The 80 Percent Solution

Bonus #HolidayCookingAdventures: Hazelnut rye yeast rolls

If you’re looking for a yeast roll recipe for your holiday dinner, this one from my favorite source, Cooking Light, was a nice one for beginners.

For me, when it comes to yeast breads, the hardest part is finding a warm enough place in my kitchen for the bread to rise. I did not use rapid rise yeast, but I might next time to experiment with a little more rapid rise. It called for two rises, the…

#SundayCookingAdventures: Need something for a potluck? Try this rice salad with roasted broccoli and bell peppers

  I have been making this salad for years to take to potlucks and other food gatherings because it’s a great crowd pleaser. It’s based on an old recipe from Jane Brody’s “Good Food Book.” The original calls for most of the vegetables to be left raw.

I found this a little hard to eat, so I’ve cooked most of the veggies, at least a little. I also sauteed the mushrooms in a little oil and butter to…

Bonus #SundayCookingAdventures: Slow cooker chicken with tomatoes and beans

  This recipe was inspired by one I found from Cooking Light in a collection of slow cooker recipes. The original recipe didn’t seem to have a lot of flavor, and reading the reviews confirmed that, so I made quite a few changes to it.

What I came up with was a recipe that is a little more liquid, but that would work well over rice or pasta. I think I could have added even more extra seasoning…

#SundayCookingAventures: Spiced Chicken Thighs with Roasted Brussels sprouts and butternut squash

My sister (Hi, Carol!) sent me this picture in a text last weekend and it looked so good I asked her where she got the recipe. It’s from the Rachael Ray Show.

It’s got roasted Brussels sprouts and butternut squash — two ingredients that seem to be popular these days — also shallots, paprika, garlic powder and sage, and lots of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I would probably cut the 5-6…

#SundayCookingAdventures: Try these 99 calorie double chocolate cookies

Finding a lower calorie, low carb dessert is always a challenge, and for the most part, unless it’s a piece of fruit, there’s not a lot to choose from. Sometimes I go for nuts and raisins (an ounce each). Other times, I actually confine myself to 1/2 a cup of vanilla no-sugar-added ice cream — but then sometimes (I’d say most of the time) I go overboard.

This recipeappealed to me because it’s…

Bonus #SundayCookingAdventures: Chard-Potato frittata

This frittata from Fine Cooking magazine was quick to make and was great tasting. It’s made with rainbow chard (NOT kale — so no excuse for you kale haters!).

The base is made of potatoes. If I make it again — and I likely will — I’ll squeeze some of the liquid from the potatoes with a dish towel. They were just a little bit too soft and creamy for me when the frittata was done. I like a…

I made this chicken, looked at the finished product and thought, hmmmm. This doesn’t look so good. And I abandoned the idea of posting it.

Then I tasted a piece. And I thought, OMG, this coating is out of this world good. Like, maybe the best chicken I’ve made in a long time.

And then finally, my husband came downstairs and said he smelled “biscuit food,”  zeroed in on the finished chicken and…

Bonus #SundayCookingAdventures: Nothing easier than green beans in the bag: picked, washed, and ready to roast.

This is a ridiculously easy side dish that offers good taste for little effort. We eat a lot of green beans, and these little haricots verts in the bag are very convenient. You don’t have to pick them, and they are prewashed. If you don’t want to roast them, you can cook them in a pan or steam them right in the bag in the microwave. Super convenient.

For this recipe, all you have to do is put…

#SundayCookingAdventures: It's fall, which means it's time for these lower calorie stuffed pasta shells. Yum!

I debated posting this recipe. In fact, I made this dish about a month ago and I wasn’t sure it looked very appetizing. It was inspired by a recipe from Weight Watchers that was a lower calorie four-cheese version of mac and cheese that I have posted previously.

I added chicken and broccoli to make this a little more filling and add more nutrition. But I skipped the macaroni and instead, stuffed…

Bonus #SundayCookingAdventures: Lower calorie chocolate molten lava cakes. #holidaycookingadventures

Two weeks ago I asked my Facebook followers to try out this recipe for lava cakes because I thought mine looked like a flop.

Well, no one tried it (anyway, no one told me they tried it — please tell me if I’m wrong) Several followers told me they thought it looked great. My sister told me it looked like every other molten lava cake she’d ever seen except that they all had more powdered sugar on…

#SundayCookingAdventures: Shrimp, pesto, bow-tie pasta. And quick to make. I mean, what's not to like?

This dish has all the things that are important to me in life: Pasta, shrimp, arugula.

OK, just kidding. I do love all those flavors, but they aren’t the most important things to me in life. Now, that doesn’t mean they weren’t great when I put them together into this pasta dish.

Bringing the water to a boil to cook the farfalle took a little time. But making the pesto sauce and cooking the…

Bonus #SundayCookingAdventures: Braised Baby Bok Choy can make a great holiday side dish. #HolidayCookingAdventures

Yummy!

I like baby bok choy, but this particular side dish was really, really good and I’m considering it for the holidays. It would be the last thing I’d cook, because it comes together really quickly. Bok choy itself can be rather uneventful in flavor — my husband and stepson squarely rejected it when I served it one night and we haven’t had it since.

But this recipe is flavored with mirin (a…

#SundayCookingAdventures: Lighter Lighter mac and cheese with rosted garlic

LIghter mac and cheese

In my search for low-calorie sides for the holidays, I ran across this one in the current issue of Cooking Light Magazine, October 2014. Macaroni and cheese is one of those dishes EVERYONE asks for at Christmas and Thanksgiving. It tastes great but cheese is high in sodium and saturated fat, so if you’re eating large spoonfuls of it, it can do some serious damage to anyone…

Vegetable soup that you bake -- yes, bake. Saves stovetop space. Bonus #SundayCookingAdventures: Baked vegetable soup

Yes, vegetable soup baked in the oven. I didn’t believe it either, so I decided to try it out. And it worked — yeah, I didn’t exactly bake it correctly, but that’s a minor detail (will explain later).

This recipe comes together like a progressive salad — you layer it. You don’t have to sautee the onions (in this case, leeks). Get a big, ovenproof, dutch oven. Add a layer of oil. A layer of…

#SundayCookingAdventures: Time for autumn food! Roasted Paptrika Chicken with Brussels sprouts hits the spot.

  Love this one!

I didn’t really expect much when I found this recipe in the current issue of Eating Well magazine. But it looked simple and I was looking for a new way to cook chicken. I do like to roast it, but I was trying to change it up, even if I still ended up roasting it.

And I DID end up roasting it, but this had a rub made with garlic and lots of smoky paprika and thyme. Oh man was it…

Great side dish: Bonus #SundayCookingAdventres: Carrots with pistachio-herb butter

About this time of year I start hunting around for holiday recipes. Although, of course, I cook the same favorites every year — yes, mac and cheese, candied sweet potatoes, you know the drill — I try to throw in one or two new dishes every year so it doesn’t get boring.

This carrot recipe is a contender for this Thanksgiving. It has some healthy elements, including pistachios and parsley.…

#SundayCookingAdventures: Stir-fried snap peas and red peppers makes a great side dish!

We’re all always looking for good side dishes. Here’s one. It’s quick, but there is a little prep involved.

You have to trim the stem end of the snap peas and pull off the string that runs along the inside of the pea pod. I also snip off the other end and pull off the string on the outside of the pod. It just makes for easier chopping and less stringy beans when you eat them.

This is a stir-fry…