Goat Cheese Peppers

Roasted Goat Cheese Peppers

This one was fun, very easy, and DANGEROUSLY good! 

I love goat cheese to start out with so if you don't, this probably isn't for you! To make these delicious puppies, I picked up a bunch of the little sweet peppers and some goat cheese from the store (not the hot pepper kind - the baby bell pepper or sweet pepper kind). Here's a quick run down of the steps: 

Getting the peppers ready:
1. Cut the top off of each pepper and clean out the seeds. 
2. Lightly coat the peppers in olive oil (a spray olive oil works great too). 
3. Put the peppers in the broiler (or on the grill) long enough to soften them up just a bit and until you start to see them turn a little brown in spots. 

Goat cheese prep: 
You can do so many variations with the goat cheese! Really, you can mix in whatever flavors you think you'll like. I made two varieties this time; one with jalapeno and one with Italian seasonings. Here's what I did: 

1. Chop half a yellow onion, mince 1 clove of garlic, and cook these in a little olive oil until the onions are translucent. 
2. Split the goat cheese (already softened/at room temp) between two plastic zipper bags (I used two since I made two types of peppers and the ziplic bags make it really easy to fill the peppers.)
3. Split the onion/garlic mix between the plastic bags (be sure you let it cool for a few minutes or you'll melt your plastic bags)
4. Add any seasonings you want to the goat cheese mixes. In one bag, I added some chopped jalapeno and in the other I used basil, oregano, and parsley if I remember correctly. 
5. Use your hands to squeeze the ingredients around in the bag until it's mixed well. Then use scissors to cut off the tip of one corner on the bag. Then you can squeeze the mixture out of the ziploc bag into the peppers easy and clean!). 
6. Once all the peppers are filled - you can either pop them back in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes to warm through before serving or you can put them in the refrigerator to reheat and serve later. 

These were fun to make and so tasty. It was hard to not eat all of them at once!! These are good for a big group so you HAVE to share. :)

Horned Fruit

I love seeing new and unusual fruits/veggies at the store. I don't go crazy and get them all but I like to get one or two that I've never done anything with before just to check it out. This time... horned melon (a.k.a kiwano) and passion fruit.

I've tasted so many passion fruit flavored things and loved them so it was time to see what the actual fruit was all about. I had never seen the inside of a passion fruit before but I have to say it looks pretty disgusting! It made me laugh to think about who on earth was the first person willing to put this in their mouth? The taste was pretty good but mine was very tart. This is the kind of fruit where the good stuff is bound around the seeds so you have to break it free or eat the seed with it.

The horned melon was a whole story all it's own. I cut open this yellowish-orange horned monster to find it filled with green slime! Similar to the passion fruit, the flesh (if you can call it that??) is bound to the seeds. The flesh is bright green and slimy and oozes like some toy a little boy would love. The taste was pretty strange too: pretty much a cross between a cucumber and a banana (the not too ripe version of a banana). I can see now why there really aren't many 'horned melon' recipes out there.

Hmm... what to do with these two peculiar fruits...I spent some time flipping through Pinterest for inspiration. The passion fruit had several options but I only one so that limited my recipe abilities. For the horned melon, the best thing I saw was some sort of a salad dressing out of the 'gel'. The salad dressing had potential but I wanted to make something more interesting than that. Finally, I decided my best option was a sorbet where I would use the passion fruit AND the horned melon mixed with pineapple. Let's see what happens....

First, I needed to find the easiest way to break the flesh of these fruits off of the seeds. I had read that just trying to push the 'gel' from the horned melon through a strainer was a tedious process because it did not want to leave it's precious seed behind. So, I decided to clean out the flesh and seeds of both the passion fruit and horned melon and run them through the blender for a 30 seconds or so to break everything loose. It worked!!! Ha... I bested you GREEN SLIME!

From here, it was pretty quick to put the mixture through a fine strainer and separate what was now basically liquid from the seed particles.

Once I had my passion fruit/horned melon 'juice', I put it with some pineapple juice and 1 cup of sugar in a pot on the stove and let it simmer until the sugar was all melted and I could tell the consistency was starting to thicken just a little bit. Oh and I almost forgot, somewhere along the way I added a little almond milk to add to the creaminess (maybe 1/3 cup or so?). When this was finished I put the mixture along with about 2 cups of chopped pineapple in the blender and let it run until it was smooth.

I had read that you could blend a sorbet mix about every hour as it's freezing to help give it that airy consistency and keep it from freezing rock solid. Well... I started out with this in mind and I did blend it after each of the first few hours but then I got tired and decided to go to bed instead. It would end up however it ended up!

And - TahDAH! While a bit more solid than the kind you buy at the store, my horned melon/passion fruit/pineapple sorbet turned out pretty tasty! The one catch... it tasted pretty much like pineapple sorbet. :) Oops...

What would I do differently next time? I would use about half the amount of pineapple and about a third the amount of pineapple juice to make this mix. Also, if I'm being honest, I might just skip the horned melon and use more passion fruit! It was fun to play with this new fruit but I just didn't see much benefit in it. It probably would still make a good salad dressing so maybe someday I'll give that one a try.

On to the next foodie adventure...

Rosemary Scallops and Quinoa

Someone once said I should collect my pictures and recipes on a blog. I see two problems with this. 1 - I rarely use recipes! :) and 2. People might think I should actually know what I'm doing in a kitchen if I put it out there for all to see. I do, however, love the idea of having a place to collect things that I find and things that I make in one place. So... here I go. I certainly don't profess to be any sort of a chef. I'm simply a girl on a mission to have a little fun with healthy foods (okay... usually healthy foods :) ). So for today:

Rosemary Scallops with Roasted Red Pepper and Quinoa

Somewhere in my browsing I traipsed upon a picture of some scallops that had been cooked on rosemary sprigs. I loved the idea and had to try it! I added a little old bay seasoning to the scallops, speared them with the rosemary and plopped them on my George Foreman for about 4 minutes. I also sliced some red bell pepper (the dish needed some color and a little more variety in flavors), spritzed them with some olive oil and put them under the broiler until they started to brown. As a foundation for the dish, I made quinoa. Before starting the quinoa, I caramelized a little onion and garlic in olive oil and then cooked the quinoa in this same pan with the delicious caramelized onions.  Oh and for the liquid in the quinoa, I used chicken broth. That's all! Pretty easy actually.

This could be made into a vegan dish by using tofu instead of scallops (just be sure to season with Old Bay and put on the Rosemary) and by using water or a vegetable stock for the quinoa. The tofu should pick up some good flavor this way.