Choose staple items that are packaged in recyclable cardboard, rather than plastic. 

One of the easiest things you can do to be eco friendly when it comes to shopping is to use your own bag, rather than choosing "paper or plastic." 

Design Contest

Grocery Outlet is hosting a contest via Instagram where anyone can design their next eco-frugal reusable grocery bag. Imagine how cool it would be to see people shopping with a bag you designed! So design something amazing! Take a picture and post it to Instagram with the tag @grocery_outlet and the hashtag #GOGreenBag

The deadline to enter is April 17 and the winner will be announced on Earth Day (April 22) The prize is a $100 Grocery Outlet gift certificate, and there are runner up prizes as well. 

Gift Card Giveaway

Want to try eco friendly shopping at Grocery Outlet? Share your best tip eco friendly tip in the comments and one winner will receive a $30 Grocery Outlet gift card, courtesy of Grocery Outlet. 

This giveaway ends at midnight PST on April 21, 2013. I will draw a winner at random on April 22. Open to US residents only. If you register your comment with your email, only I will see it. Grocery Outlet has stores in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Pennsylvania. To see if there is Grocery Outlet near you, use the Grocery Outlet store locator. 

Joshua you are the winner! I have emailed you, please send me your mailing address so I can send you the gift certificate. 

Disclaimer: My thanks to Grocery Outlet for providing the gift cards for me and this giveaway