Recipe of the week, 9/13

For me there is no better time to make dinner than in the fall. I love pasta but during the summer I have no desire to cook a big pasta dish unless it involves pesto. But come fall, the comfort foods with the fresh late summer veggies can’t be beat.

My friend gave me a delicious looking squash (and a whole lot of basil!) so I decided to go with vegetable lasagna. I based it off of THIS recipe, but changed a lot of aspects of it. Here were my ingredients:

I don’t have a large pot to boil lasagna noodles in so I saved my self a step by buying no-cook pasta noodles. This recipe calls for goat cheese but since I also purchased some eggplant that I plan on using next week, I went ahead and bought ricotta and mozzarella instead. I also added some fresh spinach because that just seems traditional for me to add to veggie lasagna.

And to prove that I’m not at all a good cook, I’ll share the fact that in my blurred, next-morning-after-drinking, I-don’t-need-coffee slumber, I made the mistake of purchasing 2 cucumbers instead of zucchini. I partially blame the grocer for putting cucumbers right next to the squash but I also blame myself for being dumb.

So since I was planning on using two casserole dishes for this anyway, I made one with squash and eggplant and the other with squash, and yes cucumber.

Here’s my finished cucumber squash lasagna. It turned out really good! Cucumbers are like biting into water with a crunch anyway so it just gave it a crunch taste that I liked. Really with a lasagna (and any pasta for that matter) you can just add whatever vegetables look good and chances are it will turn out great!

This dish was really easy to make, tasted great and gave me plenty of leftovers to freeze. It’s like making my own microwaveable dinners for those evenings when I don’t have time nor energy to cook anything.

Yum! Oh and is it just me or does the cool weather make you want to eat like crazy?!

recipe per week

I've always admired someone who can cook. I've never really had the talent and I'm too timid to try something/buy something new. I think I hesitate in thinking that either the ingredients will be too expensive or that I'll just ruin it.

But as my interest in design blogs has grown, so too has my interest in finding great recipes. I have an enormous recipes folder and at least 3 applications on my iPhone (which is cool by the way) to help me find new recipes. So I got to thinking, what if I just push myself to make one new recipe a week. It could be from cookies to pasta, but 1, single recipe that I've said to myself, 'I need to bookmark this. This looks good.' I need to take it out of just the files and into my kitchen.

With that said, I'm going to try to do this once a week. It will probably start this week as I plan on making THESE cookies in the not so distant future. I won't and simply cannot be one of those awesome foodie bloggers that takes pictures of all of my creations, but I will try when the occasion strikes. But I will certainly link to recipes as most of the awesome foodie bloggers have done all the grunt work for me.

Wish me luck!

Also, let me share this fantastic illustration from Julia Rothman, whom I love, depicting my new absolute favorite snack. This and greek yogurt with honey are my new obsessions.

measuring with style, duos

In a follow up to THIS post, I did end up making another visual measurement picture. This one is a little more convoluted, but is actually pretty handy as I've referenced to it twice already.

8 oz = 1 cup
2 Tablespoons = 1 oz
3 teaspoons = 1 Tablespoon (You might not be able to see it, but there are small white "teaspoons" tucked inside the tablespoon.)

I currently have these images printed out and above my spice racks.

This is what you do when you work at a university and it's summertime. Well, this and rent lecture halls so that you and your co-workers can eat breakfast and watch the world cup on the screen projection.

GO USA!!

measuring with style

I’ve been very slack on updating. It’s not that I don’t have things to post, I’ve just been pretty lazy about it. So I’ll start up again with an quick post about this great way to remember kitchen measurements that I found HERE.

If you’re like me, then you can never remember how many cups are in a gallon or pints in a quart, but with this quick image it’s much easier to figure things out. I made my own image below:

4 Q(uarts) in a G(allon)
2 P(ints) in a Q(uart)
16 C(cups) in a G(allon) --- It's so quick and versitile!

I would be a happy camper if this image caught on! Right when I saw it, I immediately wished I knew a friend with a printing press that could make a simple print of this for me. I could definitely see it in my kitchen as a classy measurement reminder (along with the images that I’ll be putting up that my oh-so-amazing-friend, Emily, took for me; but more of that later). As for now, it will have to go as a print-out on the side of my fridge.

Anyone else know of some great measurement tips like these for the kitchen?