Top Ten Recipes [Real Food]

We discovered a lot of new recipes as part of our real food journey. As we promised at the very beginning, here are our favorites from the month. They’ve become staples in our meal planning rotation. And they were all relatively easy!

Honey Ginger Chicken
D made this for me on Mother’s Day. He combined a couple of recipes to make this deliciousness. The best part? I didn’t have to cook or prepare one bit! Stay tuned … we’ll post the recipe soon, I promise!

Chicken Tortilla Soup
This was totally an accident, but may have been the best mistake we made all month!

Honey Whole Wheat Bread
We adapt this recipe – leaving out the lecithin and using the dough setting on our machine. When the dough cycle is done, we put it in bread pans to rise. It makes TWO loaves!

A trick we discovered: if you preheat the oven to 200, turn it off for 10 minutes, and then put the pans covered with a towel in the warm oven, it rises to double in 30 minutes or so. Take the pans out, preheat the oven to 350, and bake the loaves about 30 minutes or until brown.

We won’t buy bread from the store ever again…for real.

Honey Strawberry Jam
We tried to use this recipe, but ended up doubling the amount of honey in it on accident. So we purposely changed the name to reflect that! We’re almost done with our 6 1/2 pints … which means we’ll have to experiment with blueberry or blackberry soon!

Leek, Potato & Spinach Stew
We totally came across this recipe by chance. We got spinach, leeks, and potatoes in our Nature’s Garden box one week and discovered this the Saturday after it came. It was delicious. We made it twice. It’s even better leftover.

We did make a couple of changes … we used local chicken sausage instead of turkey, we used dried beans (soaking them overnight and cooking in the crockpot for 6 hours or so), and homemade chicken broth (I make this with the leftover stuff from a roasted whole chicken.)

Gazpacho
I’d give you the recipe for this one, but it seems to change every time we make it. Some tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, peppers, garlic, herbs, olive oil, sherry or white wine or vinegar … it all depends on what we have or what we can find at the farmer’s market. This is, by far, our favorite summer soup.

It’s supposed to be eaten cold, but we like it warm too. Sometimes we add shrimp on top, sometimes we add a little avocado, and other times we just eat it with a homemade whole wheat pita. Every time, it does not disappoint.

Lemon asparagus penne
This was the first Meatless Monday recipe we tried. My favorite part of this meal was D’s reaction. I don’t like asparagus, he said. Tough, I said, you’re going to try it. So he cut it up real tiny, mixed it with all the other veggies, and actually liked it! We left out the sundried tomatoes because we didn’t have any at the time, but when we make it again we’ll use the homemade ones we just made!

Crockpot Oatmeal
You’ve already read about my new love for steel cut oats. They are so very easy to make in the crockpot … and it makes waking up in the morning a real treat. We combine a few recipes … so stay tuned, we’ll post ours in a few days!

Mini Breakfast Casserole
There are lots of different ways to make this one. Basically, you take your favorite breakfast casserole, put it in muffin cups instead of a casserole dish, and you end up with mini casseroles that can be heated up and eaten on the go. We’ve got a couple of favorite recipes for this … we’ll share soon!

Cinnamon Raisin Bread
Yum. I need to make this again. With cream cheese on it … it’s to die for. Breakfast, lunch, snack … yes, please!

What are your favorite real food recipes?