Marinara Veggie Pasta

Date of Completion: St. Patrick's Day 3/17/10
Recipe (for 6-7 people):
Pasta
12 oz. whole wheat spaghetti pasta
1 green bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
2 bunches of scallions, chopped finely
2-3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 white onion, chopped
2 tbsp. grapeseed oil
1 jar marinara sauce
salt and pepper to taste

Bring salted water to a boil. Add pasta until al dente, drain. Heat oil in pan, add garlic first. When garlic is fragrant, add other vegetables until tender. Pour in marinara sauce and simmer. Toss in cooked pasta and mix. Toss in raw spinach leaves to wilt.

Salad: Trader Joe's spinach, cranberry, blue cheese and raspberry vinaigrette, all in a bag!

After a leisurely beach bike ride, we stopped by my place to use up all the veggies that needed cooking. It was an easy recipe for a weeknight, healthy, and tasty.

TJ's Trail Mix

No, I did not invent a new trail mix but with a little improvisation with Trader Joe's products, I created an addicting new snack great to take to school. Starting off with the basic Omega 3 Trail Mix, I also break a 100 calorie dark chocolate bar into small pieces and top it off with Roasted Plantain Chips. Yum! When I get my camera back, a scintillating picture will be here.

What inspired this mix was a number of factors: the lack of healthy foods at the student store (my only orders are Doritos and/or a Strawberry milk popsicle from Helados, a Mexican brand - which is really quite delicious), a ridculously early lunch time (and lacking self restraint to ration food throughout the day), and bringing only 1-2 fruits a day at most which doesn't fill me up. Most days I go for about 5-6 hours without any food, and I often come home feeling like there's hungry black hole in my stomach, needing to be fed. It has on multiple occasions, kept me from going to the gym after work because of exhaustion/pigging out at home.

But now, with the flavorful morsels of cranberries, pine nuts, almonds, pecans, chocolate bits and roasted plantains rolled into one, combines the needed heaviness of the nuts with the chocolate endorphins and addicting plantain chips (infinitely better than potato chips)... the sweet, sour, crunchy wholesomeness, hunger can be satiated! With much less guilt.

Friday Night Delights

Welcome! This is officially the start of a newly established cooking blog, started from three high school friends, who during a cliffside hike, decided to start a weekly cooking club. What began as a craving for Thai food (pad thai and curry) blossomed into an exciting endeavor for 3 recent college graduates united by a passion for good food, the art of cooking and appreciation for enjoying a long meal filled with lively conversation and perhaps a game of Taboo afterwards.

This blog is to keep a record of the recipes, including any modifications, and results of the meal. We hope over time we can make our way around the world with themed cooking nights. The disclaimer is that we do not claim to have invented any of these recipes, since they were gathered from other websites or cookbooks. We are compiling the recipes on this site so we could revisit any recipe or let friends try them out. We will acknowledge to the best of our abilities the source of the recipes.

With that said, onward to the recipes and good times!