Over Greened?

Are you tired of being unable to come up with appetizing dishes with greens in them? Frustrated that vegetation is taking over your refrigerator? Overwhelmed by the many shades of green slowly devouring every inch of your kitchen space until you are left sputtering for breath buried beneath their ominous leafy presence on the cold hard floor?

No?

Well here's another two dishes that we concocted with three more bunches of greens, anyhow.
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Green Marinara

Ingredients:
1 bag spinach chopped into 1/2 inch squares
2 bags rainbow chard chopped into 1/2 inch squares (probably amounts to a bunch and a half?)
1 jar marinara sauce of your choice
1 teaspoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt

Heat olive oil in saucepan large enough to hold all greens prior to cooking
Add greens and coat in oil as much as possible
Allow greens to cook down to between 1/2 and 1/3 their original volume. Adding the salt will help you accomplish this as salt makes vegetable "weep" (release water).
Add pasta sauce and heat to simmer

Pour over whatever pasta or other accompanying food you want to eat with your marinara (perhaps spaghetti squash, roasted butternut squash, roasted summer squash, etc)
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Use leftover sauce for the following dish:

Chicken Parmesan in Green Marinara

Ingredients:
1/2 recipe Green Marinara (see above)
2 boneless skinless chicken breasts rinsed and dried well with paper towels
3/4 cup grated parmesan cheese (not the powder kind, but I suppose that could work also)
1 Tbsp or more olive oil
1 tsp salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Garlic powder to taste

Preheat over to 375 F. Place prepared (rinsed and dried) chicken breasts in 9x9 in baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Pour Green Marinara over the chicken to cover and sprinkle entire dish with parmesan cheese.

Bake for 30 to 45 minutes depending on size of chicken breasts. Cheese should be melted and browning slightly and sauce should be bubbling. Eat as an entire meal or serve with garlic bread, pasta, or some other side of your choosing.

NOTE: I would actually change this recipe slightly to say that you should rub olive oil onto the chicken breasts rather than drizzle. Its a weird process but it seems to do wonders especially when roasting the chicken breasts on their own. Garlic olive oil is actually the most superior in doing this. You can make garlic olive oil by pouring your oil into a skillet, heating, and adding several cloves of garlic to cook in it until softened and lightly brown. Do not soak raw garlic cloves in oil as I have heard this can promote the growth of botulism.
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Tonight we are doing easy things since I have yet to be inspired to do the dishes. Hooray for frozen chicken nuggets and sweet potato tater tots!

Back with Collard Rice

Following my last entry, my life was sucked into my job. What little time I had to relax at home I mostly spent watching television with Patrick rather than doing most of the things required of us as adults. While my blog doesn't fall into the category of things required of us as adults, it often focuses on activities that have been largely neglected: cooking, cleaning, healthy living (or lack of there-of), crafts, reading, anything-fun, etc.

Of course, if you check the blog entry just before this one, you'll see that my life was not completely devoid of cooking (just mostly devoid of it). I just have photo documentation of some recipes I made over the time. I don't have links, though, but if you're really interested, I can find the source of the recipe that I altered (or did not).

I still don't have my final grades entered, but the term, at long last, is over. I hope that next term will be a little more open, but there's no certainty of that. My schedule, however, should allow more time for cooking. We have gotten perilously behind due to my schedule and being very ill over the last weekend. As of this morning, this was what our refrigerator looked like:

Its like a jungle in there.

Since then, I have removed three bunches of collard greens. Our life will be full of greens until we get everything back under control; tonight that means eating something I am calling Collard Rice.

Collard Rice


Ingredients:
2 cups white rice
4 cups water
3 bunches collard greens, cut into small squares
3/4 small brown onion dice very small
1 tablespoon butter (I don't trust any greens dish made without butter)
1 teaspoon Johnny's Great Caesar! Garlic Spread & Seasoning
1/2 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste


Put all ingredients into rice cooker and cook according to appliance directions.
This recipe will feed 4 and then some if you are controlling your portions appropriately (I don't).  

The results:
I was hesitant to believe that this would have turned out as well as it did. I might want to try cooking it with chicken stock instead of water (or a mix of the two) next time, but the flavor was pretty good and the ratio of greens to rice was about 50/50 which is good in my opinion. It needed a bit more salt, I think, but using some chicken stock would help that a bit. You may also decide to put a whole teaspoon of salt in to begin with.

Here are some pictures of the process:

Two Months in Food Pictures

I did, with the intention of blogging, take pictures when I cooked over the course of the last two months. Here are some pictures from these cooking adventures:

Flourless Chocolate Cookies: Could have been better if I hadn't messed with the recipe so much.

Baked Garlic Potato Chips: Very delicious, lots of work, next time I have an over abundance of potatoes again I will be sure to make them again

Some sort of squash pancakes that wouldn't cook through in the center...

Thumb print cookies made with our homemade pear butter. These were delicious.

Baked chicken (some of the best chicken I've ever made) and Pasta Carbonara with Lemon and Leeks (which I will be making again)

Experimenting with the juicer, I believe this was Pear, Greens, Beet, Carrot, Orange juice

Chocolate Beet Cake (cupcakes, to be exact) - This is ALWAYS a hit, I think. True, it has a lot of butter in it, but its a good use of beets and truly delicious. We don't put any frosting on it its so moist. You can just barely taste the beets and if you weren't told that it was beets you'd never know.

My first independent attempt at cooking salmon. Could have been better, but the texture of the fish was excellent even if the added bits weren't so awesome. I will go simpler next time.