Italian Avocado Salad This Italian Avocado Salad is everything avocado dreams are made of! Delicious, fresh ingredients, with a creamy homemade Italian dressing. you really can t go wrong here! Pair it with your favorite protein and you have a delicious meal!
I was at the grocery store today and had in my mind that I d like to make an avocado salad with my Creamy Italian Dressing recipe. I have been trying to find new ways to eat avocados because of all the health benefits. This recipe is an avocado home run! Not only was the recipe delicious, I found the PERFECT bag of avocados. Not too mushy, but not un-ripe. Small seeded so that one side doesn t have to be completely uprooted to remove the seed. The skins peeled right off. I mean, in the avocado world I basically hit the jackpot! I was peeling those babies like YESSS this is avocado life. *Side note: You should start peeling your avocados! A lot of the good nutrients are right under the skin and when we scoop them out instead of peeling we loose important stuff. Peeling also allows you to cut some pretty impressive chunks for this salad. I simply slice the avocado in half, then slice it into chunks when it is still in the peel. If your avocado is perfectly ripe you should be able to start peeling it from one of the edges. If you are finding it hard, slice the little nugget on the end off and you should be able to start peeling.
Keto Diet Update This is the part where I talk about my diet, so if you aren t interested just scroll. I mentioned in my Keto Approved Burger post that I started the Keto diet. I ll be 100% honest here, it hasn t been unicorns and rainbows. I ve had some ups and downs due to breastfeeding and being concerned about the safety during this time. I ve gotten off track quite a few times but somehow I always seem to reset and start again. I m on a roll this time, and hoping to continue!
Storing Your Italian Avocado Salad We all know that avocados can brown very quickly! The dressing in this salad prevents this to a certain degree. I would suggest making the salad at the time you are going to eat it, and finishing it within a day or two. I ve stored mine overnight and had no browning/turning to mush but the second day I finished it. If you are making the salad for a gathering or picnic I would suggest putting it together 1-2 hours before you go. A bit of time in the refrigerator is great because it allows the flavors to come together, but isn t enough time for the avocado to start looking funky. One More Thing My Creamy Italian Dressing recipe yields about 2 cups of dressing, which is a lot more then you will need for this salad. I cut the original recipe in half for this salad and it was plenty. If you d like to have some extra dressing (it is super delicious), then you can double the dressing ingredients. In my original recipe I was using a food processor to make the dressing, however I no longer have that (long story), so I just used a bowl and a whisk. The food processor makes a thicker dressing, but you certainly can get away with just whisking super vigorously and making sure you pour your oil in slowly. I also omitted the red pepper flakes because I just didn t think they would mesh well with the avocado.
Pepperoni Pizza Panko Chicken
Pepperoni Pizza Panko Chicken. Say that a few times really fast! This is an easy, kid friendly recipe that screams
weeknight meal to me! It combines panko and parmesan crusted chicken, pizza sauce, Applegate Pepperoni, and melty mozzarella cheese to make a delicious main dish. Truth I am not a huge pepperoni person, and never have been. Growing up I was just an extra cheese kind of girl. I have ventured out a bit since those days, but my ideal slice of pizza is still extra cheese. Cheese = Life. My children, on the other hand, love pepperoni. They have been known to completely abandon a slice of pizza after eating just the pepperoni off of the top. WHO. DOES. THAT. Despite not being a super duper pepperoni lover, I saw this Applegate Naturals pepperoni at the grocery store and thought it looked brilliant. It was huge. It was massive. It deserved to sit atop a chicken breast with melty mozzerella cheese and fresh basil on top. I needed this pepperoni in my life to show my children that I, in fact, can be a pepperoni person too. Here is my husband pretending to be tall, dark, handsome, and mysterious while showing off this wonderful Applegate Naturals Pepperoni! He attempted to give me several pointers on how to get this shot. I didn t listen to any of them!
Ingredients and Tips I have been mentioning this a lot here lately, and here I go again. Target is really killing it with their organic, nongmo, and better ingredient oriented grocery selection lately! I am so impressed with their organic selection, sometimes I forget I m even at Target. As I browsed the isles, or ran through them with a screaming baby, I picked up a jar of their Simply Balanced organic pizza sauce for $1.29! $1.29!!!! I thought it was a steal. I also used Kikkoman panko bread crumbs, grated parmesan cheese, shredded mozzarella cheese, and thin cut chicken breasts. If your chicken breasts are thicker, I highly suggest filleting them first (cutting them in half length-wise), and pounding them thin with a meat tenderizer. When I sauté chicken, temperature and enough olive oil is key to getting those perfectly crisp panko crumbs on the outside. I had my burner on a steady medium-low the whole time. I knew I did not want to crank it up too high, as to not burn the olive oil or the panko bread crumbs. I think the crucial part to getting perfectly crisp and browned breadcrumbs is 100% the amount of oil in your pan. So before you put each piece of chicken in your skillet, make sure there is a generous dash of oil waiting for those breadcrumbs!
Buttery Garlic Parmesan Rolls
I believe the name of these delicious rolls speaks for itself! These buttery, garlicky, parmesan cheesy, carb-o-
licious rolls are perfect to eat with your next Italian dinner or just by themselves, because yes, they are that good. Slather on some extra butter, melt some provolone cheese on top, or just eat them plain, you can t go wrong I promise!
The real reason I baked these delicious babies up is because my son has a complex about his bread at school now. Yes, the
3rd grade pressure is really getting to him! I asked him if he wanted a sandwich in his lunchbox and his first question was Well what bread are you using? We pretty much only eat Food for Life Ezekiel bread because it is the best store bought bread I have found. I totally love the Ezekiel bread because it is loaded with natural nutrients and tastes great. It doesn t include any ingredients that I can t pronounce and it doesn t contain any preservatives. My son is more of a processed, packaged bread lover (because I can t shield him from everything!) so I ve resorted to making my own breads and skipping the processed, unnecessary ingredients in store bought white breads and rolls (I also add in whole wheat flour).
Did you know that some brands of shelf stable breads can even include hidden trans fats??? I KNOW! Ridiculous! The hidden
source will be labeled as mono-and-diglycerides, which can be found in a ton of processed foods. I ve seen it in everything from dips, to ice creams, to most processed breads. I have even seen it in grocery store bakery breads, also know as We are just pretending to bake this but in fact it came in frozen and isn t really the fresh product you thought you were buying. Those bakery breads can be super misleading because they look homemade but if you take a gander at the ingredients sometimes they are even worse then the pre-packaged stuff. I have looked and looked for a grocery store that carried a bread that doesn t contain anything weird and I have only found ONE option at Wegman s, their organic sourdough bread. I ve noticed that it has been sold out every week so maybe Wegman s will take the hint and come out with more options! That would be awesome! With that being said, I wanted my son to be able to take something he wasn t embarrassed about and would actually eat so here it is. I settled for using mostly bread flour (King Arthur s brand) and stone ground whole wheat flour which created a really nice end result. Bread flour has never failed me to create the perfect roll, so I highly recommend using it in this recipe. I baked the rolls in pie pans (10 per pan) right next to each other because I like that pull apart aspect I get from doing it like that, but you could certainly separate them and bake them on a sheet tray or in a rectangular pan. *Recipe adapted Foodnetwork.com from Almost Famous Breadsticks by
Chicken, Bacon, and Broccoli Pasta
One. More. Week. Just one more week of summer vacation left. Have you seen the video of the mom singing Bye, Bye, Bye as
the bus leaves on the first day of school? Yeah, that s me right now. I m ready to see that bus pull away (ok, we don t have busses but if we did.) and I m ready to get back to the school year schedule. Don t get me wrong, I love my oldest son dearly. It is just that I m 36 weeks pregnant, FAT as ever, out of energy, can t bend over, and have exhausted all of our summer plans. I never thought I would be ready for summer to be over, but today when it hit me that next Tuesday is the first day of school I was kind of excited! Maybe it is because I really am just tired of adulting, or maybe it is because I have been telling myself over and over again that at the end of summer I will have a new baby. Which ever the case I m just not so sad to see summer go this year. Speaking of adulting, I did a little bit of it today and whipped up some brownies PLUS this delicious, cheesy, and somewhat indulgent pasta. Who doesn t love a pasta dish like this one? Cheesy..check. Creamy..check. Bacony..check. Carb-olicious..check. Oh and then there is the broccoli that I threw in there to convince myself I was being healthy..check. This dinner is a win-win in the ingredient department, but even better is that it takes less than 30 minutes from start to finish! With back to school schedules in full swing I know I will be needing meals like this to get me through the week (and keep my kids from complaining).
Recipe Tips: I used thin sliced chicken breasts for this recipe, as I always do. If you pick up regular chicken breasts at the grocery store, you can easily slice them in half lengthwise before slicing into strips, or use a meat tenderizer to flatten them a bit before slicing into strips. There is something really gross about biting into a super thick and chunky piece of meat so I always recommend thinner pieces. I only cook the broccoli for a minute or two when I first put it in because it will continue cooking. When your broccoli brightens up in color you are good to add the rest of your ingredients. Additional salt and pepper to taste can make or break a recipe. The cheese in this recipe is pretty salty, so you probably won t need to add too much additional seasoning if you do. When cooking your bacon you may notice some residue on the bottom of your pot. THIS IS GOOD. When you stir in your milk go ahead and scrape that residue off the bottom of your pan for extra flavor. As always when cooking I keep my burner at a medium temperature. Often times I feel like people want to crank up the heat but this can easily ruin a recipe. A steady low-medium is where I do most of my cooking!
Creamy Italian Dressing
I m slightly embarrassed to admit how much I ve been using this dressing since I made it last week. I ve been putting it
on literally EVERYTHING. Gahhh! Sandwiches, pasta salads, spinach salads you name it! But it makes everything taste that much better, I promise. Truthfully, with summer approaching I was looking for a bomb pasta salad dressing. I love keeping a big bowl of veggie filled pasta salad in the refrigerator all summer long to have something healthy to eat in a pinch. I kept coming back to how much I really enjoyed the dressing at Olive Garden so I started searching for a knock-off, then tweaked it to fit ingredients that I liked (no vegetable oils, Italian seasoning packets, etc.) What I found so crazy about some of the knockoffs is they were suggesting using an Italian Seasoning Packet. Doesn t that kind of defeat the purpose of a homemade dressing? When I checked out the ingredients in Hidden Valley s Farmhouse Original Homestyle Italian packet guess what the FIRST ingredient was? SUGAR! Am I the only one who thinks something just doesn t add up about that?
Making your own seasoning is super easy and only requires about 2 minutes. Who knew, seriously!?! A few teaspoons of
this and that, whiz it together, and you re done. Simple, easy, and delicious! Not only is this dressing delicious as soon as you make it, it actually gets better and better the longer it sits. 2-3 days later the taste will change ever so slightly each day to give you a robust and classic Italian Dressing taste that you can use in a number of ways (believe me, more recipes to come using this dressing). I also noticed each day the amount of spice from the red pepper flakes died down, so if you aren t a fan of a touch of spice I would suggest making this a few days in advance to let it chill out before using it. Just a note this dressing does include 3 Tablespoons of mayo, which is kind of an issue because most store bought mayo contains a bunch of nasty, unnecessary ingredients. For a really long time I avoided mayo all together because I ve *heard* making your own is kind annoying and the results aren t exactly great. I was never a mayo fanatic, but in a recipe like this it is kind of crucial. Fortunately I found an organic brand that doesn t contain anything weird (no preservatives at all), and uses expeller pressed soybean oil. Being that I don t use mayo that often, I ll take it! If you are looking for a store bought mayo I would suggest looking for one that doesn t contain anything you can t pronounce, and uses and expeller-pressed oils, which aren t as highly refined as their counterparts. I just recently found this product (Wegman s Brand Organic Mayonnaise) and it was the first store bought mayo I have found that I was comfortable with buying. With that being said, Thank You Wegman s for making all my mayo dreams come true!
Chicken Parmesan Alfredo
Have I told you lately how much I LOVE my cast iron skillet? Yes, it s true. A few years ago I traded in my non-stick cookware for all stainless steel and cast iron. It did take me a while to get used to not burning stuff to the bottom of them like EVERYTIME but after adjusting my heat (much lower!) I realized I didn t need those chemical laden pots and pans after all! Today I m sharing this chicken parmesan recipe that goes to a whole new level by adding a super yummy Alfredo sauce to the pasta and lots of mozzarella cheese before baking it in the oven to get that nice, crusty mozzarella we all love. The best part is I used my wonderful cast iron skillet to get a nice, crispy piece of chicken without a deep fryer or any unhealthy oils. If you don t own a cast iron skillet no worries, you can do this in just about any sauté pan, however I do love the results I get from my cast iron. Just take a look and you ll understand! Now that s a piece of chicken to be proud of!
Another thing I love about his recipe is the versatility. If you are short on time and don t feel like taking the extra
steps to make the Alfredo sauce you can absolutely toss your pasta in extra red sauce and call it a day. Sometimes I go the red sauce route, sometimes I go the Alfredo route. Sometimes I even toss my pasta in extra red sauce AND ricotta cheese and that is delicious too. Either way you will end up with a dinner your family will love! Whenever I use a convenience product like the panko bread crumbs I used in this recipe I always caution folks to READ INGREDIENTS! These are the products most notorious for adding a bunch of crappy ingredients that don t need to be there just for the sake of keeping the product on a shelf for years without it going bad. I get so frustrated with brands like Progresso who willingly put profit and production above ethics. When it comes down to it, there should be no reason any breadcrumb product contains ingredients like partially hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup. When I started reading labels one of the first products I immediately threw away were the breadcrumbs that had been lingering in the back of my pantry forever. That alone should have indicated to me that something just wasn t right with the product to begin with. Since that time I ve experimented with making my own breadcrumbs (which works wonderful too!) but this time I opted for an organic panko product I ve found in most mainstream grocery stores (check their organic section). Here s the product I used as well as my favorite cast iron skillet! *This is a bulk listing.