Easy Cheesy Tomatoey Pasta

You may find a new trend. Less pictures but easy recipes. With a new baby my recipes are changing ever so slightly :)

This one is so yummy we keep re-inventing it by substituting different pastas and veggies, and sometimes I add shredded chicken or cut up chicken sausage.

Melt in sauce pan:
1 cup salsa (1/2 jar) Newmans pineapple salsa
2 T low-fat cream cheese

Mix in cooked pasta and blanched veggies (I threw in frozen veggies I had steamed in the microwave with a special bowl I picked up at Fry's... I knew the electronic store Marc loves is good for something).

Viola! Amazing 1 pot meal. Healthy, easy, inexpensive and no fuss cleanup. Doesn't get better than this.

Turkey Cranberry Pizza

You may have spotted in my last post one our favorite cooking techniques for using up left overs. That is pizza!

Our pantry, or freezer as in this one, typically contains something for whipping up a pizza. Last week used left over bagels with our 'Sweet & Sour Chicken' for a delicious meal in minutes. Today we were low on bread so we went for our "in case of emergency" Boboli pizza shell to use with our left over turkey and cranberry from yesterday's Christmas Eve feast - which my parents picked up from Ralphs ready-to-go boxed meals to make cooking a breeze. Not to digress to much but this has been a long standing Christmas tradition in Mammoth because it afforded us a gourmet meal that was easy to cook after skiing all day and easily fed a group of hungry skiers for an incredible deal, about $40 bucks.

So to make the very yummy Turkey Cranberry pizza we preheated our oven to 425 and took our thin crust wheat Boboli pizza shell out of the freezer and scraped off the ice. I'm not sure how long they can be kept in the freezer but ours has probably been there about 3 months and still tasted ok.

After de-icing the pizza I spread low-fat cream cheese for the base then shredded turkey followed by the mashed cranberry sauce. A few extra small pieces of turkey and a sprinkle of low-fat mozzarella cheese for the topping. Baked about 15 minutes, the pizza was superb! The cream cheese melted nicely and the mix of turkey, cranberry and cheese was wonderful. The cream cheese and cranberry sauce also gave the pizza a perfect sauce so that it wouldn't be dry. I'm thinking this might make a good combination for a bread pudding. So keep an eye out for Turkey Cranberry Bread Pudding next.

Here's to creative cooking with left overs. By the way the cream cheese and mozzarella cheese had also been left over of course. The only problem as Marc likes to say is you never know when we'll have this set of ingredients again to try to repeat this. But you can always count on the pizza.

Apple Cake

For Chanukah, I made a traditional apple cake with lots of apples. A little less traditional I added cranberries and because I didn't have any honey in our pantry I used maple syrup for the sticky sweet glaze on top.

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp. baking powder
pinch of salt
1 cup Splenda
3 extra large eggs
1/2 cup apple butter
1/2 cup oil
1 tsp. vanilla
2 very large apples (I believe I used janigold)
1/2 cup Splenda
3 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 cup cranberries (optional)

Maple Glaze:
1/2 cup maple syrup
2 tablespoons Splenda
2 teaspoons cinnamon

Steps
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-inch springform pan with cooking spray.
2. Mix flour, baking powder and salt.
3. Mix together 1 cup Splenda, beaten eggs, apple butter, oil and vanilla.
4. Peel and slice apples into chunks.
5. Sprinkle apples with 1/2 cup Splenda and cinnamon.
6. Stir dry mixture into wet mixture and apples. Add cranberries.
7. Pour into pan.
8. Bake about 60 minutes. Lightly cover pan with foil after 30 minutes.
9. Cool in pan. When it's cool place cake on wire rack.

For glaze: microwave 1/2 cup maple syrup, 2 tablespoons Splenda and 2 teaspoons cinammon.

Pizza Bread Pudding

I tried this recipe once before and FAILED. When I say failed I mean Marc, my husband who had eaten every one of my creations up to this recipe, even made a face when I put this one in front of him. Granted, I made the mistake of adding roasted garlics to the already garlicy-rolls. But I swore to him if there hadn't been so much garlic it would have tasted wonderful.

Well as luck would have it, we had Stinking Rose (the garlic restaurant) for lunch at work today, and as such an opportunity presented itself. And there's always Plan B for dinner tonight if this ones fail (leftover pizza).

Here's the recipe:

8 Garlic Rolls
3 eggs
1-1/2 cups non-fat milk
2 diced tomatoes
low-fat mozerella cheese

Preheat oven to 350. Tear rolls into smaller pieces. Combine eggs, milk and tomatoes. Add bread and soak for a couple of minutes. Pour into a small greased baking dish and sprinkle top with mozerella cheese. Should be done after 60 minutes.

Ok, I'm now writing this after we have gone back for seconds and can vouch this recipe is a saver!