This ultimate Mediterranean hummus board has your favorite cheese board elements with the best ever hummus with spiced meat, grape leaves, pickles, olives, and pita. It's mostly no-cook and make-ahead for the perfect party meal!
IT FEELS LIKE CHRISTMAS MORNING. I just love this so much.
...Yummy spiced ground meat (use beef, lamb, pork, or even venison!) that goes over hummus for a protein-packed, savory appetizer or main dish. Use this for dipping, to stuff into pitas, or to make yummy grain bowls!
Spiced ground meat with pine nuts and hummus, just so ya know.
...Oh hey, easy dinners that light up my life.
Are bowls over, or are we still good with everything we make going in a shallow bowl with lots of toppings? Please say bowls aren't over.
These particular bowls are exceptionally delicious. We're working with a yummy brown sauce that comes together so quickly thanks to a Microplane grater that eliminates chopping of teeny things AND can get little kids involved.
Then, we have ground beef, zucchini from your summer garden (!), and crunchy water chestnuts mainly because I adore them. This is one of those "regular" meals that is also highly flavorful and a perfect weeknight dinner.
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Happy week of Halloween! We have to have a soup this week, right? I adore soup all the time for one very good reason: leftovers are the best of all the food groups. Anything fried gets mushy, bread-based stuff never reheats well, microwaved leftover veggies are satanic...you get it. Soup always works fresh or reheated, so in these little-kid years if I have time to cook extra on the weekends or early in the day I make soup and then am DONE for a meal later on, usually in the evening when everything has gone to hell, toddler-behaviorally-speaking.
Last year our go-to soup was this sausage kale number, which is still probably one of my favorite things I make ever. This minestrone is on the same playing field with the combination of veggies, meat, and noodles that work so well together. Green beans and beef to me are super delicious, and the base of the soup is tomatoes, stock, and garlic for extra flavor. You could absolutely make this vegetarian with beans instead of beef, or use both for an extra shot of protein.
Let's soup!
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HI.
How was your Labor Day? Our was GREAT minus a few things. 1. my back stopped functioning on Sunday morning so I'm on day three of super painful spasms and no I can't stop picking up my toddler and no I can't take medicine because of the fetus and no I refuse to stop wiping my ass or any other normal thing that hurts. Because everything hurts. 2. Beck peed on our bed last night because she giggled too hard so we had to wash the sheets at 8pm after a long weekend but also we got clean sheets out of it? There was also a criminal incident on our street in the middle of the night last night that yielded us sleeping about three hours total.
OTHER THAN THAT. The holiday was great. We did some fun family things but mostly hung out just us, watched enough TV that it felt lazy but did some cleaning and organizing and walked a ton. I also made an entire Thanksgiving dinner which was suuuuuper delicious but weird because it's still 90 degrees here. But! It's done and the fall decorations are out, which I'm not mad about.
It's during holiday weeks that I often find my self really craving things that don't taste like traditional American food, if that makes any sense at all. Asian flavors, Mexican flavors, and hell yes to Italian food all the time. This is that! It's on the weeknight train of things that are easy to make but is a teensy bit special because we're calling it bolognese instead of spaghetti. This was inspired in real life by two things: we came home from vacation with a half bag of frozen meatballs from my sister-in-law, and then we celebrated our anniversary at a fancy Italian place. I ordered bologese there and it had these big chunks of carrot that were cooked down in meat sauce and I LOVED them because veggies should be with pasta in the name of balance. So meatballs instead of meat sauce, extra carrots for your health. Everything simmers super quickly and you can definitely eat in under an hour OR make this on a weekend or random free afternoon and it'll keep great in the fridge for several days, so dinner can be done in the time it takes to cook pasta.
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