Spinach Smoothie Sunday

I'm kind of burnt out on the sweets, as in baked good sweets, so today I thought I would try something new and healthy - a spinach smoothie.

I'm sure you can find gobs of recipes on the internet, but I just kind of made mine up as I went along.

I used about 3 cups (loose, not packed) spinach, almond milk, French vanilla yogurt, flax seed, and frozen strawberries and blended it all up into one big glass of green and healthy deliciousness! It didn't at all taste like spincah and totally tasted like strawberry yogurt yumminess. Hooray! I discovered yet another way to incorporate greens into my eating habits!

P.S. A banana is shown in the photos of ingredients I used, however I didn't use a banana because I froze it and gee, what do you know? Frozen bananas can't be peeled. Well, I'm sure they can, but I didn't feel like wasting my time trying to peel it. Anyhow, I don't even like bananas, so no big whoop.

Squid Ink Linguine

Sometimes you just want to have a simple meal, but with a smidgey of pizzazz-a-matazz.

What's easier than a pasta dish? Spaghetti itself is easy enough, but for an ultra simple, ultra yummy dish, nothing is easier than linguine aglio e olio (with garlic and oil.) As yummy as it is, I wanted to oomph up the pizzazz factor by using squid ink pasta, as opposed to a standard spaghetti or linguine. Since I am totally obsessed with all things delicious at Ohio City Pasta (http://www.ohiocitypasta.com/), I traipsed to the always wonderful West Side Market (http://www.westsidemarket.org/) and among other things, picked up some squid ink pasta. Oh how pretty it was! (And you know how much pretty counts!) Being someone who does not like the taste of fish or seafood at all, I asked the dude at Ohio City Pasta what it tasted like and he assured me it tasted a little salty and not fish-like at all. SOLD! I bought some and brought it home to my already Ohio City Pasta stocked refrigerator. Hmmmm, what should I do with it? A typical red sauce wouldn't do the pretty black color of the pasta justice. A cream sauce of some sort would look nice with the color of the pasta, but ultimately, I wanted the pasta itself to be the visual centerpiece of the dish, so I decided on a simple aglio e olio preparation.Linguine with aglio e olio is simple enough to prepare from a recipe in your head, but if you need help, there are gobs of recipes out there. I found a fairly highly rated and simple recipe on the Food Network site (www.foodnetwork.com/recipes-food-network-kitchens/spaghetti-with-oil-and-garlic-aglio-et-olio-recipe/index.html)

I had a friend over and he loved the taste of the dish and the novelty of the squid ink pasta.

Mangiamo!

Seriously?

Ok, I so totally could not have my first post of this wonderful BRAND SPANKIN' NEW year be about Jiffy mix blueberry muffins and some pasta with lemon-garlicky goodness, sooooooooooo...

...I poked around the internet and happened upon a recipe for what sounds like a deliciously fabulous recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Brownies. Hellllllllllllllllo, yummy! I just got finished baking them (and also got my first oven injury of 2011; a slight burn to the left lower pinkie. WAH WAH WAHHHHHHHHHH! ;) )and let me tell you, they smell D-I-V-I-N-E!! (And I tasted both the batters, the chocolate and the peanut butter part and HOLY PEANUT BUTTER CUP, BATMAN! I wanted to set the bowls of batter on the floor and lap it up like a hungry kitteh laps up some warm milk on a cold winter's night! I'm waiting for them to cool off and I will report on how they taste later, as well as post pics. Until then, my friends...
P.S.
I totally got the recipe from Joy the Baker, at joythebaker.com. Thank you sooooooooooo much for making this recipe public!!

Edited to add: the brownies turned out amaaaaaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzzzzingly delicious!! Everyone loved them. So rich! So dense! So chocolatey! So peanut-buttery good! Pictures to come, once I figure out why I can't get my pics from my camera to my laptop...