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Tag Archives: Donna Hay
Need a quick and easy dinner that is not boring? Here is a simple and flavorful pasta dish using easy ingredients: roasted capsicum (red peppers), fresh creamy ricotta and whole wheat pasta.
Okay, forgive us …. we are on a Donna Hay kick again. Sorry, we just cannot quit, her recipes are simple, and so darn good!!!
Tonight we made an easy pasta dish with roasted peppers and ricotta cheese. I love both of these items for a few reasons. Roasted peppers go well with pasta, on pizza, sliced over a bed of salt cod, or even in eggs. Ricotta you can add to pasta, onto a pizza or even eat as dessert with honey drizzled over the top! We usually have both items in the house and I guess, it can be called a “staple”. You will love this easy pasta dish … dinner in 25 minutes!
Recipe: Roasted Capsicum (red peppers) & Ricotta Pasta
*serves 2
*adapted from Donna Hay
200g whole wheat pasta
150 g roasted capsicum, roughly chopped
1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
2 small cloves garlic, minced
sea salt and cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
100 g fresh ricotta
1/2 cup basil leaves (suppose to use mint but it went bad)
Cook the pasta in a saucepan of salted, boiling water for 10 – 12 minutes or until al dente. Drain and return to the pan. Place the capsicum, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil in a bowl and stir to combine. Add the pasta with the ricotta and basil and toss to combine. Garnish with pine nuts. Serve. Eat.
This easy dinner is an Italian version of Cordon Bleu – chicken thighs stuffed with parmesan cheese, wrapped with prosciutto and then lightly pan fried.
This dinner probably looks a lot like summer. I received the first magazine of the wonderful gift subscription of Donna Hay, that I received from MEM for Christmas. I love Donna. The photography throughout her books will have you drooling all over. Her easy and delicious recipes will amaze you every time.
Tonight I made a simple chicken thigh recipe. I followed Donna’s idea but changed how to do it a little. Instead of lightly rolling the thighs and sprinkling with Parmesan cheese on them; I pounded them until thin and the rolled Parmesan cheese in the middles before wrapping with Prosciutto and pan frying. The chicken came out very moist and really flavorful and slightly salty. This dish reminded me of an Italian version of Cordon Bleu. I served the chicken exactly as Donna suggested, with a tomato and basil salad.
Recipe
Chicken wrapped in Prosciutto
* serves 4
4 chicken thighs, trimmed
3/4 cup shaved Parmesan
4 slices of prosciutto
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 vine ripened tomatoes, sliced
1 cup basil leaves
olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sea salt and cracked pepper
Place the chicken between 2 sheets of waxed paper and flatten by pounding. Put shavings of Parmesan cheese in the middle of the thigh and tightly make into a roll. Wrap with the prosciutto. Heat the oil in a large frying pan over high heat. cook the chicken 3 – 4 minutes each side or until cooked through. Place the tomato and basil in a bowl, drizzle with extra oil and vinegar and toss to combine. Serve. Eat.
Move over green eggs and ham, purple soup is here to stay! Your kids will love this bright purple soup that is not only easy to make but very healthy, as well as low fat. They will be eating their veggies and giggling the entire time.
and what do you possibly think this “purple” soup could be??
You may be starting to think we eat a little too much of cauliflower soup around here; I know someone else is thinking that! I saw this purple cauliflower in the store and I knew I had to give it a whirl. The color was just too good to pass it by. If I had kids I am sure they would have loved it just because it was “purple”.
This soup is so easy to make, you can have dinner on the table in under 30 minutes. It is equally as delicious. I like to serve it with a simple salad, which I tossed with a new dressing that was fantastic (recipe below) and a hunk of crusty bread!
Recipe: Purple Cauliflower Soup
* adapted from Simply Recipes
Florets from one head of purple cauliflower
2 shallots – diced
1 clove of garlic – chopped
1 quart of water
Salt
Unsalted butter
Bring 1 quart of water to a rolling boil in a medium-sized pot. Add 2 teaspoons of salt to the water. Add the cauliflower, shallots, and garlic, and cook until cooked through, about 20 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to remove florets, shallots and garlic to a bowl. Reserve cooking water.
Working in batches, fill a blender half-way with cooked cauliflower, add enough cooking water to the blender bowl so that it comes up a quarter of the way. Purée until smooth. You want the consistency to be that of soup, so if you need to add more water, do so. For each blender batch, add salt and butter to taste (about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and about a tablespoon or more of butter for each blender batch). Since you are using only lightly salted cooking water for a base, not stock, you will need to salt this more than you would otherwise.
Serve immediately into bowls. Add a pat of butter, let melt slightly and serve.
Eat.
Serves 4.
White Balsamic & Herb Dressing
*from Donna Hay magazine – no measurements, I did it by taste.
Place olive oil, white balsamic vinegar, chopped flat leaf parsley, crushed garlic, caster sugar, sea salt and cracked black pepper in a non-metallic blowl and stir to combine.
Since we had two back to back events, I have to apologize for making the last meal of our series late. I am excited to tell you about this very easy risotto dish. It is a Donna Hay recipe from a collection of her 100 easy recipes. Now I know most of you are thinking, ‘risotto, easy?’ I have always thought of risotto as being easy as well as versatile. You can add just about everything to a basic risotto recipe. It makes a lovely main dish meal.
This particular recipe was the easiest risotto recipe I have made – it was a baked one. So simple, put some risotto rice and chicken stock in the oven and bake for about 40 minutes. Then stir in some cheese, your flavorings and some butter. As soon as I took the risotto out of the oven, while it was steaming hot, I stirred in the cheese and butter and then tossed in half a bag of frozen peas. By the time I stirred it, the peas were warm and we had dinner. Serve with a simple salad, a warm baguette and a glass of wine and you have a lovely dinner. I definitely have a new favorite recipe at Chez Us.
$ 8.98 for 4 servings. Dinner and lunch for the next day. Tomorrow night I will give a recap of the series with our tips for watching the food budget and still being able to eat organic and locally.
Recipe
Place 1 1/2 cups arborio rice and 4 cups of chicken stock in a ceramic baking dish, cover with foil and bake in a 350 oven for 40 minutes or until the rice is al dente. Stir through 1 cup finely grated parmesan cheese, 2 tablespoons butter and half a bag of frozen peas. Serve. Eat. Enjoy.
Since we are on the eating right track, once again, we are trying to limit our meat intake to once a week. Therefore, I have been making a lot of veggie inspired meals. I have also been looking for ones that make just a little extra so that we have lunch the next day – once of our ways of cutting back this year! When I am in this situation I always seem to turn to the same place for inspiration. I LOVE Donna Hay’s recipes. I love the fact that they only require a few ingredients which we usually have on hand and they have never taken over an hour to prepare. Not to mention they are so fresh!
Tonight I made this lovely Cannellini Bean Salad. It was so simple that I am not sure what to even write about it. I loved that it had blanched fresh green beans as well as mint in it. The dressing was made with a little bit of olive oil, lots of fresh squeezed lemon juice (we used Meyers) and a touch of paprika, which gave it a slightly smokey and sweet taste. The combination of fresh veggies and the cannellini beans (slightly nutty) with the flavors of the dressing really complimented each other. The only thing I would do definitely next time would be to use cooked Cannellini beans since canned ones have a tendency to get a little smashed. Otherwise, this dish is wonderful or as Donna would say, “Simple made Simple”.
It would go lovely with a grilled piece of chicken or fish, if you do not to eat vegetarian.
Recipe
My dad loves salmon and my stepmom does not, so when we come up to Montana, we make salmon. This week my dad had a recipe picked from Bon Appetit. It was a roasted salmon that was coated with a mayo, mustard and herb coating. I was interested to see how mayo would be roasted on a salmon and it was delicious. The coating really held the juices and flavor of the salmon in and make a very flavorful piece of fish. I served it with roasted potoates that were thinly sliced but kept together and then stuffed garlic between the slices, drizzled with olive oil and baked. The recipe is from Donna Hay‘s latest magazine.
I followed some crumbs from MattBites, last week, over to the weekly food blog event, Food Fest. Food Fest is co-hosted by Margaret of A Way to Garden and Deb over at Dinner Tonight. Each week they pick a vegetable that is in season and we the readers and chefs get to create something to eat! This weeks challenge was corn.
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WE are both sooo tired from our days, that we could barely even think about eating, let alone standing in the kitchen and cooking. I have been having insatiable cravings for spring rolls, too, and that was the original plan tonight. As I stood there looking at these baby eggplant, I said hell with it, it was going to be a Donna Hay sort of night! So I looked up her summer Ratatouille recipe and started chopping away – yellow squash, green squash, red onions eggplant, the first of summer dry farmed tomatoes (if you are a regular reader, you know HOW we love these) and then I drizzled everything with fresh rosemary from the garden and a healthy dose of olive oil. In 40 minutes we had a nice big bowl of Ratatouille – yum!
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