The New Red Plate

I have wanted to make this cooking "blog" a cooking "website", but hadn't found the right place to make that happen yet. Well, now google has "google sites", so I can finally turn The Red Plate into a cooking website! I hope everyone who looks at The Red Plate will now move their bookmarks to the new location:

http://sites.google.com/site/theredplate/

*Effective immediately, I will begin making all my new posts on the website and will no longer post new posts here. I have many new foods to add, but I am also going to work on moving all my previous posts to the new location as well.

I am very excited about the move!

Fall is Here!

Soups

Fall is approaching, if it’s not already here, so here are some soups I have made.

Ratatouille Soup

I was inspired to make this soup after watching the movie Ratatouille. It is a very tasty soup, and I especially liked how it didn’t require a stock because the vegetable’s juices make the soup! This is a fun soup to make because it is very enjoyable to cut all the vegetables and see all the colors and watch the soup grow – not to mention the smell!

Recipe for Ratatouille
2 large onions
1 red pepper
2 sticks of celery
1 eggplant
1 medium zucchini
1 medium yellow squash

4 garlic cloves
2 large tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
1 tin chopped tomatoes
basil
thyme
parsley

Add olive oil to a soup pan and turn it on med-high heat. Begin chopping the vegetables and adding them to the pan in the order it’s written on the ingredients list. After you added the fresh tomatoes, then decide if you need or want to add the canned tomatoes. Then add seasoning, cook covered for 20 minutes. Add cheese or bread on the side to your soup when you serve it.

Olive Garden Minestrone Soup

I love this soup. It is one of my favorites. This definitely tastes similar to the Olive Garden minestrone soup, but maybe a little better! Here is the recipe that I found online. Note: When I make soups, I have learned never to “just add water.” I always add broth if I need more liquid, or I add water with a bullion cube. Now that I do that, I never have a flavorless broth!

Recipe for Olive Garden Minestrone Soup

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 cup minced white onion (about 1 small onion)

1/2 cup chopped zucchini

1/2 cup frozen cut Italian green beans

1/4 cup minced celery (about 1/2 stalk)

4 teaspoons minced garlic (about 4 cloves)

4 cups vegetable broth

2 (15 ounce) cans red kidney beans, drained

2 (15 ounce) cans small white beans or great northern beans, drained

1 (14 ounce) can diced tomatoes

1/2 cup carrot, julienned or shredded

2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon dried basil

1/4 teaspoon dried thyme

3 cups hot water

4 cups fresh baby spinach

1/2 cup small shell pasta

Heat three tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat in a large soup pot.

Sauté onion, celery, garlic, green beans, and zucchini in the oil for 5 minutes or until onions begin to turn translucent. *Adding garlic in at the last 2 minutes.

Add vegetable broth to pot, plus drained tomatoes, beans, carrot, hot water, and spices.

Bring soup to a boil, then reduce heat and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.

Add spinach leaves and pasta and cook for an additional 20 minutes or until desired consistency.

Makes about eight 1 1/2 cup servings.

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

Who doesn’t like chicken noodle soup? This is the first time I made it rather than buying it in a can, and now I can never go back. It not only tastes better when you cook it, like so many other recipes, but it is also a pretty easy soup to make to.

Lentil Carrot Sweet Potato Soup

This recipe my mother-in-law sent me from a magazine. It was good, but I did encounter problems with it. First, I went overboard with the spices, and it dried my throat out every time I ate it, and second I somehow didn’t put enough water in there, or the lentils soaked it all up and in a day the soup dried up to a paste. Joel then spread it out on a tortilla and made a little tostada on the stove. That was pretty good!

Chickpea Veggie Red Soup

This soup I just threw together, I don’t even remember all the things I put in it. It was an “ok” soup, but not one worth repeating.

Also, don’t forget the soups I have posted about before in the archives:

Vegetable Wild Rice Soup

French onion soup

Carrot soup

Cilantro soup

Potato soup

Butternut squash soup

What I've Been Eating The Past Two Weeks

I have been making a lot of wonderful meals lately. Most of them include a lot of beans and vegetables. I have been pretty proud of the cooking since I made up three of the recipes myself. We have certainly been enjoying the foods! Here is what we have eaten lately.

Melissa's Black & Red Bean Pasta

I am very disappointed to see that I didn't get any good photos from this dish. For some reason, they are all blurry! But I thought this was a beautiful bean sauce with the greens and black and red all mixed.

This is a fairly simple bean sauce with black beans, red kidney beans, white onion, and kale. The sauce was Newman's Own marinara sauce and I served it over whole wheat couscous. It was really good with the couscous and was a good way to change up the idea of bean pasta. I am happy about making up this as well as the other bean recipes!

Melissa's Asian Noodles with Spicy Peanut Chicken and Egg Drop Soup

This is another meal that I created out of a mixture of things leftover from months before when I was making pad Thai and other Asian foods. I used rice noodles for the pasta, and the chicken and sauce included: a sauté sauce I got from HEB, some chili sauce, sesame oil, soy sauce and lots of garlic cloves. The result was very tasty! And I had some easy egg drop soup packet, so I put that on the stove, stirred in some eggs and made the soup!

Spaghetti Squash Pasta

This meal is pretty much total vegetables!! So if you ever want an entire vegetable meal, here it is!

I had never experienced spaghetti squash before, so I enjoyed discovering something new! It was pretty amazing to me how you just cook the squash in the over, and then it all comes apart into noodle like pieces! Very fun!




For the sauce, I used a red sauce I already had, and threw in a bunch of vegetables such as: green pepper, onions, garlic, carrots, zucchini and kale. Then I put cheese on top. This was a very good meal!

Chicken Salad Sandwich

I know I have posted about making chicken salad sandwiches before, but I just really liked this photo, so wanted to display it! It is also something yummy that we ate recently, and that is kind of like my "theme" right now.

Minestrone Soup with Chicken, Beans, Veggies & Rice

I have made the soup before, it is a recipe I got that is a copycat version of the Olive Garden's minestrone soup. I really liked it before. This time, I changed it a little by using kale rather than spinach (because I had kale and no spinach). It is full of good vegetables and beans like zucchini, carrots, onions, green beans, garlic, red kidney beans, white beans, tomatoes and spinach (or kale).

The chicken meal that I made with it was good too and made up of many of the same ingredients. It included chicken, red kidney beans, black beans, carrots, green pepper, onions, kale, tomatoes and rice.

These meals together made for a very nutritious lunch!

Fettuccine Asparagus with Cream Cheese Sauce

I got this recipe out of a Taste of Home recipe book and modified it a little. This is a tasty pasta that includes fettuccine, asparagus, sliced garlic, sliced yellow onion and long shreds of carrot. The sauce was good, I wanted an alternative to Alfredo and I found it! (Alfredo is tasty, but pretty fattening too!) You just melt some cream cheese and milk and there you have it!

Quiche (sort of) with Potato Cubes

As we were leaving from our beach vacation, my mom made what she called a quiche with no crust for breakfast in order to help us use up the eggs we had leftover. It was really tasty. Then when we got home from our vacation, I noticed that I had a ton of eggs, so I decided to make my own version of this crustless quiche.

I basically put eggs, kale, onions, tomatoes, cheese and whipping cream into a bowl and mixed it all. It came out almost great, but fell short because I had put in way too much cream compared to the eggs and so it didn't have a good enough egg flavor. But it was ok. Maybe I made it right for a quiche, but I was hoping for more of an omelet flavor - I'm not sure. But next time, I will have more eggs and less cream.

The potato cubes were simple and yummy!