Defeat Garden

Now that I’ve made a few recipes in the new Dutch oven we got, I figured maybe I should actually post one.  And this one I really liked 🙂

Yum!

The girl took pictures tonight while I was layering everything in – you may even catch a glimpse of my hands….

I did kind of think ahead for this recipe – I normally don’t have anything thawed, but I left out a pound of spicy sausage (in the fridge!) on Saturday after I got groceries so that this would be fairly easy to prepare.

You can spray your Dutch oven if you want, but I don’t have any spray, so I just pour a little oil in and then rub it around the sides.  It’s as close as I’ve gotten for a really long time to greasing a cake pan.  Sad, isn’t it?

First I de-seeded 3 peppers and sliced them. That was really the most labor-intensive part of this recipe. 🙂

Then I put 1 1/2 cups of quinoa in the bottom of the pan, poured in a can of chicken broth, and stirred to combine.

(see, there’s the elusive hand)

I got lazy (again) with the sausage and sliced up the pound and laid it in like that, right on top of the quinoa.

I think that next time I make this, I won’t use the spicy sausage – it was a bit much!  And I think I might be a little less lazy and crumble the sausage up a little more.  But then again, it was pretty nice to be lazy!

After that, I sprinkled in the peppers that I had sliced up.

Aren’t they pretty?  Colored peppers were actually less than green peppers at the store this weekend.  That’s pretty unusual!

Then I put in a can of chopped tomatoes.  Again, just layered it right on top 🙂

Then cover it up and bake it at 450 for about 45 minutes.

Voila!

***disclaimer***

I did use a recipe, but I changed a few things.  We got quinoa at Trader Joe’s, and the girl wanted multi-colored, so that’s the first change. (The recipe did say quinoa – which you should try, it’s amazingly good!), but it didn’t specify which kind – they also had just plain old one colored, but who wants that???)

Also, I was supposed to use a green pepper, but since the others were cheaper, I went with that!

And, the recipe called for sausage links.  However, I love – I mean really LOVE – the Farmland spicy sausage.  I could eat it every week.  So, I used that instead.  But, as stated above, I probably would just use regular sausage next time.  Still, I wouldn’t use sausage links, because normally a pound of sausage is cheaper 🙂

The last substitution I made was with the tomatoes.  Really, tomatoes just aren’t good right now.  However, canned tomatoes are good!  The recipe said to wedge a few Roma tomatoes, but I traded that out, as well.

I have been really bad about updating this blog – for any of you who actually read this, I apologize!

I don’t even have a really good excuse – except that maybe most of the food I make is already on here.  I tend to use this more for me than for anything else – I’m always looking up previous recipes to check ingredients, and so on and so forth.  Maybe I need to shake up my meal rotations and make something new!

Actually, we did get a new dish for Christmas – a Dutch oven.  I’ve been making a few recipes from the book that we got with it still trying to get used to how it works.  Maybe I’ll start making something up from that soon 🙂

Other than that, life is good.  Busy with the kids in activities – the boy is out of the house 2 nights a week for wrestling practice, and his meets are every weekend (pretty much), and the girl is involved in Destination Imagination (www.idodi.org) which is really a pretty cool program, so we’ve been going at least once a week to those meetings, and she’s also going to do a show choir clinic in about a week.  It should be fun!

What’s new in your lives? Any new recipes I can try to mix up our food lives?