Spinach Salad Recipe with Bacon and Feta

I don't eat much bacon, but occasionally I splurge on something like this Spinach Salad with Bacon and Feta.

(Updated with better photos and added to Recipe Favorites in February 2012.) I think spinach salad is a beautiful thing. Not only does it taste fantastic, but according to The World's Healthiest Foods "Calorie for calorie, leafy green vegetables like spinach provide more nutrients than any other food."  Maybe that's why I don't feel too guilty for the tiny bit of bacon in this Spinach Salad with Bacon and Feta, even though I normally don't eat much bacon.   The salad I made above for a dinner with my niece, her husband, and a friend had just one strip of pre-cooked bacon per serving.  We crisped the bacon in a pan and then blotted as much fat as we possibly could with a paper towel. Since the pre-cooked bacon only has three grams of fat per strip to begin with, I'm sure there wasn't more than a gram of fat left in the bacon we each consumed, a number I'm not too worried about. 

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Kalyn's Kitchen Picks: Onion Goggles

No more tears or burning eyes when you peel onions!

I confess that for most of my life I was a bit of an onion-chopping snob.  My eyes never seemed to bother me when I chopped onions and I figured anyone who was bothered by the onion fumes had to be a bit of a wimp.  It wasn't until late last year when I had eye surgery and no longer needed contact lenses that I realized that it was the contacts that kept the onion fumes out of my eyes all those years!  Suddenly I could hardly chop an onion without my eyes burning and stinging.  What is a food blogger to do?

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Recipe for Creole-Spiced Rice and Kale

A delicious rice seasoned with Creole seasoning and cooked with chopped kale.

I've been slightly infatuated with kale for a few years now, so when I see a recipe that uses kale in a way that's new to me, I'm always excited to try it.  I found this recipe for Spicy Rice and Kale in an old Bon Appetit magazine from February 1999 (and back in those days before kale entered my life I probably wouldn't have given it a second look.)  Finding old food trends that I have just caught up with is one reason the bookshelves in my office have piles of old cooking magazines arranged by month! This find from the past turned out to be one of those side dishes that I could have happily eaten a big bowl of for my entire meal, and it's so nutritious and easy to make that I think it's a perfect Meatless Monday dish.

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Black Bean and Beef Chili Recipe with Cilantro, Lime, and Avocado Salsa

The salsa with cilantro, red onion, avocado, and lime really puts this black bean chili over the top!

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  This Black Bean and Beef Chili with Cilantro, Lime, and Avocado Salsa is something I've made over and over since I first posted it in 2008.  I made it again this year for our family Superbowl party and decided to take some step-by-step photos; enjoy!)

Chili is a great party food, as well as something that's nice to have in the freezer for quick dinners.  For anyone not familiar with the cuisine of the Southwestern United States, the stew-like dish called Chili may be a bit puzzling. Yes, it does usually contain chiles (small red or green hot peppers) as well as chile powder (powdered dried chiles). If the Chili has meat it could be beef, pork, chicken, or turkey, but Chili can be a vegetarian dish. There are Chili recipes with or without beans, but if you use beans, many types will work, including red beans, black beans, white beans, pinto beans, and more. Besides chiles, meat and possibly beans, most Chili recipes include tomatoes and onions.

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Recipe for Effie's Easy and Amazing Cottage Cheese Salad with Za'atar

This Cottage Cheese Salad with Za'atar was one of those must-make-again recipes from the first bite!

Every now and then I try a recipe and from the very first bite I know it's something that I'm going to be making over and over again.  When Jake and I tried this Easy Cottage Cheese Salad with Za'atar, we couldn't stop exclaiming over how fantastic it was.  But just as fun as the salad itself is the story of how I happened to be making Effie's amazing salad!

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Recipe for Spaghetti Squash and Chard Gratin

Spaghetti Squash and Chard, mixed together in a cheesy gratin.

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.  This Spaghetti Squash and Chard Gratin from 2009 is one of my favorite ways to cook spaghetti squash.)

Besides writing this blog, I also write about food twice a week for BlogHer.com, and recently I wrote about spaghetti squash. Of course that made me think about cooking some of my own spaghetti squash from the garden. I found great-sounding spaghetti squash recipes for the BlogHer post, but the one that inspired this recipe was Spaghetti Squash Gratin from Daily Unadventures in Cooking. Adding the chard was one of those "wonder how it would work?" experiments, but really liked the combination of spaghetti squash and chard in this cheesy gratin.

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Recipe for Slow Cooker Kielbasa and White Bean Stew with Tomatoes and Spinach

A tasty stew that starts with dried beans cooked all day in the slow cooker!

I wasn't really planning to post this recipe so soon, but then I realized it would be fun to follow the announcement of my new slow cooker site with a slow cooker recipe on Kalyn's Kitchen!  And this recipe will become a recipe template for many more dishes in the future, since the recipe starts with dried beans that are cooked with broth, onions, tomatoes, and spices for 8-10 hours in the slow cooker until the beans are creamy and soft.  I had always heard that tomatoes will cause beans not to soften, but apparently a long cooking time will overcome that, because the beans in this dish were amazing.  I added the sausage at the very beginning with the beans, but next time if I was home I'd probably add that halfway through the cooking time so the sausage was a little firmer.  Then stir in come chopped spinach at the end and you have a delicious dinner.

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Introducing Slow Cooker from Scratch

Slow Cooker from Scratch is my new website dedicated to sharing "from-scratch" slow cooker recipes!

For a couple of months now I've been hard at work on a new website, which is officially launching today!  Slow Cooker from Scratch is my new site dedicated to sharing recipes from Kalyn's Kitchen and other fantastic food blogs who use the slow cooker to make tasty "from-scratch" meals.  Every day, Slow Cooker from Scratch will introduce a slow cooker recipe with a photo, my description of the recipe, and a link to find the recipe on the original site if it looks like something you might want to try.

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Chicken Barley Soup Recipe

It may not be that creative, but Chicken Barley Soup is still one of my all-time favorites.

(First posted in 2006; updated with new photos and better instructions and added to Recipe Favorites February 2012.)  It's getting cold in Utah, which always puts me the mood for soup.  I love soup with barley, and there's  a very similar recipe using leftover turkey on the blog, as well as a recipe for Mushroom Barley Soup with Ham and Leeks that's similar too.  This recipe may be my favorite barley soup though, because you can start with a couple of chicken breasts, an onion, some carrots, some celery, and some barley and a little over an hour later you have a delicious soup.

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Recipe for Spicy Vegan Black Bean Soup with Cilantro and Green Tabasco

This vegan black bean soup is flavorful and just spicy enough to be interesting.

I love black beans, and I love black bean soups, but this Spicy Vegan Black Bean Soup may be the best soup with black beans I've ever made.  Interestingly, it started out as a soup with ham, but when my nephew Jake and I tried it that way we both agreed that the spiciness and other flavors would come through better without the ham.  The next time we cooked we made the soup again, using vegetable broth to keep it vegan, and both of us preferred the vegan version.  I do think cilantro is a pretty important part of the flavor profile here, so if you're a cilantro hater this soup may not be for you, but if you like black beans, jalapenos, cumin, and cilantro, give this soup a try!

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Saturday Snapshots: Superbowl Party Food from Superbowl 2012

My sister Pam brought Ham and Dill Pickle Appetizer Bites for the Superbowl party!

Every year the Denny family has a big Superbowl party at my brother Mark's house, and for the last few years I've had fun taking photos of the food people bring to celebrate the big game.  This year I have a new Canon Speedlite 430EX II Flash that should have made the photos better than ever, except this was only my second time using the flash, and obviously I don't quite have it down yet.  But no worries because Friday Night Photos and Saturday Snapshots are about me having fun with my camera, taking pictures that are a bit out of my comfort zone.  I'm not a big football fan but I always have fun at the annual Superbowl party; hope you enjoy seeing what was on the menu this year.

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Recipe for Peperoncini Chopped Salad with Romaine, Red Bell Pepper, and Feta

This delicious chopped salad has red bell peppers, sliced peperoncini, and feta.

(For Phase One Fridays I highlight Phase One recipes from the past that have been my personal favorites.   This chopped salad with romaine lettuce, red bell pepper strips, sliced peperoncini, Feta cheese, and a dressing flavored with peperoncini brine is something I've made many times for Denny family parties since it first appeared on the blog in early 2010.)

Normally I have a routine where I try recipes, edit the photos, and add them to the list to be featured for the blog, but this salad with sliced Peperoncini, romaine, thinly sliced red bell pepper, and feta just cut right to the front of the line. The salad was a big hit when I made it for brunch at my sister Sandee's house, and I've made it twice since then for myself. What makes the flavors really rock in the salad (besides the slices of Peperoncini) is the addition of one tablespoon of Peperoncini brine to the dressing. If you like Peperoncini when you get them added to a restaurant salad, you'll definitely like this salad.

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Turkey Pesto Meatloaf Recipe with Tomato Sauce

A little basil pesto in this turkey meatloaf really bumps up the flavor!

I'm a huge fan of basil pesto, so this year when my garden had lots of basil I went into pesto-making overdrive.  Now I have an abundance of Basil Pesto with Lemon in my freezer, so I've been pondering new ways to use pesto.  Pesto ideas had been swirling around in my head for a few days when I had the thought of adding some pesto to turkey meatloaf to bump up the flavor.  Of course it's hard to come up with a recipe that someone hasn't thought of already, and when I searched for "turkey pesto meatloaf" I found that quite a few other people had the same idea.  The recipe here was adapted from Turkey Pesto Meatloaf at Culinate, although I did make quite a few changes for the version I ended up with.  My Turkey Pesto Meatloaf has a generous amount of pesto, and I used tomato sauce mixed with a little balsamic vinegar to top the meatloaf, a combination that went well with the pesto.  I loved this variation on meatloaf; hope other people will enjoy it too.

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Slow Cooker Recipe for Vegan Black Garbanzo Bean Curry

This was my first time cooking with black garbanzo beans, and I loved them in this slow cooker curry.

For my birthday in December my blogging and real-life friend Lydia sent me some black garbanzo beans, an ingredient I had never seen before I got them in the mail.  I was intrigued and immediately started looking on the internet and in cookbooks for ideas of how to cook this type of bean.  I settled on a recipe from The Indian Slow Cooker where the unsoaked beans were put in the CrockPot and cooked on high for 9 hours with water and a ground mixture of seasonings and Indian spices.  (Yes, that is supposed to say 9 hours on high.)  The final recipe I ended up was delicious but may not be all that authentic, because when I tasted the mixture after 9 hours it was a bit spicy for my tastebuds, so I added a can of tomatoes and some green onions and simmered it an hour more.  Cilantro and a little lemon juice is stirred in at the end.  I loved the chewy texture and the savory, almost nutty flavor of the black garbanzo beans.  

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Easy Recipe for Ham and Dill Pickle Appetizer Bites

It was my sister Pam who introduced our family to these Ham and Dill Pickle Appetizer Bites.

(Introducing a new feature called Phase One Fridays!   So many people commented on how they've enjoyed seeing the favorite Phase One recipes I featured during January that I've decided to start spotlighting a favorite Phase One Recipe every Friday.  Other types of featured posts that used to appear on Friday will now be posted occasionally on Saturday.  This Friday I'm sharing a Phase One recipe from a year ago that's a huge favorite at the Denny Family Superbowl parties.  Enjoy!)

A few days ago I suggested Hummus and Cucumber Appetizer Bites for a diet-friendly Super Bowl party offering, and these Ham and Dill Pickle Bites are another option if you're looking for something that's a bit lighter for game-day fare.  My sister Pam first had these ham and dill pickle bites as a store sample, and she's been making them ever since for Denny family parties, where even the non dieters will chow down on them.  If you'd like to make these dairy-free and even lower in calories, you can skip the cream cheese.  When I made these lots of other ideas popped into my head, so check after the main recipe for more options  (If you have other good ideas for variations, please share in the comments!)

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Slow Cooker Recipe for Beef and Refried Bean Chili with Salsa and Lime

A slightly-spicy Phase One Chili with beef, two kinds of beans, refried beans, salsa, and lime juice

I made this tasty chili several weeks ago and then today I realized that if anyone wanted to make this easy slow-cooker chili for a Superbowl party, I better get it posted.  Not that there is a shortage of good chili recipes on the blog, with a few of them having made an appearance at Denny family Superbowl parties in the past!  What was fun about this recipe was the way it uses a can of refried beans to thicken the chili, and also the addition of salsa.  There's also a healthy amount of lime juice, and I'd serve this with slices of lime so lime lovers (like me) can squeeze even more lime into their chili!

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South Beach Diet Phase One Recipes Round-Up for January 2012 (Low-Glycemic Recipes)

How could I choose just one favorite Phase One Recipes from a Month of Daily Phase One recipes?  Pictured is Tuna Salad Lettuce Wraps with Capers and Tomatoes, Ham and Cauliflower Casserole Au Gratin, Vegan Heart of Palm and Avocado Salad with Lime, Green Onion, and Cilantro, and Quick Sriracha Beef Lettuce Wraps.

We just finished a Month of Daily Phase One recipes, which means 31 delicious Phase One recipes have been featured on the blog this month!  That alone guarantees that this will be a big round-up of Phase One recipes, and you can bet plenty of other bloggers were also featuring diet-friendly recipes during January as well.  I always post only Phase One recipes during January, but this was the first year I committed to doing a Phase One recipe every day, and truthfully it was a lot of fun.  I also heard from lots of people who loved seeing the Phase One recipes I spotlight from past years, which made me think maybe that's something I'll do a little more often, maybe as a Friday night feature.

(You can use the label Low-Glycemic Recipe Round-Ups to see all the posts like this one.)

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