Meal of the Day: Pastella

This dish I'm about to share with you has been created in the past, yet has never been given a proper name.  This dish encompasses different tastes and textures.  No matter how much of this dish you eat in one sitting or maybe two if daring, this leaves you full and definitely satisfied.  I guess you can say this dish is a mash up of 2 completely different dishes: pasta and paella.  Well, I don't think they're completely different because the only difference is the choice of carbs.  When I first made this dish, I had all the ingredients to make paella but had no yellow rice.  So instead I opted for whatever was in my pantry which was penne.  This dish turned out great the first time around.  For the second time around, I still had no yellow rice so I settled for penne again.

Now this time around, I just finished the yellow rice recently and purchased penne rigate during my latest trip to the supermarket.  The dish still came out great (the key is timing so everything doesn't overcook) and I have yet to name this dish.  My husband and I were throwing out ideas during dinner and came up with a few clever ones.  It's simple to just mash the ingredients together and come up with a nonsense word.  Or, call upon the Rachael Ray goddess and pick the first letter of each word to come up with a name (ie: extra virgin olive oil is now EVOO thanks to the goddess chef herself).  After much deliberation, we decided to keep it simple and mash up the common ingredient of pasta and paella.

So, I share with you pastella!  The ingredients in this dish can also be used to make paella, just swap out the penne for yellow rice.

Meal of the Day: Chicken Cacciatore

What a beautiful day to spend time at the beach.  My little family took a small trip to Sandy Hook, NJ and enjoyed the waves and cool water at the shore.  Since I live right next to the George Washington Bridge, I knew that I'd be too tired to whip up dinner once returning from the shore.  Plus we're trying to cut out fast-food.  So I decided to make use of my favorite kitchen appliance, the slow cooker.  I picked out an easy recipe from the small cookbook that was provided.  I already had most of the ingredients for this dish.  I did a quick run to ShopRite last night and prepped everything so that once we headed out of the door this morning, I could throw everything into the slow cooker and let it cook.  I think that's the best thing about the slow cooker: you can walk away from this appliance and let it do all the work.

If you like to make dishes that doesn't leave you in front of your stove for hours, scroll down for the ingredients and how to make this.  This filling dish will leave you happy and content that it only took you 10 minutes to put together, but 8 hours (or 4 hours) to cook.