Empadao de Arroz

In portuguese cooking, Empadão is something similar to a lasagna but made with mashed potatoes (mashed potatoes on top and bottom and cooked ground beef with tomato sauce in the middle).
On this recipe, I added some vegetables in the meat mix and substituted the mashed potatoes for some rice.
It was delicious and very moist. My little assistant loved it and ate a lot of it!

Salads

The summer has arrived (unofficially) and time for salads is here!
Salads are healthy, lightly, refreshing, and very low in calories and it seems the perfect meal to have once the weather starts warming up. The tomatoes are starting to taste really good, but I also try to have a variety of different greens so that the salads are somehow different every night.

Cherry tomatoes:

Spinach salad with fruit and almonds:

Baby lettuce, spinach, cucumber, tomatoes, and cheese:

Lettuce, pea sprouts, cucumbers, and carrots:

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

This has been my favorite cookie of my whole american life.
I haven't made these in a very long time and I usually use a portuguese recipe that is very simple and uses much less sugar and fat than the well known cookies here.
The other day, as a treat to my assistant, I decided to make the actual american recipe. They were chewy and moist and as sweet as they are known for.
I was disappointed to realize my assistant is not crazy about these cookies and got tired of them a day later and preferred his trusted animal crackers to one of these.
(of course, I ate them all - this is how I gain weight!)

Baked Fish

We have one friend that is a dedicated fisherman. When I say dedicated, I mean, he's been known to drag the whole family out of the house at 3am to go fishing. But the rest of the family goes with it and they all have a great time.
We have gone fishing with them couple times (not at 3 o'clock in the morning!) but they never caught anything when we were with them, so we (and I mean, I) started teasing them and saying all the fish they say they fish, is all bought down the road at the fish market.
To prove me wrong, the other day, our friend caught a really big fish - a bass that was almost as long as his 3 y.o.. They took pictures of it and brought us some nice fillets of it. I cooked it with red onions, garlic, parsley, olive oil, and paprika. It was delicious.

Yogurt with berries

Berries are starting to appear in the markets and here's one of my favorite ways to use them. I buy the big plain yogurt containers and then like to add whatever is around to have a more natural flavor. To this one I added yellow sugar, that I brought from Portugal, with raspberries and blueberries.

Salmon with lemon

We were given 1 lemon that was smuggled on a plane from Italy. It was huge, the size of an orange, so I decided to use half of it to make with salmon.
I laid fresh dill and fresh lemon thyme on top of the salmon, sprinkled with sea salt and covered each piece with a slice of lemon. Drizzled all with olive oil and some lemon zest on top. It came out moist and juicy.
I served with corn on the cob, broccoli rabe, and roasted red peppers. So simple, so delicious. Definitely one of my favorite dinners.

Pork Loin with vegetables and mashed potatoes

During this time of the year, when we have one sunny day and 4 cloudy, cold, and rainy days, I try to get out of the house as much as possible as soon as I see the sun. The problem with that is we always come back inside too late to start any elaborate dinner. But since I already had this (luckily thin) pork loin out for me to cook, I challenged myself to cook it as fast I could.
I put it inside of a pan with butter and a touch of olive oil and let it cook on all sides. While cooking, I chopped onions to put inside, carrots, and zucchini. I added beer to start making some sauce and raisins to contrast with the bitterness of the beer. I let it cook for about 45 minutes and it was done.
On the side, I made mashed potatoes, to which I added broccoli for extra color and vitamins.
Little assistant loved it!

Stuffed Cabbage

The portuguese version of stuffed cabbage is made with fresh sausages. It is not a complicated recipe, yet it requires a little extra time than the quick half hour meals I usually make. It is a good dish to make on a cloudy weekend, I think, since this is a warm and comforting dish.
I start by giving a very quick boil on the leaves then after letting them cool off a minute, I roll the sausage. I bought italian sweet sausages and it worked very well.
I make a tomato sauce with onions, garlic, fresh tomatoes, and a tiny hot pepper (so it's not too hot for my assistant). I then add some of the water from the cabbage, salt and pepper, and place the stuffed cabbage inside. Let it cook on low heat covered. I served with rice and everyone loved it.

Spinach and presunto quiche

For a lighter dinner the other day, I made a quiche to go with the watercress soup I had made.
I love how quiche can be made with so many different type of ingredients to give it a different feel. I made this one with spinach, cheese, and presunto. And I used heavy cream as oppose to half-half. I think it comes out much better with heavy cream.
I follow my mom's portuguese recipe, but here is something very similar to what I make, except I use real butter on the dough (not shortening) and don't use cayenne pepper nor onions.
My assistant ate it pretty well.

Welcome to USA cookies

Grandma Cookie came back home after being away for 1 month in Italy. We welcomed her with these star cookies. They are basically sugar cookies made really thin with a layer of jelly in between before it bakes. It's a little tricky to put one layer of dough on top of the other, but it's so worth it!

For the neighbors that did not go away, we made the cookies with a flower shape.