Acorn Squash with Pecan-Cherry Stuffing

Acorn Squash with Pecan-Cherry Stuffing. Recipe test from Urban Vegan’s upcoming cookbook The Urban Vegan: 250 Street-Smart, Animal-Free Recipes (publish date: late 2009).

This dish wasn’t that hard — once you get the darn acorn squash cut in half — to make but is a lovely presentation. I can definitely see serving this with a Fall meal like Thanksgiving. Also, I wonder since you slice up little serving bowls like this, what it would be like to tweak the stuffing for each “bowl.” Hmmm….

Usually I slice my acorn squash length-wise like above, but Dynise’s recipe called for the half-wise so you get a scallop effect. It was easier to cut length-wise. :: grin ::

Sun-dried Pesto

Sun-dried Pesto. Recipe test from Urban Vegan’s upcoming cookbook The Urban Vegan: 250 Street-Smart, Animal-Free Recipes (publish date: late 2009).

I served this spreadable pesto on top of toasted thinly-sliced French bread. This was incredible! The layers of flavor were beautiful. This was supposed to be done with a food processor, but I’m still unsure about Grandma’s food processor so I tried the blender. It worked very well! Who needs a fancy-dancy food processor that takes up precious kitchen room!

Oven Fried Chicken, Avocado Greek Salad

Dinner: Oven Fried Chicken and Avocado Greek Salad

• Leftover Oven Fried Chicken
• Avocado Greek Salad
  So with the sale on chicken, there was a sale on avocados. I grabbed one and had no idea what I was going to do with it. A previous boss used to rave about this Greek dressing and avocado. So, I put together some torn romaine, quartered tomato and half the avocado. Drizzled with a little Greek dressing and enjoyed! The only problem with the dressing is that it’s about 3 points which is a bit high. It’s very delicious though.

Honeyed Chicken, Roasted Butternut, and Strawberry Salad

In my effort to try and live mo’ bettah, I cooked last night and tonight. It’s hard though. I get off work around 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. Commute is not long but still puts me in the kitchen around 6:00 – 6:15 p.m. usually. Then there’s prep and cooking, so I’m not eating till around 7:00 p.m. or so. I want to exercise when I get home but if I did that, then I wouldn’t eat till closer to 8:00 p.m. Insane. Oh and another thing about eating last is the craptastic light I have to work with if I do photograph. I apologize for the blur.

Dinner: April 23, 2008

• Honeyed Chicken
  Used up the rest of the drumsticks that were dirt cheap that I bought yesterday. Didn’t use my locally bought honey because I didn’t have enough but will next time. I did use my own grown chives from out back instead of green onions. Measurements were eyeballed but used basically the rest of the recipe sort of. You know how it is.
• Roasted Butternut Squash
• Strawberry Salad
  This was a mixture of torn romaine lettuce, baby spinach and sliced strawberries. They’re in season, y’know. I drizzled on top of it some bottled Light Balsamic Dressing (Newman’s Own). This was my first time making or eating a strawberry salad and I liked it. Next time maybe I’ll add nuts.