Arancini- Italian Rice Balls

This was one of my favorite recipes when I was a kid; my parents would buy them from the Italian store! We would eat them with our hands as a snack. These are also great with tomato sauce on top as part of a larger meal, or you can make them small and serve them as an appetizer. They are so delicious and are both kid friendly and impressive for an adult dinner!

Spicy Lemongrass Thai Rice

Jesse requested a rice recipe last weekend. He is away for a few weeks this summer working on his masters and has been subject to bad college cafeteria food; I told him when he came back to visit I would make him whatever he wanted. Apparently the dining hall doesn’t have any “fresh food” or “vegetarian options” and “all their salad dressings are nasty.” Lucky for him I made a ton of food as usual and sent him back with leftovers!

Roasted Pepper Risotto

Here’s an easy risotto recipe that has a lot of flavor and color! We roasted the peppers ourselves, but you could easily use roasted red peppers from a jar or can to cut down on preparation time. It takes about an hour to cook, but most of that time is just the rice sitting on the stove top, so you can spend time doing other things while the meal is cooking! We made a lot of risotto so we would have leftovers to make rice balls with. For two people you would want half of this recipe.

Tofu Satay with Peanut Sauce and Pickled Vegetables

We’ve been wanting to make this FOREVER and I finally got the stuff together to do it the other day. It’s a great complete meal but it’s not an authentic Southeast-Asian satay seeing as how we didn’t grill it or even use skewers. We did marinade the tofu in a pretty typical marinade and serve with the sauces and accompaniments you would see in a Thai restaurant. This makes plenty of food and the prep can be done ahead of time; I did the pickled vegetables the night before so they could really soak up the flavor, and you could do the same with the tofu!

Lemon Vanilla Cupcakes with Whipped Cream Cheese Icing

We meant to make strawberry cupcakes, but I procrastinated a little bit and the strawberries started to go bad– oops. I still wanted to make cupcakes, though, so I improvised big time and decided to use some lemons we had kicking around. These came out great– they are dense but moist, and the lemon gives them a great kick. The frosting, though, is the best part; it has the consistency of whipped cream but it tastes like cream cheese. I really heaped on the frosting because it’s so good; this recipe will give you the right proportions to give each cupcake a generous amount of frosting!

Tempeh Salad Flatbreads

We made these in the style of a chicken or tuna salad; the juxtaposition of warm flatbread and cold salad is really great. These are perfect for summer and really easy to pack for a picnic lunch. As usual, the recipe makes a ton, so we brought some to Herbie while he was working at Beaux Arts down the street.

Double Layer Chocolate and Peanut Butter Fudge

I know I shouldn’t admit this, but I have been eating pieces of this fudge for breakfast. It’s just so good, I can’t help it. The hardest part about this recipe was figuring out the proportions of sugar to peanut butter, etc. but that’s all done now, so enjoy this easy fudge! Just a warning, you will either need to do a lot of whisking, or get an electric blender for the peanut butter fudge, so I suggest tracking down an electric blender/mixer/food processor.

Lemon Bars with Blueberry Balsamic Reduction

These are so good– flaky pastry, tart lemon, oozy blueberry. Deceptively easy to make, too, and perfect for summer! We just slopped on the blueberry sauce, but if you were feeling creative, I’m sure these could be decorated even more beautifully.

Oreo Suprise Cupcakes

We had a porch sale this weekend with Ryan and Megan and needed some baked goods for weekend fuel. Meg and I wanted to do cupcakes and these seemed like a great idea! We sold a few at the porch sale, but kept most of them around for ourselves. Jesse likes his cold, but I like them warm! Also, these are really really easy. We cheated big time, but the results are impressive nonetheless.

Cheddar Cauliflower Bake

This is some serious Americana. Jesse and I both grew up eating relatively ethnic foods, (Hispanic and Italian) so I like to try something new every now and then and make a casserole. This one is really cheesy and good, but it’s definitely a side dish, not a main, or you might be in cheese overload.