Here’s another easy pasta dish for a weekday dinner.  Use some of your already cooked pasta (see yesterday’s Tuesday’s Tip) and layer it with ricotta cheese and sauce to make a quick lasagna.

And surprise--there is a fun kid-friendly ingredient in this dish--chicken tenders.  You can easily omit to make this dish vegetarian, but I think the chicken can add a fun factor to this dish!

Baked Spaghetti Lasagna

1 pound whole wheat spaghetti, cooked
1 head of broccoli, cut into small florets
1 - 28 ounce jar of marinara

Last week I shared several slow cooker recipe, tips and ideas for my favorite way to get healthy food to our family’s table without a lot of stress and time.  This week I focus on my second favorite convenient, healthy food genre:  pasta.

Pasta has several things going for it:  first, it is almost universally loved by children and adults alike. Second, even if you have special food needs, there are gluten-free versions and of course my favorite, whole wheat and whole grain blends.  Third, pasta can be served in almost infinite flavor combinations: Italian, Southwestern, Asian and American flavors all are well-suited for pasta dishes.  Fourth, and perhaps most important for our purposes this week:  pasta cooks fast.

Pasta dishes can be as simple or complex as you wish, but for our purposes this week, I am going to keep the recipes quite simple, yet super tasty.  Really, in a pinch, I’ve been known to open a jar of store bought marinara and serve it over cooked spaghetti with a touch of low-fat cheese.  This is great, especially when I am just super short on time.  Using whole wheat pasta, you have a really healthful meal!  But here is an almost-as-easy recipe that gets rave reviews in our home.

I created this slow cooker chili this fall and shortly after developing it, our local large grocery store had a Chili Cook-off.  SPH encouraged me to enter the contest and a few weeks later I had a call on my voice mail telling me I was a finalist!  Long story short, this chili came in 2nd place of around 100 entries in the vegetarian category.

Even if you aren’t a vegetarian, if you love chili, this will be a recipe for your family to try.  The subtle sweetness of sweet potato and bell pepper combine with the beans and tomatoes to create a tasty chili sans meat!

Slow Cooker Vegetarian Chili*

1 medium onion, diced
1 sweet potato, diced (or try carrot, squash or even corn)

This recipe is a perennial favorite in the Sweet Pea home.  We love tacos and this stew (it is a thick, thick soup) is almost like a taco in your bowl.  Serve it with the toppings of your choice for a happy dinnertime for the whole family.

Slow Cooker Taco Stew

2 - 15 oz cans of black beans, drained and rinsed -OR- 3 ½ cup cooked black beans
16 oz can tomato sauce
10 oz frozen corn package
2 - 10 oz cans of tomatoes with green chilies, undrained
12 oz can or bottle of beer or 1 ½ cups broth

This is a recipe that I simply call "easier than pie."  Pie isn't easy for me, but this couldn't be simpler. 

What I love about this slow cooker recipe is that it not only yields a great meal for the day you cook it, but also the makings of a quick meal later that same week.  

Slow Cooker “Roast” Chicken

1 - 4-6 pound chicken, thawed
1-2 tablespoons spice mixture (such as lemon pepper, jerk seasoning or Italian)
2 onions, cut into quarters

One of the rooms I always miss the most when we travel away from home is my kitchen. I miss the space of it, and the light coming in through the windows in the morning; I miss how I feel when I'm in the kitchen, cooking up food for my family, or making myself the first pot of coffee in the morning. At our house the kitchen is very much the heart of the home. I felt this the minute we first saw the house. I didn't care that the walls were covered in 1960s flowery wallpaper, or that we'd have to replace the appliances immediately, they were that bad, or that there were brass knobs on the cabinets. I loved the space, and the light, and the sense that this was a place where good things could happen, and where everyone would want to be.

And everyone does, most of the time. You can run through our kitchen, as the kids do constantly, from the dining room and into the hall and around again, in a loop. T. likes to sit at the kitchen table and color or draw, or she'll sit on the end of the counter and help me cook.

It's outdated, our kitchen, but I love it. It's the heart of it that matters, anyway, and its heart is sound and good.

*******

Scott and I have been working away at a long to-do list this week. We made the most of the three days the kids were still in school to do lots of wrapping, and last-minute gift buying, and organizing the odds and ends that always go along with Christmas. On Thursday we were all home together, and I had cookie baking on my to-do list. Cookie baking--at long last! What I did not have on my list was taking both kids in to the pediatrician. L. has been complaining of a sore throat for a couple fo days now, and T.'s sinus infection, which clearly didn't clear up after the first round of antibiotics (that terrible round that resulted in her allergic reaction--she still has some residual hives from that!), has come back in full swing. Since we are traveling for Christmas, the thought of hitting the road with sickies in tow just wasn't at all appealing. Plus we were worried about spreading any serious germs to our family members--especially to my baby nephew. Luckily, both kids have only non-contagious sinus infections, so we'll be packing antibiotics with us and they should be feeling back to themselves by the weekend.

Once we had crossed the pediatrician off our list, T. and I turned to cookie making. One of our favorite cookies to bake at Christmas are stained glass cookies.

I veganized the recipe and used Ener-G egg replacer and Earth Balance, and the dough came out perfectly fine. I chilled it overnight, brought it to room temperature in the morning (while we were at the pediatrician) and working it with my hands a bit before rolling helped.

Before you start baking, put the hard candy in ziploc bags, cover with a dish towel (place on a wooden cutting board, too), and turn your older child loose with a hammer.

With only two days before Christmas Eve, for many of us the holiday food preparations are reaching their peak.  Food is so closely tied to our celebrations and certain foods conjure up images of specific holiday celebrations.

My mom has an entertaining cookbook that takes me back to my childhood and special food celebrations.  Specifically, this cookbook reminds me of this time of year and the preparations we made for my aunt and uncle’s Christmas Eve cocktail party.

Each year on Christmas Eve, after church, we would go for a wonderful smorgasbord of Christmas foods at my aunt and uncle’s home.  My mom would always prepare tasty appetizers to contribute to this holiday feast and many of them came from this one entertaining cookbook.  

This is a recipe she recently made from the same cookbook.  The cookbook is more than 30 years old, so she took the liberty of lightening the recipe, with especially tasty results.  

Have you tried spaghetti squash yet?  Spaghetti squash is a winter squash with a special surprise inside.  When you cook this humble vegetable, it goes from this:

to this inside:

I had such a good time cooking and baking for our Christmas party this past weekend. I tried some recipes I've been wanting to for awhile, like this one for sugared cranberries:

They were so addictively delicious, the way they popped in my mouth with a sweet-tart burst of juice! I might have eaten away at the entire bowl if I hadn't been so busy.

I love tempeh, but it has to be doctored up, in my opinion, to bring out the best of the flavors. I made my own honey-sesame glazed tempeh (mixed about a 1/2 cup of soy sauce with a 1/2 cup of honey and sesame oil and tossed the tempeh in a pan until the glaze coated. Then I sprinkled sesame seeds on top) and topped a fresh salad with the tempeh:

I made a tahini-lemon dressing from this site (scroll down for the dressing recipe) and it was the perfect addition to the salad and melded so well with the tempeh.