The Adventures of Lilli: On Our Plates

I've got about five million tabs open in Safari right now of recipes I need to file and then Pin on Pinterest to keep track of. I think some combo of Ziplist and Pinterest may end up being the best way for me to keep track of everything we make, particularly since we don't repeat often (mostly because I can't find the recipe or the review of what we thought of it!) Mixing in here with some pictures Brent took of Lilli at the park "feeding" the very unhungry ducks on Saturday.

Slow Cooker BBQ Chicken - this was really pretty good and easy. Not much to it and a great and fast meal to come home to on a weeknight. I'm sure there are better sauce recipes out there, but this was pretty good.

Marinated Spicy Pork Chops - This one used up some local pork chops from the CSA we were in last summer. We marinated overnight and the key is to not overcook them. We're not huge pork fans but this was pretty good. Brent made this homemade mac n cheese along with it (because we didn't have the box stuff). We were out of the cheddar cheese soup but I had a nacho cheese soup can in the pantry and that gave it a nice spice. However it was way too "mixed" for Lilli and I don't think she even tried it.

For St Patrick's Day, I made this Green Monster Smoothie. The spinach in it makes it green, and I just don't think I could get past it. It just had a really bland taste. We did add a little sugar and that helped, but it was missing something. We had it alongside Racheal Ray's Smoky Turkey Shepherd's Pie which is always delicious. We don't make it a ton because it's fairly involved (and always takes us longer than 30 mins), but sometimes instead of making the potatoes from scratch we'll cheat and use a mix for that part.

Quinoa is sort of a new food for us, though it's been around a while. It's packed with all kinds of healthiness and it tastes delicious. We tried this spinach and fruit quinoa salad and all really liked it. I'm just not a huge grapefruit person, so I think in the future I could sub that out for oranges though. I accidentally made about three times too much quinoa, so I also found this recipe for another fruit infused quinoa salad on Pinterest and made it. In some ways I liked it better, though it's totally a different thing altogether. The dressing was just okay, but I loved the blueberries, mango and other things mixed together with the quinoa.

When we had friends over for dinner last week we made an "upscale" Mexican fiesta. We cooked pork carnitas in the crock pot all day. That's one of our fave recipes and it's so incredibly easy and flavorful. We serve with corn tortillas, rice, pico, cheese, sour cream, lettuce and avocado. We made the Cilantro Rice to go along with it, and it was SO good (and also easy). And then I also served a black bean, tomato, cucumber salad to go alongside it. We mixed that in with the tacos and it was great, and would also probably be really good with just chips to dip it in. Everything tasted so fresh, was easy to prepare, and literally once we got home from work we were ready to serve dinner in less than thirty minutes.

We had a big to-do at church last Sunday and had various dish assignments. One of mine was cole slaw, which is really not something I eat or enjoy (or have ever made). I will eat it, but I'm not a huge mayo person so it's just not my thing. I had found a great apple based cole slaw but our awful grocery store didn't have the type of cabbage it called for. So we went with a fairly traditional recipe. I never tried it but Brent said it was good. I also had a dessert assignment, which is much more my thing! I was trying to do something fairly simple but really good and then remembered it had been a while since we had made Mexican Chocolate Cake. It's very fast to make and the kick of cayenne pepper adds a great spicy flavor to it. Of course it looks like any other traditional chocolate cake so some people probably get surprised by it! But it's seriously so delicious.