Yesterday when I was at the store, I picked up some more tomatillos, a big poblano pepper, a white onion, some garlic and headed home to make another batch of salsa. It was hot out yesterday, and I didn’t want to turn the stove on, so I got out my skillet and added everything to the pan.

The beginnings of a great salsa

Ingredients:

Tomatillos
1/2 large white onion
4-5 cloves of garlic
1 Poblano pepper
juice of 1/2 lime

I just added a few teaspoons of Canola Oil, and threw everything into the skillet. I turned the heat on medium and just cooked the veggies on all sides for about 15 minutes. Some parts got a little browned, but I was OK with that!

I removed the stem from the Poblano pepper, and the paper from the garlic, but other than that, I threw everything into the blender.

I also added a few teaspoons of Tapatio picante sauce. And this is how it turned out:

The best salsa I've ever made!

Since it’s kind of warm, I put some into 2 bowls and stuck it in my freezer for about 15 minutes to cool it off.

It was so good! And the best part is it makes so much. I’m seriously thinking about canning some of this for gifts at Christmas!

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So, are many of you into back to school stuff yet?? We went shoe shopping yesterday and right now Payless Shoe’s has buy one get one pair half price, AND, I went on line and found a coupon for an additional 20% off. I wasn’t sure if it would work, it just had a coupon code, but the man at the register punched those numbers in, and I saved $15.00!!

Click here to print out the coupon code I used, one is good until 8/9 and the other one is good until 8/31!

So check out the shoes my kids picked. My oldest son is going to be a Freshman in high school, my middle son is going into 7th grade and my daughter is going into 3rd grade. It’s going to be a crazy year with 3 kids in 3 different schools, we’ll see if I survive!

Paul's shoes!

Mark's shoes

My daughter Claire's shoes!

I should be lucky I have a few more weeks before school starts. 67 Chicago Public Schools have adopted a YEAR ROUND school and they go back to school on Monday!

Year round students get 6 weeks off during summer, 2 weeks off at Christmas and 2 weeks off during Spring break. It’s all in an effort to keep kids off the streets and keep them safer. Which I am all for that! Some areas in Chicago are pretty rough and dangerous!

If you have kids, are you excited about school starting again soon?

This was so good!

My twin sister always makes fun of me because I make pasta so much. But with so many different ways to make it, you can never get tired of it.

When I had my first apartment, I think I made pasta at least 4 nights a week! Here are some of my favorites I’ve made: Lasagna for One, Pasta Bake, Very veggie pasta sauce, Pasta with mini meatballs, just to name a few.

I almost always just make my sauce since its so much cheaper than buying jarred sauce. I do like to throw in some veggies into the mix. For this version I threw in 2 Melrose Peppers I bought at the farmers market last weekend.

I haven’t had Melrose Peppers before, they look like this:

The one's I got were green

I asked the man working the table if they were spicy or not, and he said no, more like a green pepper than a hot pepper. So I bought a small basket.

This version of my pasta sauce

1 28 oz. can crushed tomatoes
2 Melrose peppers, seeds removed
1/2 white onion
2 medium fresh tomatoes – threw the whole thing, seeds and all in!
4 cloves of garlic
2 links of mild Italian sausage, casing removed
1 teaspoon fennel, chopped
1-2 tsp. dried oregano
salt and pepper
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

In a medium skillet, cook the Italian sausage and drain any fat off. Meanwhile, in a blender, add the crushed tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, melrose peppers, onion and garlic and puree until smooth. Add that to the cooked Italian sausage, and then add the rest of the spices. Cook for about 20 minutes. Then I added the fresh parmesan cheese and let that melt into the sauce.

I also used a different shape pasta which was Campanelle or little bell shaped pasta.

I have to say it was REALLY hard to just have one serving, but I was happy I did, since I had leftovers to take to work with me the next day.

How often do you cook pasta??

Also, have you tried Melrose Peppers before??

I am a member of Slow Food, which tries to bring people back to the table with the freshest foods, cooking with real ingredients, the more it comes from the earth, the better! Recently I joined that Group on Linked-In and a fellow member Meredith Greene posted a great recipe using her bumper crop of fresh tomatoes she grew in her back yard. It’s a great idea in general, but especially when you have so many tomatoes you don’t know what to do with them.

With her permission, this is her recipe for Slow Food 15 minute pasta sauce, which is so easy anyone can make this!

We’ve been harvesting scores of tomatoes each day from our twelve ‘bushes’ in our backyard organic garden. This morning I got up early and tried out a cooking method for tomato ’sauce’ that I found online: 15 minutes of cook-time.

The best part: due to the limited cooking time, the tomatoes still retained that fresh-from-the vine unique quality. This method yielded the freshest, most flavorful pasta sauce I’ve ever tasted, without exception.

Thanks Meredith for letting me share this with my readers!
Does anyone have a lot of tomatoes growing in their gardens yet?? If so, what do you do/make with all of them?

Also, a fellow blogger John, who has lost 100 pounds since January, is going to try to participate in 40 events by his 40th birthday! Stride Gum is having a contest and if you vote for John, he could win $10,000.00!!! The voting starts today, so please vote daily until August 9th!! Click HERE to vote!

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And thanks so much for everyone’s support and suggestions for me giving up diet soda! I’ve survived 24 hours so far! And, I did P90X last night for 50 minutes! (the first disc) Wahoo!!

The winners are:

Duo Dishes

Sophia of Burp and Slurp

Cassie from Foodie with a Little Thyme

Please e-mail me at slim-shoppin@comcast.net with your mailing address and I will get that in the mail ASAP!

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While reading this months Women’s Health magazine, there was an article talking about how to change up what veggies you eat, and one of them was…

Parsnips!! Did you know that parsnips have 7 grams of fiber per cup? They also have a lot of Vitamin C and folate PLUS 40% of Vitamin K which is a hard to get nutrient that researchers believe can improve bone health and control blood sugar.

A recipe they suggested was making parsnip cakes.

Ingredients:

1 pound peeled and grated parsnips
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
3 eggs
1/4 fat free milk
Season to taste with pepper, salt and nutmeg

Directions:

Combine all the ingredients and spoon each pancake onto a skillet lightly coated with vegetable oil. Brown on both sides.

Another suggestion for adding parsnips into your diet is to use them like carrots, such as in stir fry’s or in salads.

Have you tried parsnips before??

Check out Christina’s blog and wish her a Happy Birthday, PLUS she has a great give-a-way!!!

Thanks to everyone who left a comment!

Errign, I will contact you to get your address.

Do you know what this is? Neither did I. When I was grocery shopping over the weekend, there was a big pile of prickly pear fruits and I had never seen them before in my life! I asked the produce person (who looked like he was about 16) what they were. He showed me the ones that were ripe, he said just peel it and you can eat the whole inside, seeds and all!

So I brought some home and I peeled it, cut them into slices and my kids and I tried them. They taste wonderful! Not too sweet, but very flavorful. It kind of reminded me of pomegranates.

So, of course, I had to do research on it since I didn’t know what it was. It comes from the prickly pear cactus plant which looks like this:

Apparently the prickly pear cactus has been a staple of the Mexican and Central American diet for thousands of years. In the US it has been gaining popularity as an exotic, gourmet and HEALTHY addition to one’s diet. Now I was definitely interested in the healthy part. The Aztecs and Incas revere the cactus pear as a medicinal fruit.

These are all the health benefits:

Known to reduce cholesterol
Helps reduce gastrointestinal problems
Helps with digestion
Fiber Rich
Safe for diabetics – low glycemic food
Contain 8 out of nine essential amino acids
High in Omega 3’s and 6’s

1 cup of prickly pear fruit is only 61 calories and 5 grams of fiber!!

After reading even more about the pear, it turns out you can eat the the cactus part as well. That part (or pad of the cactus) is called the Nopal is treated like a vegetable. The inside of the prickly pear (called tuna) is treated like a fruit.

Most prickly pears at the store have had the prickly part removed, so you can handle them with your hands.

Boiled nopals are used in making salsa, you can add them to soup or a salad or omelet. You can grill it and coat it with salt and pepper and a little olive oil. They are ready when they are browned and soft.

The inside fruit can be eaten as is. You CAN eat the seeds, but don’t chew the seeds, (it doesn’t taste good if you chew the seeds) you can swallow them whole. You can also make prickly pear jam, jelly, or sorbet!

For further reading, check out these links:

www.nopaltrade.com

Nutrition Data

Desert USA

Also check out recipes for this fantastic fruit at Cooks.com

Has anyone else tried this fruit before??