A Short Week

Oh Hey Monday!

Forgive me because I feel this post is going to be random and all over the place!

How about that Super Bowl? Was anyone disappointed by the outcome?
I have to admit I really didn't care who won. I pretty much watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and half time show, anyone else like me?

This was my favorite commercial of the evening!

And thank goodness Madonna sounded better then last years Black Eyed Peas Performance!
We sat around eating delicious homemade pizza, guacamole delicious, Trader Joe's dessert and some yummy salad!

(My pizza was loaded with spinach, basil, and cilantro, and of course we had pepperoni for my dad)!
 Sounds perfect to me!
This week is a short one for me, since I leave for Columbus on Thursday!
So this weeks  Pinterest Challenges is going to be short, but don't worry still delicious!

I did finish off last weeks Pinterest challenges this weekend with the final two dishes!
And both were delicious, and in my mind keepers.

Lets start with this soup.

Spinach, Tomato Orzo Soup
Tasted like a grown up version chicken noodle soup.  I loved the addition of spinach, and the orzo made this broth base soup seem thick and filling!  This recipe makes a big pot of soup.  Would be perfect to make on Sunday nights then you would have delicious soup to eat the entire week!

That yummy salad I mentioned above, well that would be this salad...

Balsamic Chicken, Spinach and Tomato Pasta Salad
So good!  I loved that there was a subtle balsamic flavor, and that the salad was not dripping in dressing.  I topped my serving with a bit of feta, which was a great flavor punch!  Easy to assemble, and keeps well.  This salad will be making its way into my lunch box this short work week!

Lets wrap up this post with the two recipes in this weeks Pinterest Challenge.
I found this gem of a recipe, and immediately decided I had to make them this week!
Mexican Stuffed Peppers

Source: recipes.womenshealthmag.com via Hilliary @ Happily Ever Healthy on Pinterest

I love stuffed peppers! And I have not made them in what seems like forever!  Hoping these ones will have a great flavor, and judging by the spices called for I think they will be delicious!

And numero two...
Vegetarian Fried Rice

Source: realsimple.com via Hilliary @ Happily Ever Healthy on Pinterest

I am hoping this will taste like a healthy version of my favorite fried rice from PF Changs!
This week I am also trying to lighten up on of my moms favorite breads recipes, stay tuned for the results!
Happy Monday!

PS: Anyone score some Jason Wu pieces this weekend at Target?
I did't venture out Saturday to check out the collection, but I am going to go see if out local Target has pieces left!  Such a great collection, full of classic pieces!

What was your favorite part of the Super Bowl?

This Time Next Week

Happy Friday Lovelies!
This time next week I will be in Columbus for the weekend with this guy, 

celebrating Valentines day and 2 wonderful years of dating! Hard to believe that it has been two years, man does time fly.  He has planned a wonderful weekend for us including some of my favorite things exploring, cooking (yes the pinterest challenge) and shopping!  He knows how to make me a happy girl! 

Now lets take a little look at the challenge recipes for the week, starting with this one!

Black Bean and Corn Topped Potatoes 

Baked potatoes are a go to dinner for me.  Healthy and quick.  I loved the black bean, corn and salsa topping for these potatoes, it was spicy and full of flavor.  I added a bit of cumin, garlic and paprika to the mixture and was happy with the results!   I want to try  the topping on sweet potatoes, I think it would be a delicious combination.

Next up Sweet and Spicy Chicken.

This chicken had a kick to it, and was fantastic.  My dad couldn't stop saying how much he loved this dish.  Steamed broccoli and rice made this a well rounded dinner!  I want to try making more of the sauce and stir frying vegetables in with the chicken, I bet that would be tasty!

And last but not least...

White Bean Chowder

Source: ksl.com via Hilliary @ Happily Ever Healthy on Pinterest

This soup had a great flavor  and was delicious the night it was made, but I didn't think it reheated that well.  I am still on the fence about this recipe.  

Still to come this week

Balsamic Chicken, Spinach, Tomato and Pasta Salad
Spinach, Tomato Orzo Soup

Ps have a sweet tooth?  Try this recipe!

Hands down delicious!

A New Year Around the Corner-Top 5 Recipes from 2011

Wow, it is Thursday already, and the new year is right around the corner!  Where did 2011 go?  When I look back at 2011 there are several big moments that stick out to me.  But you will have to wait and read about those BIG moments tomorrow, because today I am sharing my top 5 all time favorite recipes (cooking moments) from 2011!  After all Happily Ever Healthy did start out as a cooking blog!

Enjoy!

I have to say I kinda enjoyed looking through some of the older cooking posts.  I am happy with where my blog has gone, lets just say the blog has improved a bit with time!  But as promised here are my top 5 recipes (in nor particular order) from 2011!

Lets start with breakfast.  A meal I use to detest but now wouldn't dream of missing!
1. Oatmeal Pancakes!
Delicious any time of the day, and even better when you add banana!

If you like a pumpkin version check out Pumpkin Oatmeal Pancakes
2. Pumpkin Coffee Cake
A little experiment that turned out fabulous!

Perfect for any festive brunch, or when you want something sweet!

3. BBQ Chicken Burrito Bowls (Remade)

One of Marks All time Favorites... along with
Stir Fry!

4. What is a year without a little chocolate!
My Mom's Chocolate Sheet Cake!

5. And last but not least... my Tzaziki CousCous Salad!
The remake, with so much more flavor.  This was the first recipe to be featured on a website!

Well there you have it... my top 5 recipes from 2011!
Have you ever gone back and looked at where your blog started?

Chocolate Wonderland

Good Morning lovely bloggers!  I hope you had a wonderful and relaxing weekend.  Is everyone having a good start to the week?  My day has started a bit slow, and it is rainy here in Minnesota.  It makes me just want to stay curled up by the fireplace with a book.  But I know that cannot happen today, I have a long to do list and I have to go to work!  I have been sitting by my phone waiting to hear how Marks first day of work went!  I hope it is going well.

Anyways I have the perfect recipe that is sure to brighten any rainy day.  Because lets be honest who doesn't love lots and lots of chocolate?  I have grown up eating this chocolate cake, it has been a family favorite for as long as I can remember.  I remember being a little girl helping my mom make this cake.  This was the very first chocolate cake I learned how to make!

  The best part was getting to eat a cup full of the chocolaty batter before the eggs went in (and yes I did this the other day when I made it, and so did my mom)!  It is just that good.  This cake is nothing fancy, just a simple chocolate sheet cake, but sometime simple is better.

(You can see we have used this recipe a lot)

Just A Soup Kinda Day

Alright before I start talking all about soup I have a bit of a side note.  I was going through my moms cookbook cabinet last night (just for something to do) and stumbled across these, 

These are my very first cookbooks!  Did anyone else have these American Girl Doll Cookbooks or have a slight obsession with the dolls as a little girl?  I had to laugh as I flipped through the pages of the cookbooks.  I can still remember all the recipes that my sister and I used to make when we were little.  Who would have thought I would eventually learn and love to cook!

Just a little childhood memory I felt I had to share with you all!  Just like I feel I have to share these soup recipes with you!  While yesterday was sunny it was still pretty chilly, and nothing sounded better then big bowls of soup.  Soup for lunch and soup for dinner!  I have been flashing this photo

pretty much all week, and guess what I made it yesterday for dinner!  Five and a half hours in the crock pot, the kitchen smelled amazing.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and let me say I thought the soup tasted just as good as the picture looked!  But before I talk about the Crock Posole I want to discuss pumpkin soup.  Since we are in the lovely season of fall it seems pumpkin recipes spring up everywhere.  From pumpkin bread, to pumpkin cupcakes, soups and even oatmeal.  Till yesterday I had never made a pumpkin soup. But as a bowl of leftover pumpkin stared me down from the fridge yesterday I thought to myself why not give this pumpkin soup a try!

Here is my quick quick recipe!

Black Bean and Pumpkin Soup for One!

1 Large Bowl of Soup

1/2 Cup canned Pumpkin 

1/2 Cup Black Beans 

1 Cup chicken Broth 

Garlic, Pepper, Cayenne, and Cinnamon to Taste

Here is what you do:

Throw all the ingredients into a small sauce pan and cook until heated through!

See I told you it was simple!

Pour in your favorite soup bowl and enjoy!

YUM!

Here are a few more recipes I would like to try out!

"Vegged Out" Pumpkin Black Bean Soup

Quick and Easy Pumpkin Black Bean Soup 

Black Bean Pumpkin Soup - I would leave out the Ham and add more beans thats just me!

Now on to soup #2

If you love the way cooking in a crock pot makes your house smell, I think you will love this recipe.  This soup was a hit with my parents, kinda like a chicken tortilla soup.  My dad thought the soup would be amazing with guacamole on top, and maybe some tortilla strips.  I served the soup last night with warm cornbread, yum!

Here is what you need:

2-14.5 Ounce Cans Golden Hominy Drained 

2-14.5 Ounce Cans Chicken Broth 

1-14.5 Ounce Can Diced Tomatoes Undrained ( I used Fire Roasted)

1-4 Ounce Can Green Chilies 

1 Pound Chicken cut int 1 inch cubes 

1 Medium Onion Chopped 

2 Cloves Garlic

Fresh Cilantro 

Cumin 

Fresh Oregano

Here is what you do:

Chop your onion, Mince your Garlic, and cut your chicken into cubes.

Now Place everything into your crock pot.

You can either cook the soup on low for 5.5-6 Hours 

or 

on high for 2.5 Hours

I decided I would cook mine for 5-6 hours on low.

My anticipation grew as the kitchen was filled with the wonderful smell of spices!

The finished  product!

This makes a huge batch of soup, 8-10 servings!  You will have lots of left overs, I plan on eating this for lunch today.  I think adding some fresh lime juice would be a nice touch before you serve the soup!  

I hope you enjoy, and remember to live Happily Ever Healthy!

What is your favorite thing to eat on a cold day?

Just Like Old Times

Let me start by apologizing for the fact that I have been MIA in the blog world.  But I think a best friends wedding is a pretty good excuse for the blog to take the back burner for a few days.  I am sad that this weekend has come to an end.  Kady left yesterday ( I was sad to see her go) and Mark left early today.  However I cannot think of a better way to spend a long labor day weekend then with people you love, and celebrating the wedding of one of your best friends.  My whole weekend was centered around wonderful friends/family, and making memories!  We have countless pictures of the "high school bunch" from this weekend.  I felt like I was  back in high school (not that I am complaining), especially when my parents made brunch for all of us Sunday morning after the wedding.  Everyone gathered in my parents kitchen taking and laughing just felt like the good old days.  This post is going to be very picture heavy!  But there are so many wonderful pictures I want to share with you from the wedding!  I cried and laughed on Saturday.  Katie made the most beautiful Bride, and you could honestly tell how happy and in love Katie and Richard are.  The ceremony focused on how they had known each other for a life time, and talked of there love for one another, you could just see how excited the two of them were to start their lives together.   I am so glad I got to be apart of their wonderful day, and with that being said here are some fabulous pictures!

Beautiful!

The Flowers were gorgeous!

Plummer House and Festivities Recap

Yesterday before going out to celebrate my parents 31st wedding anniversary Mark and I did a little tour of Rochester.  Rochester has three huge mansions, two were home of the Mayo Brothers (I talked about Will Mayo's house in this post) and one was Dr. Plummer's.  The Plummer house is one of my favorite houses. Not only is the house beautiful, but the gardens are sprawling and studded with beautiful flowers and fountains! I held my Graduation (from high school) open house there and even took some of my senior pictures there.  Dr Plummer was not only a wonderful doctor but helped the clinic in many ways, he came up with a correspondence system that was used throughout the Clinic, and was the first doctor to understand and operate the X-Ray machine.  Here are a few pictures from our adventure!

 The tower in the side garden

 Front door to the house!

 I love these fountains!

 King of the Rock!

We spent the rest of our day relaxing and gearing up for the celebration!  Lets transition into talking about the fabulous dinner we had last night!

Hill Vs. The Pancakes, and Updates from Margaritaville

Have you ever watched the show Man Vs. Food?  Well I felt like Man Vs. Food yesterday when my plate of pancakes came out at breakfast!  I dubbed my fake show Hill Vs. The Pancakes!  These mammoth size pancakes were curtsey of The Butter Cafe!  I was so excited to go to The Butter Cafe for brunch, I have been wanting to go there for some time now!  Butter Cafe supports sustainable cooking, which means they use only the best ingredients (ingredients that don't hurt animals, the environment and are healthy for consumers) aka lots of Organic!!

 I was struggling on what to get, everything sounded so good post run, and I was starving!  I went between Banana Pancakes, French Toast Kebabs, Oatmeal, and Cinnamon Sugar Pancakes!  I wish I could have ordered one of each (then you would have been rolling me out of the cafe)!  So what did I finally settle on?  Drum roll please...  Cinnamon Sugar Pancakes!  Best decision ever, these pancakes were sweet but not that overpowering sweet.  Topped with bananas and of course peanut butter, the pancakes hit the spot!  I took the rest of my pancakes with me to snack on latter because let me tell you those suckers were huge!  Take a look.

Mammouth Cinnamon Sugar Pancakes!!

And after Mark, his mom and I Went to town!

Clearly food won that round in Hill Vs. The Pancakes!  

We left the Butter Cafe ready to tackle the hour and a half drive to Indy for the Concert!!

Upon arriving in Indy we decided we would check into our hotel before hitting up the venue... lets just say its a good thing we did!  There were a few issues with the hotel lets just leave it at that (makes for a great story)!

Baja Fishy Tacos

Good evening all you Happily Ever Healthy readers!

 I hope you all had a great Monday!  Mine was a little on the lazy side, but I also feel like I got a few things accomplished!  Mark and I woke up and went for a run, then sat around waiting to here about my interview that has now been pushed back to Thursday.  I cancelled and rebooked all train tickets and I am set to be back in Minnesota Thursday night!

While Mark and I were waiting to hear more information about the mentioned interview, we decided on dinner!  Mark's neighbors came over last night and had mentioned having fish tacos!  Then I read this post from How Sweet It Is!  The fish taco craving was sticking with me!  We took a brisk walk down to the grocery store to pick up some ingredients for the Fish Tacos's!

Grocery List:

Fish

Cabbage

Tortillas 

we also came out with a bottle of Kung Fu Girl wine!  We just happened to stumble across one of our favorites while just glancing over the wine selection!  It was the last bottle!  We found two more wines from the same Vineyard!  They have some great labels!

After a nice walk back to Mark's a short nap and catching up on some blog readings, it was time to start dinner!  While I do not have step by step pictures of everything being made it is pretty simple!  Mark and I looked up recipes earlier this morning and found a few to gather inspiration from.  Once again I found inspiration on Eating Well.  Eating Well featured a Grilled Fish Taco!  YUM!  A lot of the Baja fish taco recipes we found featured a cabbage slaw.  We decided to make our own!

Cabbage Slaw

1/2 Head of Purple Cabbage

1/4 Cup Low Fat Sour Cream 

1/4 Cup Greek Yogurt

Various Spices:

Cumin

Cayenne Pepper

Chili Powder

Garlic Salt

1 Teaspoon Sugar

Hot Sauce to taste

All you have to do is chop your cabbage, and combine the chopped cabbage with the sour cream/greek yogurt and spices!

For the Fish:

Grill 

1 Pound White Fish of Choice-We used Tilapia (Mahi Mahi and other mild fish would work great too)!

Spices:

Pepper

Salt

Lemon 

Grill the fish until done (flakey)-you know me I am not a grill expert!  Marks dad was our grill expert this evening, and the fish turned out amazing!  Lots of wonderful flavors!

Now time to assemble your taco's!  Tonight Mark his dad and I all agreed one of the best things about Tacos is this, each taco shell you load up turns out a bit different!  Fabulous!

Tonights fish tacos were served with fresh salsa, the cabbage slaw, and cheese and more hot sauce!

My first taco was loaded more with the cabbage slaw, 

While my second taco featured more of the tilapia!

Yum and Yum!  Not the best pictures but these tacos were fabulous, healthy and light!

For dessert, a grilled S'more like sandwich!  

Following dessert we watched some of the Cincinnati Reds Game, 

while enjoying a friendly game of Monopoly!

Don't ask Mark who won!

I hope you all enjoy the rest of your evening, and as always remember to live Happily Ever Healthy!

Random and off topic thought!  I have been thinking a lot about the organization of the blog, and by that I mean assigning certain days to talk about certain things!  Are there any types of posts you would like to see more off?  I enjoy doing the what I am loving post, and I might make Monday be where I share the rest of the Be Quotes!  I would like some input so let me know!

Small Town Treasure

Good Morning!  I am just going to jump right into yesterdays festivities!

Yesterday my mom, sister, Melinda and I went down to Decorah Iowa for the day!

Yea you think small town there is going to be nothing to do.  But since my Mom, Melinda and my sister had been raving about the cute little shops in Decorah I decided I wanted to go to!  Let me tell you for Decorah being a small town in Iowa they have the neatest downtown!  We just spent the afternoon going from shop to shop.  We went through little stores like a yarn shop, a cooking store, a store that sold Vera Bradley, and a hatchery!  I even found the wine my parents Mark and I had at the Meridian in Indianapolis!

And this wine is not easy to find!  We couldn't find this wine anywhere in Indianapolis (the only places we found it was a bar and they had one bottle), and of all places I find this particular wine in a little 

Co-Op store in downtown Decorah Iowa!  I was extremely excited about this find.

We had lunch at a wonderful little Bistro called La Rana. 

 The food was excellent, and the decor was charming yet simple.  La Rana means the frog so the bistro featured many a different frog statues!  

To top it off I got the cutest mug that they sold there!

For lunch my sister and I split a green salad topped with Pecans, Cranberries, Grilled Chicken and Goat Cheese!

They had a orange vinaigrette as the dressing.  And the crusty bread they served on the side was fabulous!  We also split the Turkey Avocado and Swiss sandwich.

I have to say that Turkey and Avocado has to be one of my favorite combinations for a sandwich!

Melinda had a Cobb Salad which looked fantastic, and my mom had a grilled chicken sandwich.  I also had to sample the amazing Tomato Basil soup my sister and mom both ordered!  The dessert menu at La Rana looked phenomenal but I was way to full after lunch for dessert!

The hatchery was the last stop of our day!  We shopped a lot!  My sister and I bought some adorable hats and got to hold baby chicks that the hatchery raises!

They were adorable, so soft and fuzzy!

I was super excited about the hat purchases!

Decorah is just one of those charming little towns in the country!  

And don't think our day/fun ended in Decorah!  Because we came home to have a big BBQ with my dad and my sisters friend!  We had way to much food, but everything was delicious!  The only thing I made was baked beans I used a new homemade BBQ sauce recipe.  The sauce called for apple juice, but we were out I subbed in Orange Juice instead.  I want to try this BBQ sauce with apple juice before I share it with you, because I thought the OJ added an interesting flavor.  I am not sure the interesting flavor was a good thing!  Although we did have by far my favorite salad, Grilled Romaine Hearts with Grilled Pineapple.  This salad just screams summer! My sister also made this amazing Guacamole Salad from Ina Graten.  My sister kept saying something seems spicy but I don't know what the spice is from!  Turns out she had added way to much cayenne pepper to the salad!  I thought the salad was excellent!  We had a good evening full of lots of laughs and stories!

 Brats and Hamburgers on the grill!  We even had hot dogs and Veggie Burgers for me!

Yum!  Nothing but veggies fruit and beans!  

I hope you enjoy the many pictures from our day!  I don't think the pictures do the day justice!  And ow before I leave you to get ready for the day I will share our Be quote!

Be Amazed

"As I started looking, I found more and more."

Valerie Steele

Enjoy your day and the long holiday weekend, and remember to live Happily Ever Healthy!