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Well tomorrow I'm off to the District! There will be many posts about that in the next coming weeks! However, I have some new foodie items and recent knitting projects to show off.

First, my favorite part the food! When I went to the farmers market I had already decided that I wanted to buy eggplant. I have never been a huge fan of eggplant stemming from a bad experience as a child. The kind of eggplant that I bought was considered Asian eggplant, and supposedly has smaller seeds. So I searched the internet for panini recipes because I also wanted to use my beautiful foccacia bread. I didn't really see one I liked so I made up my own.

I pan "grilled" eggplant, sauteed onions and peppers, put tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese on the sandwich and stuck it in the toaster oven. 

I also made roasted broccoli, so yummy! I used a recipe from the Food Network. 

A few days later I also made Eggplant Parmesan, but unfortunately never got around to taking a picture of it. However I used a recipe from Weight Watchers, so including pasta I believe it equaled out to about 9 points or so. 

I also completed a first birthday gift for "A". I decided to knit her fruits and vegetables to play with. Her mom also made her a bunch of felt food, so we had some overlap in items that we made, but I think A will have a lot of fun playing with the items, and I loved making them. 

The banana was the funniest thing! She recognizes bananas and tried to eat it. She was very upset when she realized it was not a real banana. 

Celery 

Pear

Broccoli

 Apple

Pumpkin 

I'm also planning one more special item to be sent a little later, because well sometimes I'm really slow and behind at what I do. Well that's all, if you are reading this over the next few days, please pray for safe travels to D.C. and prayers of peace and direction once I'm there! 

Farmer's Market

Saturday, I decided to hit up the local farmers market with my friend Meg for the last time. I went in determined to buy some different vegetables than I normally would. We got there and went straight to the Anastasia Kitchen booth and got sweet potato and black bean burritos which were awesome! Then we walked around, and just kinda looked at what was there. I ended up buying quite a few things, and Sunday I did my first round of cooking with my farmers market items.

Pretty peppers, and a red/purple onion.

Apparently these are Asian eggplants. They are supposed to have less seeds in them. 

A beet!

Goat cheese!

5 beautiful peaches.

Delicious Garlic and Rosemary Foccacia bread from Maria's Bakery

I decided to make roasted peaches with goat cheese, honey, and toasted hazelnuts. It came out pretty well. However, I did have a couple mishaps. First, I totally burned my first batch of hazelnuts, and secondly, the goat cheese I used was not as soft as I would have liked. Therefore, I am going to try this again with a softer goat cheese. It was really good though!

I also made a delicious roasted beet, peach, and goat cheese salad. I have come to adore roasted beet, and really should come up with more uses for it!

That concludes my farmers market adventures. I am still looking for something to make with my eggplant. I just haven't narrowed down the perfect item. And in other news I move out of my home for 3 years, in just under a week and a half. I can't believe it, and I'm going to miss it so much!

Adventures in the Kitchen

What is this three blog posts in the past two weeks. I feel like I'm setting a record for my blogging.
I've got the cooking bug again and I've been experimenting with pizza. My goal has been to create "semi-gourmet" pizzas that are low in weight watchers points.
This time I made a sausage and peppers with mushrooms pizza. I used low fat Italian cheese, tomato paste sauce, and Jennie O Italian Turkey Sausage. It was so good! I have found the trick is to use half a pound of dough per pizza. It is the only way to truly get a thin crust!

I also had an abundence of zucchini that I bought from the framers market. While looking through recipies on the interent. I found a recipie for stuffed zucchini. I hollowed out 2 zucchini's, chopped up the zucchini, tomatoes, onion, asiago cheese, and bread crumbs. I put the rest of the low-fat Italian cheese from the pizza I made on top and baked for 15 minutes. They ended up being around 3 Weight Watchers PointsPlus each!

I'm excited to be cooking again. I feel like since it is now summer, I have wanted to really create good food again, rather than mediocre food. I'm also trying to create really good low points food. I've been working out everyday. I have lost 37 pounds on Weight Watchers, and want to keep a good trend going, and not be held up by my diet. As my good friend and I have discussed, Food is an addiction and it is hard work to break that addiction

Food

So with increased time again now that is summer, I have begun to experiement with recipies a bit more. Last Saturday I went to the farmers market and picked up zucchini. I didn't know what I was going to do with it. Later that day my friend was telling me about this delicious recipe from Vegetarian Times Magazine. Zucchini, Red Pepper, Goat Cheese Pizza. It was really easy to make and was so good!

In case anyone is interested the recipe is at Vegetarian Times Magazine