Pasta & Pizza | Be Nutritious

Asian Miso Noodles

A while ago I showed here a recipe for a kid friendly Peanut Butter Pasta. This recipe is very similar however I upgraded it slightly by adding miso. Asian people use miso not only to prepare famous miso soup but also as a dressing, marinade and an ingredient in many sauces. Miso paste is not only very tasty but also very healthy. It is made from fermented rice or soybeans and the fermentation process is what makes it so healthy. During fermentation millions of gut friendly bacteria are able to grow inside and when we consume fermented food, those little guys travel to our intestines where they work by improving our digestion, boosting our immunity and produce some very important for our health vitamins (biotin and vit K).

That is exactly why we should consume more fermented foods and consuming miso completely raw, uncooked is even better because cooking process kills those friendly bacteria and we do not get any benefit.

Ingredients (2 servings):

2 bunches Asian wheat or Soba noodles

1 cup favorite frozen stir-fry mix vegetables

2 Tbsp miso paste (I used white miso)

1 Tbsp low-sodium soy sauce

1 Tbsp peanut butter (Tahini works great too)

1/4 cup water

2 Tbsp chopped peanuts

2 sliced scallions

Cook noodles according to a package instructions.
During last 2 min of cooking, add frozen stir-fry vegetables, bring to a boil and blanch for 1 min.
Drain pasta and vegetables and cool under cold running water.
In a bowl mix together miso, soy sauce, peanut butter and water.
Place noodles in a big bowl. Pour sauce and mix so it is distributed evenly.
Sprinkle with chopped peanuts and scallions.
Serve cold (great to take in a lunchbox)

Healthier Lasagna with Turkey, Mushrooms and Eggplant

Lasagna usually isn’t regarded as a healthy food but I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t try to make it healthy so I used lean ground turkey instead of beef, low fat ricotta cheese which has half of the calories of regular ricotta and plenty of vegetables such as eggplant and mushrooms. I didn’t skimp on cheese though, in the end I’m a cheesy girl and eat cheese with everything. Other than cheese you won’t find fat in my lasagna but it doesn’t mean that it has no flavor. Oh no, it’s as flavorful as typical bolognese lasagna. And in just one portion you get full serving of vegetables. Isn’t that just fabulous?

Ingredients:

(makes 8 regular portions or 6 for very hungry and greedy like me)

1 standard size lasagna pan
1 box of lasagna sheets
1 pound of lean ground turkey
1 medium sized eggplant
8 oz mushrooms (I used baby bella)
1 medium onion
3 garlic cloves
15 oz box of low fat ricotta cheese
1 egg
2 Tbsp chopped parsley
1 Tbsp italian seasoning
24 oz jar of marinara sauce
1 cup + 1/4 cup of parmesan to sprinkle on a top
2 cups of shredded mozzarella cheese (1 cup if you want to make it extremely low fat)
Salt and pepper
2 Tbsp olive oil

Start with peeling the eggplant and slicing it into rounds. Place on a kitchen towels, sprinkle with salt and let ir rest for 30 min to get rid of the bitter flavor.
Meanwhile chop the onion, garlic and slice the mushrooms.
Mix ricotta cheese with 1 egg, 1 cup parmesan, parsley and salt and pepper.
After 30 min wash the eggplant of the excess salt, dry it with kitchen towels and chop into small cubes.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Boil lasagna noodles for roughly 2-3 min. I used boil free noodles but I don’t believe in boil-free so I boiled it a little bit. Just make sure that they wont stick especially after you’ll drain them under cold running water in the colander. Don’t let them just sit in the colander, separate them right away or they will stick together and you won’t be able to separate them (yes that happened to me). Also even though it might seem like a lot, it’s better to use whole box just in case.
Heat the oil in a large skillet, add onion, garlic, mushrooms and eggplant. Season with salt and Italian seasoning and let it cook on a medium heat for 10 min stirring occasionally.
Add turkey and separate with the fork to prevent large clumps of meat. We don’t want turkey meatballs.
Cook turkey just until no longer pink and add whole jar of marinara sauce. You can also add half cup water to thin the sauce as I did. Let it cook 2 min more.
Spread about 1/2 cup of the sauce on the bottom of the lasagna pan. Place the noodles. Evenly spread half of the ricotta cheese mixture on the top and follow with 1/3 of the sauce.
Cover with lasagna noodles and again spread the remaining half of the ricotta mixture. Follow with another 1/3 of the sauce and top with lasagna noodles.
On the top part just spread the remaining 1/3 of the sauce, sprinkle mozzarella cheese evenly and top with remaining 1/4 cup of the parmesan.
Cover with aluminum foil and bake 30 min. After 30 min remove the aluminum foil and bake additional 15 min.
Take out of the oven and let it rest about 15 min before cutting and serving.

And that’s how it looked when it came out of the oven.

Salmon Farfalle with Sambuca

This pasta is probably my favorite pasta dish at the moment. Well maybe except angel hair with tomato sauce, which always is unbeatable. First of all salmon is not very frequent addition to pasta and I have no clue why because those two things together are a perfect match. Also Sambuca used instead of white wine adds fantastic, new and intriguing flavor. Sambuca, if you’re not aware, is an anisette flavored Italian liquor. It’s sweet and has a strong anisette taste but when cooked with butter, salmon and tomatoes becomes very mellow yet distinctive. I love it, it’s so much different than white wine based sauce. If you’ve ever been to Bonefish Grill and ordered Mussels Josephine, than you definitely know the flavor because it’s also made with Sambuca. It’s pretty hard to describe it, you have to taste it to know what I’m talking about. Oh and by the way, if you think 1/4 cup of Sambuca might be too overpowering, add 3 Tbsp and eventually add 1 Tbsp more later while cooking if the taste is ok.

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Orzo Greek Salad with Chickpeas

How I love salads, I cannot even explain. Perhaps I’ll try by telling you that even after eating out in many fancy restaurants, Sweet Tomatoes with its giant salad bar is still one of my favorites. Definitely in my top 5 favorite restaurants of all times. Salad bar is all I need to make me happy. Nothing more is required and nothing compares to a healthy and clean taste of fresh vegetables mixed with a tasty dressing.

This recipe is my take on a Greek salad but instead of preparing it with lettuce I used orzo pasta and chickpeas. That trick makes it more filling so you can have it as a main dish for lunch or you can take it with you to school or work for lunch break.

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Mushroom Pasta Bake

In many European countries, September is known as a mushroom month. Usually by the end of August, it gets slightly colder and rain falls much more often. That’s the time when forest becomes a charming place full of wild mushrooms. My parent’s house is in close proximity to the forest so sometimes I would wake up early in the morning and go into the woods to pick wild mushrooms and believe me, nothing can compare to the taste of fresh wild mushrooms. We would constantly be finding porcini, chanterelle and many more mushrooms which English names don’t even exist. It is probably one of those things that I miss the most in American kitchen, fresh wild mushrooms which are extremely hard to find in US supermarkets and generally cost fortune.

I wish my dish could be made with flavorful wild mushrooms but I am not willing to spend $100 just on mushrooms and to prepare this dish you definitely need a lot of them. I decided to compromise my taste buds a bit and used cremini mushrooms which are much cheaper than wild mushrooms but still have much more flavor than simple white, button mushroom. Eventually shitake might be used but I didn’t want any Asian flavors in my dish, I was aiming towards traditional American family meal.

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Pasta with Broccoli and Ricotta

I am not going to lie, broccoli is not my favorite food. For the most part of my life I have been avoiding it as it was poisonous. I consider myself being far from picky but broccoli somehow never made it to the top of my most loved foods. On the contrary, it used to be at the very bottom. It wasn’t until few months ago that I finally decided to face my demon. I made a stir fry with broccoli. I took a first bite, then second and realized that there was nothing to be worried about. Seriously it didn’t taste bad and it had a nice firm texture. That’s when I realized that it’s not the broccoli that I don’t like but the methods of cooking it. Most of the time I ate it boiled or steamed and even though steamed broccoli is super healthy, I just can’t stand the taste. Somehow stir fried or sauted broccoli has more appetizing texture and flavor.

Now I eat broccoli every now and then. Not that it became my favorite food all of the sudden, but due to its health benefits I try to include it into my diet. One of the best ways to eat broccoli is to add it to your pasta or mac & cheese. When it’s combined with other flavors and creamy sauces, it becomes a pleasant experience for the palate. I made a simple pasta with creamy ricotta and broccoli but if you want it to be even more substantial, you can add tofu or vegetarian sausage and if you’re not vegetarian, chicken breast will be a perfect fit.

Have any of you watched Food Network Iron Chef America about two weeks ago? There was a battle between a vegetarian chef and one of the Food Network stars. The main ingredient was broccoli. You should have seen faces of those poor contestants when they saw what a surprise dis the show producers prepare for them. Why didn’t they choose something versatile like tomatoes or tasty like zucchini? It had to be one of the hardest challenges in the history of Iron Chef America but I think that both, Chef Morimoto and chef Amanda Cohen did more than well. As usually the dishes were out of this world and judges extremely harsh. Chef Morimoto won although in my opinion chef Cohen dishes were a bit more inventive, but it’s just my subjective opinion and you can’t really decide unless you taste all the meals that were prepared.

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French Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Brie on a Whole Wheat Dough

Oh what a title, right? Pretty long for the name of a dish but I just couldn’t decide how else to call it. Plain French pizza is too simple and doesn’t really tell you anything, but with caramelized onions and brie, that makes more sense. Then I decided to throw in whole wheat dough in the title to please all of you health fanatics (yes, I’m talking about myself too). Honestly speaking it was the best dough I ever made. I was a bit scared of doing whole wheat dough and unsure if it would taste as good as white pizza but to my surprise it came out fabulous. My boyfriend loved it too, he even said it tasted like in the pizza place. I used different, traditional toppings for him but I wanted to experiment with mine so I topped it with caramelized onions and brie cheese. It might look odd to some people but if foccacia is eaten with caramelized onions why no pizza. I adore making traditional food and combine it with an ingredient that transforms whole dish into unconventional one. That’s how my kitchen creativity works and I have to admit that lately I started experimenting with food a little bit more. I never went to culinary school and don’t have culinary job experience but writing a food blog teaches you a lot of new things and forces you to be more creative in the kitchen. At one point you find yourself preparing Summer Rolls with Sweet Chili Sauce for a quick, healthy snack even though before you would simply microwave a bag of popcorn. I make those quite often if I get super hungry late in the evening but don’t want to eat anything high in calories.

Also my dear readers, I wanted to announce that yesterday my mango chutney was featured on Foodbuzz Top 9 on number 5. Hooray, that’s awesome, I love when they feature my food. That makes me want to cook and learn even more and more and timidly I have to confess that it also boosts my ego

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Back to School, Peanut Butter Pasta Salad

I bet most of the people never even thought about combining peanut butter with macaroni. I also never did until one day while shopping in Whole Foods I saw peanut butter pasta noodles in their deli section. My first thought was: ‘Omg did I just saw pasta with peanut butter? How cool is that!’ I didn’t buy it and didn’t try it over there because I had other food waiting for me at home but I left the store with peanut butter in my bag and new recipe idea in my head. Oh how I love tasting new things. Of course I tasted peanut butter before, dah, who didn’t, but it was a surprise for me to see it in a savory dish other than peanut butter dipping sauce or dressing.

I would also say that it might be a perfect dish for a kid lunch. First of all, show me a kid that doesn’t like peanut butter? Two, since the dish is cold, there is no problem to pack it into lunchbox. And it’s so convenient, you can prepare it a day ahead and then sleep 10 minutes longer in the morning because you know that you don’t have to wake up early to prepare school lunch anymore. Plus you kid is going to love you, no more boring sandwiches.

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Penne with Mushrooms and Eggplant

Viva la macaroni! I absolutely love pasta, all kinds of pasta, spaghetti, penne, lasagna and all the other types. If I could, I would eat pasta everyday till the end of my life and my favorite restaurants are obviously Italian. I adore the fact that Italian cuisine offers such a variety of vegetable dishes, something that is hard to find in typical American cuisine. Everytime I go to Italian restaurant I find it hard to decide what to eat because there are so many choices for veggie people. If you think of pasta as just regular spaghetti with tomato or alfredo sauce, you probably never went to authentic Italian place. They offer much more than that.

This pasta is great with porcini mushrooms but they might be a little bit pricey so just regular crimini or portobello mushrooms will do fine. Also romano or parmesan cheese is an awesome addition for the dish.

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Creamy Squash Orzo

I made this recipe a while ago, before I started this blog. I took a picture because I knew that one day I will use it. It was absolutely delicious and I only regret that I didn’t take more pictures and didn’t record a cooking video tutorial. I did not know back then that I will start a blog with vegetarian recipes. Of course I was thinking about it but there’s a long way from thinking about something to actually doing it. Hence just one picture but it’s really easy to make. Orzo and squash fit perfectly and the dish actually looks like risotto. You can easily substitute orzo for rice if you want to but I just love orzo, together with angel hair it’s my favorite pasta variety. By the way, even though the recipe calls for 4 garlic cloves it won’t be overwhelming because the garlic is roasted so it becomes much milder.

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