Home Cookin'

While reading my Better Homes and Gardens magazine during my break yesterday I was inspired to do some cooking. Nic and I eat most of our meals at home and we mainly prepare Dream Dinners, so the idea of making a dinner from scratch sounded really fun. I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and did most of my shopping in the fresh produce section! If you know me at all this is probably the most impressive part of this entire entry! ;)

For our 1st course I made salad with romaine lettuce, buffalo chicken, blue cheese crumbles, and blue cheese dressing. It was so easy and delicious. For our second course I made a vegetable frittata with Italian squash, mushrooms, and corn. It was really enjoyable to come home and prepare a full meal from scratch. I planned on making home made ice cream and topping it with blueberries for dessert, but my bowl didn't freeze enough so we had cookies instead. ;) I like to think of it as a reward for all the fresh and healthy food we had eaten.

To end the night we went out to our backyard to sample our grapes. They are delicious. They are still small, but only slightly tart. I took a bag of them to work today and plan to take a bigger bag tomorrow so I can share them with everyone. Eating something from your own yard is really cool and it makes me want to experiment with growing other foods.

After such a fun night with the main focus being food I was all excited and inspired today so I figured why not keep it going. So tonight I came home and prepared another meal from scratch. I loosely followed a pasta recipe and came up with a delicious dinner. If you know me well, not following every specific direction is also a very big deal for me! I used fresh onion, garlic, mushrooms, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, lemon zest, lemon juice, and white wine. I served it with feta cheese and fresh oregano from the garden as a garnish. (Again, I'm loving this whole walking out my back door and grabbing ingredients for my meal thing!). It was so good. Nic said it tasted like something you would get at a restaurant. It was a perfectly light summer pasta dish. For dessert we had my homemade vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce. What a sweet couple of evenings we have had. :)