Cranberry Lime Green Tea Granita

Oh my this is good, I mean really good!! Think the best shaved ice ever but with more flavor. This dessert came about when I was doing some true pantry busting. It was frickin hot out and I wanted something really refreshing for me and my boys! I scoured the fridge, freezer and pantry and came up with a bag of frozen cranberries that had been jammed in my freezer since Thanksgiving [I can almost confidently say that it was even from this past Thanksgiving], a half-used container of lime juice [good organic stuff not creepy juice from a faux plastic lime ], sugar and some green tea. I remembered when my good friend Anna made me hibiscus tea granita [strong hibiscus tea with and slowly frozen]. It got me thinking that granita is an awesome pantry buster- take whatever tea or juice you want, add in some fruit, if you want and however and whatever type of sweetener you want and you got yourself a good time.

Cranberry Lime Green Tea Granita
8 green tea bags [I used Celestial Seasons Blackberry Pomegranate Green Tea]
4 c boiling water
1 c. sugar
1 c. frozen, fresh cranberries
7 T lime juice
6 ice cubes

Steep the tea bags in boiling water for 2 minutes. Remove tea bags.

Stir in sugar until sugar has dissolved.

Add frozen cranberries to liquid. Allow to defrost in liquid. *You can absolutely use fresh cranberries. I had leftover ones that I had frozen. I thought that by adding them to the liquid, I would help expedite the cooling down process.

Once cranberries have defrosted, add them and a few tablespoons of the liquid to a blender or food processor. Pulse until pureed, about 15 seconds.

Stir cranberry puree, lime juice and ice cubes into the liquid. You can sub about a 1/2 c. of water for the ice cubes, but I was trying to come up with more tricks for expediting the cooling down process.

Once the ice cubes have dissolved, pour your mixture into a shallow baking dish and place in your freezer.

Now all you have to do is wait, and “stir” occasionally with a fork to break up the ice into what looks like shaved ice.

My mixture didn’t begin developing ice until an hour and a half into the freezing process.

I stirred and broke up at that point and continued to do so about every 45 minutes after that. Below is a picture of the granita about 45 minutes before I called it done.

It took about 4 hours of freezing and occasional stirring to yield my granita.

Once frozen, you can move the mixture to a tupperware and keep in your freezer...it will continue to freeze so I recommend eating pretty quickly after the 4 hours! The perfect summer dessert!

Too bad that my family hated it and could barely force it down!

 

Lemon Herb Marinated Chicken for the Big Fam

While vacaying with the family, I wanted to make a big summer meal with lots of fresh, varied flavors. Meanwhile, my husband and brother had a hankering to make a large grill out of rocks. Enter grilled, lemon herb marinated chicken!

This chicken was the perfect protein to tie together a Mediterranean smorgasbord type of meal. We bought pitas and hit up the olive bar at the local grocery store. I made tzatziki and greek salad. Mamah [my grandma] made a good ole' fruit salad and my mom made a killer dill and feta cole slaw. For my cute, vegetarian sis in law [and also because I wanted to feast on grilled veggies] we grilled zucchini slices and then made aluminum foil packets full of mushrooms, onions and red bell peppers that we threw around the coals.

Mamah's grill was broken so the boys excitedly took the grate off of her grill and put it over some coals in between some big rocks in the yard.

 

A few hours before the boys crafted a grill, I began marinating my chicken. 

Lemon Herb Marinated Chicken [for a crowd of 20]

10 chicken breasts, sliced into tenderloins [about 4-5 slices per breast]

1 cup of olive oil

Juice of 4 lemons

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

6 cloves of garlic, chopped

1/2 cup each of chopped parsley, basil, dill and green onion

Mix together everything but the chicken in a large roasting pan [or divide between however you want to marinate your chicken-several ziploc bags, a couple mixing bowls...whatever fits in your fridge].

Add in the chicken, toss to coat the chicken. Cover and marinate for at least 2 hours.

After marinating, throw on the grill and cook until done. Approximately 5 minutes a side.

While we grilled chicken, we also grilled zucchini slices that we sprinkled with salt, pepper and oregano.

The boys lined the charcoal with the tin foil packs filled with veggies. This is an awesome cooking technique....I have had foil packs filled with chicken and a little barbecue sauce, I have also had mussels with herbs and a little white wine. The meat stays super tender and still gets a little smoky! Roll out a long rectangle of foil. Place your veggies or meat on one side. Fold the other half over the meat or veg then fold up the remaining three sides to seal everything.

When all was said and done, we had an unbelievable family meal, made even cooler when the buffet line was in Mamah's retro kitchen! My fave way to eat all the Mediterranean goodness was to stuff the veg, chicken, tzatziki and greek salad into the pita and eat it all souvlaki sandwich style!

Cooking for the Big Family with Slow Cooker Salsa Chicken

Poor Sauce on the Wall! You have been so neglected whilst I have frolicked around the country, living it up with the family. We just got back from a week and a half in Pittsburgh. My extended family met up at my grandmother's big farm home outside of Pittsburgh. We drove in from Boston, New York and Nashville and flew in from Seattle and Denver. We took turns tickling Emmett, explored Pittsburgh, sweated our brains out in the humidity and ate a lot of amazing food. 

I volunteered to cook most of the big family dinners under the guise of "needing material for the blog" but mostly because I love feeding loved ones and I love spending time in the kitchen with my aunt, mom and sister when they come in to help!

After the rest of us had been there a couple days, my aunt, her family and my sister drove from the Northeast to join the party. I thought that it would be great to welcome them, after a day of driving, to the family fun with a Fiesta Night.

We had latin-inspired, refreshing summer drinks and a chip n' dip happy hour waiting for them. We bought a few containers of pico de gallo, made queso [yes, good ole Velveeta melted with salsa] and Mom made her to die for mango nectarine salsa.

I wanted time to be with my family and didn't want to be in the kitchen all day cooking for 15 so I turned to my go-to slow cooker salsa chicken for the main course. 

This chicken is awesome because it is flavorful and can so easily become the basis for a healthy, easy latin meal. 

We chose to make a burrito bar. We bought tortillas, grabbed the leftover salsa from happy hour, chopped tomatoes, lettuce and onions, shredded some cheese and put out some sour cream. We supplemented with some pan-roasted fresh corn [my roasted corn with cumin and feta from a few posts ago, minus the feta and with the addition of a little lime juice at the end].

Mom made homemade refried black beans [chop and saute a little onion and garlic, add in cumin, salt, pepper and a little chili powder, then add in a few cans of black beans and mash together].

 Mom mashing her refried beans with a potato masher.

 The beginnings of our burrito bar in Mamah's retro kitchen.

Slow Cooker Salsa Chicken
*I have made this chicken before simply by covering chicken breasts in some store bought salsa, throwing then in a slow cooker on low for 6 hours and calling it a day. I amped this one up a bit for the fam.

2-3 pounds of chicken breasts
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 T ground cumin
1 tall jar of salsa [I chose to make a more verde style of chicken this time so I used Pace salsa verde to top]
1/2 t black pepper
3 roma tomatoes roughly chopped
2 anaheim peppers, broiled until charred then chopped

*This is a great pantry buster...you can add in anything latin-flavored that you need to use up. Chuck in some cilantro or green onion before serving. Add in a spare can of canned tomatoes. Throw in some beans in the last couple hours of slow cookery. Chop up any veggies that you want to use up....zucchini, carrots, additional onions and peppers.

Place chicken in a slow cooker, cover with all remaining ingredients. Cook on low for at least 6 hours. Before serving, pull chicken breasts from crock pot and shred with 2 forks. Return shredded chicken to the crockpot and stir to mix into the juices and vegetables. At this point, you can leave the entire chicken mixture on warm until ready to serve.

*This is also a great way to stretch chicken, and your budget. I probably used 8 chicken breasts and fed 15 people with leftovers for the next couple of days. My fave re-use of the chicken was when we stuffed quesadillas with it! Mmmmm!

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

One of my fave, go-to party side dishes is a salsa bar. It is so easy, inexpensive and flavorful to buy a couple bags of tortilla chips and let my friends dip to their hearts' content. I normally like to have at least a tomato based salsa and a fruit based salsa to satisfy my love for all things savory-sweet! For years, my go-tos were a simple homemade pico de gallo and my Mom's kick-butt mango nectarine salsa [http://vickisawyer.com/recipes.php#mango]. My salsa bar needed another component. It was craving a sour foil to the savory and sweet. Enter tomatillos!

I had tried a few different salsa verdes while out to eat. It wasn't until I tried one that was packed with cumin and was the perfect balance of spicy, sweet and sour that I realized that I HAD to figure out how to make this awesome dish. I had never cooked with tomatillos before but was very willing to experiment if it meant eating this salsa on a regular basis.


Tomatillo Salsa
1 jalapeno pepper
15 tomatillos, husks removed and rinsed
1 T olive oil
1/4 c. chopped onion
1 T cumin, as per usual, I love mashing cumin seeds in my mortar and pestle
1/4 t salt
1/4 t black pepper
1/4 c. chopped cilantro
Juice of one lime, approximately 1 1/2 tablespoons
1 t sugar

Turn your broiler on. Add the whole tomatillos and jalapeno to a baking dish. Sprinkle with olive oil. Broil until skins on tomatillos have begun to turn black and the jalapeno has begun to blister. You will have keep an eye on these. I am convinced that I have a really slow-working broiler, I can let things sit under my broiler forever. Alas, this means that I can’t give you an estimated broil time.  

Once tomatillos and jalapeno have blackened a bit, remove from oven and let cool to room temperature. I have made this salsa by immediately putting the blackened tomatillos in with my fresh ingredients, it still tastes great but the fresh flavor in the other ingredients gets lost a bit. Also, you don’t get as pretty of a color because the cilantro turns brown from the heat.

Place your onion, cumin, salt, pepper, cilantro, lime juice and sugar into a blender or food processor and pulse a few times to incorporate and reduce the size of the chopped onion and cilantro.

Add the cooled tomatillos, pepper and pan juices into your blender or food processor and pulse several more times until there are no large chunks of tomatillo and all of the ingredients are thoroughly combined.

This is awesome with chips. You could also use it as an enchilada sauce by smothering your stuffed and rolled tortillas with the salsa, then covering with cheese and baking at 375 for 15 minutes until gloopy and bubbly.

Oven Dried Tomato Panzanella

A few years ago, my friend served me panzanella for the first time. How could I not have known this existed? How could I not want to eat a "salad" made of bread that tastes like delicious tomato bruschetta and crostini?

Panzanella is super simple and so delicious. In essence, you make tomato bruschetta and rather than slathering it on top of toast, you toss it in a giant bowl with homemade croutons. 

Panzanella is also a great pantry buster. You can add anything into it. Replace your tomatos with a mixture of roasted zucchinis or mushrooms. Chuck in some pancetta or bacon. Use olive tapenade instead. Add in some fresh mozzarella. Basically, whatever you would want to eat on top of toasted bread, throw in!

 I have made panzanella for quite a few gatherings but this time, as a side for Sam's bacon-wrapped birthday party [I was looking for excuses to use up my year's supply of bacon], I think I perfected it.

My only contention with panzanella is that it can get  mushy. In the past I have chopped up a bunch of tomatoes and mixed them with fresh basil and garlic and tossed them with the bread. The tomatoes contain a lot of liquid and so the "salad" albeit delicious, can get pretty mushy, pretty quickly.

Enter my beloved oven dried tomatoes [http://sauceonthewall.blogspot.com/2012/04/oven-dried-tomatoes-veggie-sandwiches.html]! Uggghh, these made it! The oven drying removed most of the excess liquid and amplified the tomato flavor! To die for!

Before we begin, know that you can absolutely still use fresh tomatoes in your panzanella if you don't feel like taking a couple hours to oven dry tomatoes. It is still delicious!

Oven Dried Tomato Panzanella
1 pan of oven dried tomatoes, approximately 8 tomatoes 
*For the panzanella, I cut my roma tomatoes into eighths rather than quarters to better fit into the salad
1 loaf of crusty bread
3 T olive oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped
3 T balsamic vinegar
1 large handful of basil, chopped
1 T chopped fresh oregano or 1 t dried oregano
Salt and pepper to taste 

Preheat oven to 350. Slice the loaf of bread into approximately 1 inch cubes. Toss the bread with 2 T of olive oil and spread over a baking sheet. Bake until cubes have toasted slightly, approximately 15-20 minutes.


*Since I was oven drying my tomatoes anyway at 300 degrees, I added my bread cubes to the oven for the last 30 minutes of the tomatoes cooking time.

Once your tomatoes have roasted, toss them with your basil, garlic, tablespoon of olive oil, vinegar, oregano, salt and pepper. Stir to combine and let sit and marinate for a little bit, a half hour is fine.

Once your tomato bruschetta flavors have melded, toss in your delicious toasted bread until the bread looks evenly coated by the bruschetta mixture.

Enjoy!

*I got caught up in birthday party planning and forgot to take a picture of the final product, but, believe me, it is sooo good!

Uh-mazing Roasted Corn with Feta and Cumin

Please forgive the two week hiatus...we have been living it up in Montana. Yes, there was much celebration [we did have to frolic around our beloved Emily and Doug for their wedding day] and much food but I was on vacation and wasn't feeling very motivated to document my cooking. 

In case you were wondering, I did "have" to make homemade ricotta for all of the ladies at the bachelorette, I was "forced" to make my take on steak au poivre for my in-laws' 32nd wedding anniversary and I "choked down" the piggy pumpkin lasagna made for wedding guests. It was hard to eat such delicious food and spend time with such amazing people, but I did it!

We drove back to Denver and, lo and behold, summer was waiting for us with 90+ degree heat. We assembled the kiddy pool and quickly made some awesome summer food.

My fave summer dishes take full advantage of the fresh veggies available, are quick to make and use minimal oven times [I swear my kitchen stays hot for hours after I bake something].

I could eat this roasted corn dish everyday and never tire of it.

Roasted Corn with Feta and Toasted Cumin
1 t ground cumin
1/2 t pepper
1 T  olive oil
4 ears of corn, shucked
1/4 t salt
1/3 c. crumbled feta cheese
2 T chopped chives or green onion

Pre- heat a frying pan over medium heat for about a minute. Add your ground cumin and pepper and toast for another minute. [I am slightly addicted to freshly smashed cumin seeds in my mortar and pestle but feel free to use ground cumin].

Once cumin has toasted, add the olive oil to the pan. Add the shucked corn and salt to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, until the corn starts to get a little translucent and some kernels have some toasted edges. Roughly 15-20 minutes.

Once corn has cooked, remove from heat and stir in the chives and feta cheese.

We had our with the cumin yogurt sauce and quinoa couscous from a few posts ago and with fresh chopped tomatoes tossed with a little salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar. 

Sooooo delicious!

 

Quick and Delicious Chicken Pot Pie

Last Friday, my besty Ashley and I did our grocery shopping together and followed up our shopping trip by making a laid-back dinner for our boys.

We wanted something satisfying that didn't require a lot of hassle. Enter the amazing $5 rotisserie chicken. I snagged the rotisserie chicken because I knew that the possibilities for a quick dinner would be endless with it in hand. After talking with Ashley we realized that, between the two of us, we had a bunch of assorted veggies and a can of biscuits. Voila...dinner for 4 and a half including a few scraps for a cute boxer for the cost of a rotisserie chicken and some pantry-bustin!

Quick and Delicious Chicken Pot Pie
2 T olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2 potatoes, chopped
2 ears of corn, shucked and "de-corned" [you can use frozen corn, 3/4 of a cup, but wait to add until you add your chicken]
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
*Whatever other veggies you feel like pantry-busting
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
8 leaves of fresh sage, chopped or 1 1/2 T dried sage
Salt and Pepper to taste 
3 T flour
3 T whole milk or half and half
4 cups of chicken broth
Chicken pulled from one rotisserie chicken 
1 can of biscuits [feel free to substitute with your own biscuits or a batch of Bisquick]

*This could also be a great, hearty vegetarian meal. Omit the chicken. Replace the chicken broth with veggie broth. Substitute the bulk of the chicken with a couple extra starchy veggies, like potatoes and carrots...oooo or sweet potatoes, turnips or parsnips.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a dutch oven or stock pot.

Add onions, celery, potatoes, carrots, corn, sage, garlic, salt and pepper.

When veggies are starting to look translucent, sprinkle the flour over the vegetable mixture and stir to combine. Let floured vegetables cook for about a minute to cook out the "flour-y" taste.

Pour your chicken broth over your vegetable mixture. The broth should just barely cover your vegetables. Feel free to adjust the broth level to whatever suits your "veggie level."

While veggies are cooking, preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Simmer until veggies are fork tender, approximately 20-25 minutes.

When vegetables are tender, add the chicken and milk to the pot. 

*At this point, your pot pie mixture should look like a really thick sauce/stew. In the above picture, I still needed to reduce/thicken up the broth a bit more. If you are in this bind, feel free to continue to simmer to reduce the broth or you can add a slurry of corn starch and broth or water, about 1 1/2 T of corn starch to 1 1/2 T of liquid.


Pour or ladle, whatever is easiest, your mixture into a baking dish. I used a 9 x 13 roasting pan but feel free to dole yours out however you want, you could even divide between 8 little baking dishes, so cute.


Space your biscuits evenly across the top of your pot pie mixture. If using biscuit dough or Bisquick, evenly dollop over your mixture. *Ashley wanted to get rid of 5 leftover mushrooms she had, so we sliced and chucked them on top before we added the biscuits.

Bake until the biscuits have turned golden-brown, approximately 20 minutes.


Enjoy!

P.S. Your recipes will always come out better, if you have a watchful toddler examining your every move.