One pot kielbasa and rice with peas

This easy one pot kielbasa and rice with peas is a family friendly weeknight dinner that's ready in less than 30 minutes. 

You know I'm all about quick and easy, real-food dinners that anyone can make, right? (I mean, if you don't know that by now, after six years, I must be doing something wrong!!)

I've pretty much got the mother of all them this week.

Easy One Pot Weeknight Dinner

This one-pot dinner made with kielbasa, rice and peas is so crazy easy and so crazy yummy that you will quickly make it a weekly regular, I can almost promise. Plus, it's a complete meal, made in less than 30 minutes in one skillet -- what's not to love?

Healthy one pot turkey pilaf

Master weeknight dinner with one pot turkey pilaf: only 30 minutes to a healthy delicious dinner with minimal clean up plus leftovers.

Another busy week means another entry for my list of healthy and easy weeknight meals that anyone can make -- one-pot turkey pilaf.

Lazy me is a big fan of easy, one-pot dishes, as evidenced by some of my favorite recipes, including one-pot tomato basil pasta and healthy one-pot Asian pasta. I mean, seriously, what's not to love?

In less than half an hour, from start to finish, you can have a healthy, delicious dinner on the table. With leftovers for lunch the next day, too.

Easy slow cooker jambalaya

Enjoy this easy jambalaya, delivering all the spicy Creole flavor you love but made effortlessly in your slow cooker.

Did I ever tell you that I lived in New Orleans for a while? (Yeah, like you're surprised anymore by the number of places The Ninj has lived...)

Let's just say it was a nice place to visit. :-)

But the food. Oh my gosh, the food. It's the only place I've ever lived where I gained more than 10 pounds really, really quickly. Because the food. Oh my gosh, the food.

In fact, I had never even eaten jambalaya until I lived in New Orleans. And I certainly had no idea the awesomeness that I was missing! Jambalaya is now one of my all-time favorite comfort foods -- and not just because of the smoked sausage.

Yet, as with long-cooking rice dishes like risotto, I never really made jambalaya a lot at home because it was too time-consuming.

Not so anymore, thanks to the slow cooker.

Skinny oven baked squash risotto

Skinny oven-baked squash risotto is a satisfying meatless weeknight meal or an easy but impressive side dish -- without all the stirring.

I never make risotto. Seriously: I made it once or twice and, with all the freakin' stirring and attention it required, I quickly removed it from my repertoire. No time for that.

Until now! I'm bringing risotto back because I found it can be easily baked in the oven, with very little stirring and even less attention.

Made with acorn squash, this skinny oven-baked squash risotto is satisfying and filling enough to stand alone as a meatless weeknight dinner entree, accompanied by a green salad. Because we are trying to eat more meatless meals around Casa de Ninj. But it also makes an easy but impressive side for a Sunday dinner.

And, of course, you could easily substitute butternut squash for the acorn, if butternut's more your jam.

Brown rice pudding

Mr. Ninj is a huge fan of rice pudding.  Back in the days when we were dating and not eating as healthfully as we are today, he was known to buy a tub of Cozy Shack rice pudding from the grocery store and eat the whole thing.

Yeah, I'd say that makes him a huge fan.

Up until now, I hadn't really made rice pudding because it seemed like too much of a pain in the ass, frankly, and you know The Ninj is all about easy when it comes to recipes. (I know, that's not very loving of me, but hey, I'm honest.)

But brown rice pudding? That uses leftover or instant-cook rice and involves minimal prep? Now you're speaking my language!

I love this recipe because it's super easy and, because of the individual portions, you can pull one out of the fridge anytime you want a snack. Or, let's face it, breakfast -- this rice pudding makes a seriously delicious and filling quick breakfast. The custard is thick but smooth, and the rice adds just a hint of chewiness.

Pineapple rice with chicken

Easy weeknight recipe for pineapple rice bowl with chicken -- with plenty of leftovers for lunch.

I have a new favorite quick and easy weeknight dinner. OK, it's beyond mere favorite status: I am more than a little crushing on this pineapple rice with chicken.

Rice bowls are the best, aren't they? Easy to throw together for a weeknight dinner, generally full of fresh, seasonal veggies and most of the time there's a lot leftover for tomorrow's lunch. And if, like me, you tend to add some cooked chicken, you've got a pretty complete meal in that one bowl.

This pineapple rice bowl has a great blend of flavors: Thai-style spices complement the sweet tang of the pineapple, and carrots and peanuts add just the right amount of crunch.

Oat and yogurt breakfast bars

Oat and yogurt breakfast bars

Regular readers know I'm all about make-ahead, grab-and-go breakfasts.

So imagine my delight when the recipe choice list for my virtual book club this week included a good-for-you, whole-grain cereal bar. I was all over that like white on rice.

When cooking from a book entitled Whole Grains for a New Generation, I didn't expect to find too many sweet recipes.  Frankly, I didn't expect to find any at all, because I'm that new to cooking with whole grains.

This bar is all about the oats (just like my salted oat crack cookies but with actual nutritional value). I'm hooked on making oat flour simply by grinding up oatmeal in the food processor: genius! I modified the original recipe, based on what ingredients I could find (I'm hard-pressed to find quinoa flakes locally and didn't want to have to mail-order them just for this recipe), but I'm super-pleased with the results.

Cranberry rice and book clubs

Cranberry rice

Are you part of a book club?

I joined my first book club in 1991, just after graduating from college. This was pre-Oprah, so the concept was new to me. Get together with other book lovers to read and discuss books? Oh, happy day: it was like college lit class without the term papers.

I was hooked.
 
Even though we move around a lot (every five to six years, historically), I have been in one book club or another almost continuously since that first one.  Right now, I'm in two clubs: one physical, one virtual.

I joined the From Scratch Club's virtual book club at its inception last year. The first book we read and discussed was Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal.  While we all enjoyed the book and Adler's gorgeous prose, the book club members were ultimately more interested in a "cookalong" type of book and format. The second book we tackled was Alana Chernila's Homemade Pantry; every two weeks we read and cooked recipes from two chapters in the book and shared our stories and creations through Good Reads and Facebook. It was great fun, made even more enjoyable by the author's participation in the discussions and willingness to give feedback and answer questions.

We're now into the third book: Liana Krissoff's Whole Grains for a New Generation; again, we're fortunate enough to have the author joining us our journey. This book will be bit of a challenge for me, as I'm fairly grain-ignorant. Because of the nature of the book, instead of cooking by chapter, we are cooking by grain type.

This week, it's rice -- a nice, easy introduction to the world of grains.

Fauxsotto: an original recipe

Fauxsotto!

It's not that often that I can say I'm sharing a fully original recipe with you.

I'm creative in the kitchen -- just not quite that creative. Yet.

But today, this one is all mine. And I'm really excited to share it with you because it meets my highest recipe criteria: wicked easy and wicked good.

Like many people, I love risotto but rarely ever make it because I can't be bothered with all that standing around and stirring. (I do have one baked risotto recipe up my sleeve that works like a dream -- it's on my to-do list to share with you, if I manage to get some photos of it the next time I make it.)

But I didn't set out to create my own risotto recipe or anything. I just reserve it as an order-in-a-restaurant-where-someone-gets-paid-to-stir treat.

But then I stumbled across a taste combination that got me thinking about making and easy risotto.

(Or fauxsotto, which I'm sure you figured out by now.)

It started innocently enough with a conversation with my sister-in-law, who was telling me about a bed-and-breakfast she stayed in in which the proprietors had created a Japanese inn-style ambience, including a traditional breakfast of raw eggs cracked into hot rice and mixed with some soy sauce. (According to Google, this is called tamago kake gohan in Japanese.) Using the same principle as spaghetti carbonara, the hot rice cooks the egg and gives it a nice creamy consistency.

Since I love a savory breakfast more than a sweet one, this really piqued my interest.

So one morning I gave it a try.

Easy fried rice: a recipe

Fried rice with chicken and lots of good veggies

As I sat down to write this post, I realized that it's the third rice bowl dish recipe that I've posted in the past month.

If you don't like rice, sorry. Bear with me. There will be other things coming up soon. Like cheese.

If you do like rice, you're welcome. Now go like my Facebook page.

This is another recipe I've adapted from one found via Pinterest. It's becoming clearer and clearer to me each day, based on the memes I've seen popping up all over Facebook, that I'm one of the only people on the planet that actually makes the recipes I pin, rather than just creating food porn boards.

Anyone else out there? Anyone? Perhaps we can form a Facebook group.

But I digress. Back to the recipe at hand.

Wahoo's-inspired chicken and rice bowl

Wahoo's-inspired chicken and rice bowl: dinner in less than 15 minutes

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a wicked quick but delicious sausage and spinach rice bowl, which triggered the memory of the Wahoo's-inspired chicken and rice bowls that I used to make.

(Why I stopped making them, I don't know. I can only imagine they seemed too simplistic once I started getting more adventurous in my cooking. Boy, that was stupid.)

I also mentioned that thinking of those chicken and rice bowls (and writing about them) was inspiring me to try making them again. And that I might post on them if I did.

Well, here ya go, my pets.

Sausage and spinach rice bowl: a recipe

Sausage and spinach rice bowl

I used to live in Southern California. The famed "OC", in fact -- although no one called it that except the fools on that TV show.

One of my favorite things about living there was that you could get healthy fast food. Clearly I'm not talking about In-N-Out (which I used to call "In, Wait Around for a Wicked Long Time, N Then Out"). There was a cool fresh Tex-Mex place called La Salsa (I think), and of course the almighty Wahoo's, home of the fish taco.

(I still have never eaten a fish taco. The combination just scared me too much.)

Besides fish tacos, Wahoo's made these fast and yummy rice bowls. Ever since we moved away (can it be nearly 10 years? Good lord, I'm getting older faster), I've made my own version of those rice bowls for a fast lunch or dinner. Put some warm cooked rice in a bowl, add some seasoned grilled chicken (black beans optional) and top it off with a couple of big spoonfuls of pico de gallo. Delish.