Sauteed Chicken with Zucchini & Summer Squash

Summer's a great time to play with produce, whether you grow it in your own backyard, hit up the local market, or head to the farmer's market to pick up something that somebody else grew in their backyard.

Here's an easy dish with lots of flavor that combines the tastes of fresh zucchini, summer squash, and tomatoes. You can grill the chicken instead of cooking it in a skillet if you like.

Savory Beef and Root Vegetable Stew

The chilly weather is moving in here in the Northeast, and that means it's the season for soups and stews. Beef stew is a winter staple in our house, but I decided I wanted to play around a little bit to see if I could come up with something with some different flavors.

This stew is pretty versatile, as you can adjust the herbs and spices to your liking, as well as play with which root vegetables you include.

Read on to see what I did.

Maple Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Fall is officially upon us, and around here the leaves are starting to change to some brilliant yellows and oranges. Root vegetables are a wonderful dinnertime staple in the fall. There's something sort of cozy about cooking with them.

I recently played around a bit with a recipe for roasted sweet potatoes that, originally, calls for honey and rosemary. I had no rosemary on hand, and my honey had crystallized. So I needed to be a little creative.

Enter maple syrup and Italian seasoning.

This recipe is so simple, you can prepare it in less than ten minutes.

Zucchini Stew with Tomatoes and Onions

Wow, I did not mean to go more than two whole months without posting any new recipes! But school's finally out for summer, and I have a few things up my sleeve to share.

It's still a little early in my neck of the woods for most of our local produce to make an appearance, but one vegetable that has a recurring role at my dinner table is zucchini. There are many, many ways to prepare this veggie, but my favorite (and one of the few ways my husband will willingly eat it), is a sort of Italian-style stew with onions and tomatoes. My mom used to make this all the time when I was a kid, and for some reason we referred to it as "fixed" zucchini. Not necessarily because other ways of cooking zucchini were "broken", of course, but I think because it was "fixed up" with herbs and such.

This family recipe is very easy and can be adjusted for any number of servings. If you serve it with some nice crusty bread, it can stand in as a light main course, perhaps for lunch. It also pairs well with grilled chicken as a side dish. I still recommend crusty bread to sop up all the juices.

Spicy Sicilian Style Sauce (Meat Free for Lenten Fridays)

Since I'm finally getting back the energy and drive to cook again, it felt good to be in the kitchen, putzing with one of my favorite recipes. This was something I experimented with a couple summers ago when we had a boom year for tomatoes, and it was so tasty, this spicy Sicilian style sauce has become something of a standard in our house.

I'm not 100% sure if it's accurate to call this "Sicilian style", but based on what I saw and ate when I was actually in Sicily a few years ago, I think it's close enough.

Sweet & Spicy Shrimp

Some of my best stir fry happens when I'm just playing around in the kitchen. A while back, I came up with this shrimp dish that rated "highly edible" on my husband's food-tastiness scale.

It's very easy and, like most stir fries, quick to cook and serve.  Here's how.

Mango Lassi

Holy smokes, it's almost the end of June already, isn't it?  Well, as usually happens, I've fallen a bit off the "maintain real life and also your interwebz presence" during these last couple weeks of school. But I do have a very easy recipe to share on this first day of summer - and my first official day of summer vacation!

I first tasted mango lassi when the hubs and I were on vacation over April break. We went to an Indian restaurant in Flagstaff, and I thought this would be an interesting drink to try. Absolutely awesome. After some searching, I found a recipe that, turns out, tastes almost exactly like the one I had in Arizona. There's probably some secret ingredient the folks in Flagstaff included, but this was darn close!

Mexican Grilled Chicken with Spicy Black Beans & Rice

This past week, the thermometer decided to test the "above 90 degrees" thing, which meant by Saturday I was in no mood to heat up the kitchen in order to provide dinner.

Thankfully, we got our grill working.

This recipe was so easy, I'm a little surprised I hadn't figured it out before this.

The Healthiest Cookies in the World

You know that Pinterest thing? How it sucks you in and you end up pinning directions for how to make your own soap and ten thousand recipes for cookies that you'll probably never have time to make?

I stumbled across the recipe for two-ingredient cookies several months ago, and I finally found time to make some this weekend.  I kid you not - Lauren over at The Burlap Bag has a recipe for oatmeal cookies that has two ingredients as the base of the cookie. Bananas and oats. And then you add whatever mix-ins you like and chow down with very little guilt. Especially if you go the raisin route for your mix-in.

When these cookies were all said and done, they had a very chewy consistency, and a taste similar to banana bread. I also added cinnamon for flavoring, because I'm not a big enough fan of bananas by themselves.