Roasted Red Pepper Sauce over Pasta and Meatballs

When people hear "pasta sauce" the first thing that usually comes to mind is usually "tomatoes" or perhaps "cream" or "pesto."

While the humble tomato can be used to make some truly delicious things, we've gone through just about every kind of pasta sauce you can think of using that base ingredient, which means it's time to try something new. Keeping it red, recently we made a pasta sauce that's half cream, half vegetable based, using roasted red bell peppers instead of tomatoes.

While of course we love roasting our own peppers in the oven for things like hummus or the double-pork rollup, this particular week jarred roasted peppers were actually on a better deal than fresh red bell peppers, so we went that route. Our other ingredients are flour, garlic, half and half (you could use heavy cream instead), a tub of solid chicken stock (get the kind that usually is called  "flavor boost" instead of a "stock base" and isn't powdered or liquid), crushed red pepper, and parmesan.

To get started, we roughly chop the roasted red peppers and then toss all the ingredients in the blender and blend until its a smooth sauce.

For this particular meal we wanted some meatballs with our pasta, which we're making with ground pork. These are also good with ground turkey or chicken. You can see how we put together our meatballs at this location (although this time we aren't stuffing them with cheese as usual).

We usually cook our meatballs on the skillet, which requires browning them on all sides first before pouring in the sauce to cook through.

Here's our blended sauce, which turned out a truly beautiful reddish-orange: a much different color than the traditional tomato pasta sauce.

The meatballs cook through in the sauce, occasionally stirring or re-positioning as necessary, while the pasta boils.

Here's my finished plate, topped with some parmesan and pepper.

We used multi-colored rotini, but anything from penne to linguine goes great with this meatball and sauce combo.

Potato Chip Crusted Chicken and Bacon Bread Salad

There are a million and one ways to dress up chicken - stuffing, frying, injecting, marinating, pan cooking, etc. You can take a look at some of our other delicious chicken experiments, like the coffee rubbed whole chicken, spicy buffalo chicken calzones, chicken bacon alfredo puffs, or our buffalo fried chicken.

One style we enjoy is to coat chicken breasts or tenderloins in something crunchy and then pop it in the oven, which gives a great juicy inside and a nice firm crunch on the outside. Recently we had some potato chips that weren't very exciting, so we decided to use them as a crunch coating for some tenderloins. Here we've got a handful of chips in a plastic bag to make it easier to crush them up.

To prevent any mess, Megan rolls a rolling pin over the plastic bag, crunching up all the chips quickly and easily.

Here we've got some tenderloins which will get coated in the chips before baking.

Instead of a milk and egg wash, as we might do for frying or baking a coated meal, this time we decided to brush the chicken with a layer of mayo to get the potato chips to stick.

The tenderloins are set in a bowl of chips and then flipped over. The crunchy coating should stick nicely to the meat.

Here's our finished coated chicken, just about ready to go in the oven.

While the chicken is baking, we'll put together a salad, which will be a little more involved than our usual veggie-topped side salad. This one uses a custom dressing and a few non-traditional ingredients. To start off with, we microwave some turkey bacon until it's crispy.

Next up we dice a whole roma tomato. If you're feeding several people, you may want to go with two or three instead.

The sauce is a combination of balsamic vinegar, minced garlic, basil, and salt and pepper.

All the sauce ingredients are mixed with the tomatoes, which are then worked together with a potato masher.

After the flavors have had a minute to soak into the tomatoes, cut up and throw in the bacon.

For a little more color we also ended up dicing some green onion as well.

Finally goes in the ingredient that sounds odd but actually works fantastic - torn up pieces of a fluffy bread. French bread would work great, but we used a cheddar topped bakery bread.

Mix it all together and let it sit for a few minutes so the bread soaks up the dressing.

Then tear up some romaine, or whichever lettuce you prefer, and toss it in.

A few quick mixes and you've got an absolutely delicious salad!

Here's my plate with two juicy and crunchy chicken tenderloins and a helping of salad.

The salad actually could have been a meal on its own because of how filling it is, and next time we'll likely go that route.

Home Herb Garden

With all the cooking we do at home, it made sense to start our own indoor garden for fresh herbs. Last summer we had a family member move out, leaving open a room to become our new library and garden. We've since been growing a variety of herbs and vegetables - with varying levels of success - including cilantro, basil, oregano, chives, mint, hot peppers, strawberries, and more.

We've gotten a lot of use out them so far, from tossing in handfuls of cilantro while cooking just about anything to using basil leaves in a variety of sauces and even whole for our basil pesto pizzas.

Before we could plant anything however, we needed some shelving to go next to the window that actually gets sun. We didn't really want to spend any money though, so we got creative! We started with this pile of random boxes and junk:

We have two larger boxes that would be the perfect height for the window, but of course a box isn't very sturdy, so we had to reinforce it. Here we've put two wooden dowels into a styrofoam brace to prop up the top of the box. The dowels were then nailed in from the top side.

Next we needed to fill in the box for further support, which involved playing a live action version of Tetris, trying to get everything to fit in properly and provide support...

Soon we had our boxes completely filled in and reinforced, and then taped shut. They are almost ready here:

They were kind of ugly though, so we decided to completely paint them over with white paint we had on hand. We're still planning on painting designs or perhaps gluing some of our perler bead art projects to them... someday. The plan is to have a spring design on one side and a fall/Halloween on the other, so we can just turn the boxes around every few months.

Finally we could get on to actually planting! We began with a pre-potted strawberry plant, along with a variety of herbs starting from seeds. We're just using cheap potting soil from Walmart along with 97 cent pots and some other containers we already had lying around.

After about the first week here's what our little garden started out as:

More than a month in our plants had positively exploded, with several of them needing to be re-potted to make room. Unfortunately we lost some of them on the first attempt, as our parsley didn't make the transition from the transfer shock.

We did get one big nice strawberry before the plant finally got sickly and eventually died, but most of the rest continued to thrive.

Here we've also got some watercress! Interestingly enough, we didn't do this from seed or as a pre-potted plant, but rather we got one of those living watercress varieties from the grocery store that still has the roots attached. After using most of it, we simply potted the remainder, and amazingly they continued to grow!

We've now been able to routinely cut off a portion to use for our watercress and Gorgonzola pasta.

Although we've only gotten a few peppers to actually sprout, they are going strong and are finally turning shade from green to red, which means we can use them soon. These have taken the longest to come to harvest, having been growing from seed for about three and a half months now.

The most prolific plant is ahead of the rest by a mile - our mint grows faster than we can use it! Several sprigs were needed for our honey-mint chicken, I've been using it to flavor water, and pulling sprigs by the handful to make homemade iced tea.

We'll check back in with a new update as summer turns to fall with all we've learned getting different plants to grow indoors in the Montana climate.

Spicy Asian Salad

We like using tahini in recipes like hummus, but unfortunately it's a bit too expensive for how little comes in the jar, so we've been trying out several peanut butter substitute recipes. One of the latest was a spicy salad done Asian style using napa cabbage and Udon noodles.

Here's our base ingredients of cabbage, rice vinegar (the kind you'd use for sushi, not regular white vinegar), soy sauce, natural peanut butter, Udon noodles, sriracha hot sauce, toasted sesame sauce, and snow peas:

First we start by dicing the cabbage, along with some red bell peppers and carrots to form the base of the salad.

Next we mix together the sauce that will cover the salad using the peanut butter, sriracha, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and Asian sesame sauce. It's an interesting combination of sweet and spicy that you wouldn't normally get in either pasta or salad.

The Udon noodles need to be boiled for a few minutes first until they start to get soft and wiggly.

After draining the pasta, we pour some extra sesame sauce directly into the noodles.

Then we give it a good mixing!

Now it's time to start assembling, first by throwing in the diced vegetables and the whole snow peas.

We decided to add in some diced green onions at the last minute for extra crunch and texture.

Now the sauce gets poured in. We did this in two steps, mixing in about half of it, then pouring in the rest and mixing again.

And now it's finally ready to eat!

Here's our all-in-one meal containing the best parts of both pasta and salad for a refreshingly different dinner.

Using the peanut butter was good, but it's also a little bit too sweet, even if you use the natural kind with no sugar added. The next time we try this we'll be using the the peanut or almond butter straight from the grinding machine at Smith's. It's a little more expensive, but with no sweet ingredients at all I think it will provide a better savory flavor.