Arugula

A grilled pizza with chunks of watermelon, spicy sausage, feta, arugula, black olives, and a sweet bbq sauce base.

Creamy and cheesy risotto is a fun and different filling for these meatball wraps.

A great side dish for outdoor eating, this pasta salad is tomato based instead of the usual mayo.

A BLT flavored ice cream with bacon and arugula in the actual ice cream and a sweet tomato jam as the topping.  Inspired by Orange is the New Black.

Hummus and beef may sound like a weird combination to us westerners who mainly use hummus as a dip for pita, but it’s actually a fairly common combination in middle eastern food. In this flank steak recipe, the hummus is used not only as a seasoning for the meat but also as a glue to help bind the steak together. It’s national hummus day on the 15th, and Sabra is really going all out for the day, I will give you some of the details on their fun giveaways at the end of the post.

I whipped up this noodle salad last night and it was really easy and delicious, so I thought I would share it with you guys. I had a ton of arugula that I had bought for another dish but never ended up using, so I wanted to use it in some sort of salad with an Asian type of noodle. Salami is one of my favorite things to pair with arugula, and I also had this really cool espresso rind cheese that was actually great in this dish.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I was snowed in, but after being out all day in the gross snow/rain mixture, when it was time to finally be home I didn’t want to leave. I decided to try and make a soup based off things I only had in the house. The soup came out amazing and really warming on such a cold night, and I think it was mainly because of a slab of delicious bacon I was able to grab on a recent trip to the Culinary Institute of America with Jones Dairy Farm. The smokey bacon really gave the soup a deep warming flavor. Homemade stock, a can of tomatoes, and noodles from a package of ramen (without the flavor packet) rounded things out. Honestly there was nothing I would have rather eaten that night.

I had to make short ribs this past weekend, so I planned a dish around having some extra leftover shreddy beef deliciousness.I’ve been eating a veg-forward diet recently (I just made that word up.) so I wanted to load up this lasagna with all my current faves, cauliflower, mushroom, and arugula. I also made a really quick sauce in the food processor with manchego, ricotta, and some milk.  Historically, I have been averse towards lasagna varieties, but this one came out fantastic!

When I am eating less meat, I make sure to get a good amount of protein in my diet via nuts, beans, and quinoa. Since I work in a burrito shop, you could imagine that I get kinda bored with eating beans. The idea for this casserole was that I had a bunch of veggies in my fridge, and I wanted to douse them with tomato and bake them, so I decided to puree beans in with the tomato to get the protein in there without really noticing the beans. I also was pretty curious about how the texture and flavor would be. In the end, I absolutely loved everything about this dish and will make it again for sure.

Mini grilled cheese with some fresh sweet seasonal peaches, spicy italian sausage, creamy cheese and bitter arugula.

Mac and cheese with kielbasa and mustard mixed right in.