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Natural Comfort Kitchen

Happy. Healthy. Homemade.

Quick and Easy Dinners

My best quick and easy recipes when you need to get dinner on the table fast. Most are healthy, too!

5 Ingredient Veggie Tofu Scramble

A healthy, make ahead breakfast to last all week.

It’s Sunday night, and I should be shooting a few pictures of my Fresh Direct order right now, but, thanks to some mildly serious snow and/or a confused driver, the delivery is running an hour late. Grocery delivery pointers: don’t schedule deliveries after dark if your house is hard to find. Last I checked, the driver is backtracking to find out just where he dropped off the order, since it wasn’t here or at any or our immediate neighbors’ houses.

Meanwhile, I wanted to start giving the recipes from last week’s grocery list their own blog posts, since the ones in the Google Sheet are “rough” outlines, and might not serve beginning cooks well. So we’ll start with breakfast!

If you honestly have tried and hate tofu, there’s probably not much I can do to convince you of the merits of a tofu scramble. But, if you have even the slightest taste for it, there are so many reasons to try this breakfast.
[Read more…]

Dinners for the Week before Vacation

There are so many good things going on just in the title of this post. One, I’ve bounced back from a really nasty cold/maybe the flu and am nearly cooking at full force again. It’s a marked improvement from last week’s diet of Boston Market mashed potatoes and Ritz crackers. Two, it’s vacation time! Steve and I are taking a little combo babymoon/first anniversary long weekend trip to Vermont, to a gorgeous, pet-friendly resort. Yep, that’s right, we’re allowing the pugs to infiltrate our romantic getaway. And in case you don’t follow my personal Instagram account, you also may be surprised to find out that, after a rough first dog experience and before adding a baby to the house, we acted like crazy people and adopted another pug. Blog world, meet Nugget (whose name may not be permanent):

Nugget in the sun

He and Clarence are getting along pretty well:

Pug pile

Although, Nugget’s an estimated six years old (he was found as a stray, so we can’t say for sure) and definitely has the old man attitude going on sometimes, like when Clarence wants to play, which is…always. My life is now listening to Clarence bark his head off at poor Nugget to get a little chase going.

BUT, this was not meant to be a pug post. It’s meant to explain how, during a pretty busy week of pug care, getting ready for vacation (i.e., doing 17 loads of laundry…per day), pregnancy, and house upkeep and decorating, I managed to make us (and a client-friend) good, comfort food, warm dinners every night. Except the night I must order pizza.
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Herbal Cherry Frozen Pops

On a whim, I grabbed a sucker from the little bin at the Trader Joe’s checkout line last week. Maybe the cashier thought I had a little one waiting at home (or it’s for the pug??), but really I had no shame as I politely asked permission, as a childless grownup, to take one.

That cherry sucker, or lollipop, for those of you confused by my vocabulary, was the best thing I’d tasted all week. I’m not sure HOW, save for artificial flavoring, they pack so much cherry flavor into a tiny piece of candy, but it left me with a craving for more, sans high fructose corn syrup.

Herbal cherry frozen pops--for happy taste buds AND a happy tummy!

Coincidentally, that day happened to be one of many in a stretch of 90-something and humid ones, so, at the next grocery store, I planned to snag a box of whole fruit cherry popsicles. Except there weren’t any. Just weird, unappealing flavors like lime and mango. I was disappointed, but not deterred. It took no time at all for me to get home and unpack the groceries, hop on my laptop, and start searching for cherry popsicle recipes. As a bonus, I’d get to use my newly acquired popsicle mold! A few pages down the Google results, something interesting caught my eye: the reputable Carla Hall’s recipe for frozen cherry pops, with a sugar syrup base infused with all kinds of stomach soothing ingredients. Kind of like an herbal tea blasted, yes, blasted, full of cherry flavor.
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One-Bowl Macadamia Butterscotch Cookies (Gluten Free)

Gluten free macadamia butterscotch cookies: chewy on the inside, so sturdy (no crumbling!), and made in ONE bowl!

Slowly but surely, or rather, cyclically, my breakfast planning is improving. Despite my love of breakfast foods, working from home, without any mandate to arrive for work at a specific time looking a specific way, leads to breakfast decision fatigue, complicating what could be a simple and healthy start to the day. Kind of like that sentence could be one of the longest and most confusing, but I think still grammatically correct, I’ve ever written. Lately, though, in spurts, I manage to portion out a few days of overnight oats, so that I just have to add almond milk for a super productive next morning.

It was on one of these prep nights that my eyes wandered to the back of a fresh bag of Trader Joe’s gluten free oats, to a recipe for–could it be?–an actually cohesive, chewy, and gluten free chocolate chip cookie. [Read more…]

10 Minute Dinner: Gnocchi and Gorgonzola Salad

Dinner in 10 minutes using a genius, no-boil technique to cook store bought gnocchi.

It’s been one of those weeks where I’m spinning what feels like 73 plates, and even this food blogger ain’t got no time to plan dinner. I’ve been improvising, and while I did create a weekly meal plan spreadsheet, as I’ve done every week for the last two years, I’m filling it in as I go. My strategy has been this: pick one or two main pantry/fridge staples to use up, and work around them. Here’s what the week in dinners looked like:

  • Dinner party leftovers of vegan Spanish potatoes, grilled steak and veggies, and chimichurri sauce
  • Delivery veggie pizza
  • Grilled veggie and steak tostadas with creamy black beans and peach salsa
  • Tomato salad with pasta and garbanzo beans added
  • And…toasted gnocchi and copious amounts of blue cheese over arugula

Dinner in 10 minutes using a genius, no-boil technique to cook store bought gnocchi

Last night was not looking promising, and I thought we would end up with takeout. [Read more…]

Spanish Tomato Salad with Almond Herb Dressing

All winter (okay, not all winter) I preach my hatred of salads, then come summertime, it’s salad everywhere. Pasta salad, potato salad, and now? TOMATO salad! Spanish tomato salad to be precise.

Vegetarian Spanish tomato salad with almond-herb dressing...perfect for a break from the usual caprese treatement.

I know caprese-style summer salads of fresh tomatoes and burrata and a few basil leaves and a little glug of olive oil are all the rage, but they have never been my thing. Slowly growing on me, maybe, but I’ve always found mozzarella in any form much too mild for my taste buds.

Vegetarian Spanish tomato salad with almond-herb dressing...perfect for a break from the usual caprese treatement.

Plus, when you’re planning dinner around a Spanish theme (that you didn’t tell your guests about), the caprese action isn’t going to work. We must stick to the theme! I realized last week, though, I have no idea if the Spaniards even eat salads. [Read more…]

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