Name: Twice-Baked Spinach and Artichoke Potatoes
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 1 h 25 min
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients: 2 large baking potatoes, scrubbed clean and dried; olive oil; 4 tablespoons unsalted butter; 5 ounces baby spinach; 1/2 can artichoke hearts, well-drained and quartered; 4 ounces Swiss cheese, shredded; 1/4-1/2 cup sour cream; salt and pepper, to taste

Twice-Baked Spinach and Artichoke Potatoes

April 10, 2015

Who doesn’t love spinach-artichoke dip? These twice-baked spinach and artichoke potatoes combine that classic dip with a delicious baked potato.

Twice-baked spinach and artichoke potatoes are a marriage of two of my very favorite foods. There are few dishes in life that I love more than a perfect baked potato. At Christmas, my mom makes a gigantic prime rib and, while I adore a medium-rare slab of prime beef, I honestly get more excited about the twice-baked potatoes I make to go alongside than the meat. If I am offered a loaded baked potato as a side dish option in a restaurant, I am rendered unable to order any other side. In fact, I will not order pasta in a restaurant that serves baked potatoes. I just can’t. Here in Chattanooga, most of the barbecue restaurants serve baked potatoes piled high with smoked meat, and I always order the potato, even when I convinced myself before walking into the restaurant that I would order a sandwich or a plate or something else besides a potato.

Spinach and artichoke dip is another love of mine. I still remember my first experience with it, when my friends and I decided my freshman year of college that TGIFriday’s was the best restaurant on the planet. Hey, we were young! And excited to be hanging out downtown, because we were college kids and we were sooooo cool. I remember ordering spinach-artichoke dip as my entrée on multiple occasions. Once I had to go to the ER (stress-related neck cramps…I was a bit of a perfectionist even back then) and my roommate went and got me some TGIFriday’s spinach-artichoke dip and had it waiting for me when I got home (thanks, Crisi. You really were the best!).

So what could be better than to combine two of my favorite things into one dish? And if there is any way to make a baked potato better, it’s to bake it twice. Scoop out the flesh, mix in some good stuff, throw some extra cheese on top, and bake it up. I won’t say that they’re quick, because baking potatoes takes a long time (I believe in really baking the potatoes, not microwaving them) but I will say that they’re easy. And I will continue to find new things to stuff into a potato…

These spinach and artichoke potatoes are a great side dish for a family meal, but they are also a great main dish.

Yield: 4 servings

Twice-Baked Spinach and Artichoke Potatoes

15 minPrep Time:

1 hr, 25 Cook Time:

1 hr, 40 Total Time:

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Ingredients

2 large baking potatoes, scrubbed clean and dried
olive oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
5 ounces baby spinach
1/2 can artichoke hearts, well-drained and quartered
4 ounces Swiss cheese, shredded
1/4-1/2 cup sour cream
salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Rub the potatoes lightly with olive oil. Place them on a baking sheet and bake for one hour. Remove from the oven (leave the oven on), cut in half, and set aside to cool briefly.
Preheat 2 tablespoons of the butter in a 10-inch skillet over medium heat. Add the spinach to the skillet and cook until completely wilted.
Use a spoon to scoop the flesh from the potato halves and into a bowl, being careful not to break or tear the skins. Place the skins back onto the baking sheet. Use a fork to mash the potatoes. Add the remaining butter, the spinach, the quartered artichoke hearts, half of the cheese, and enough sour cream to bind the mixture together and make it creamy. Salt and pepper to taste.
Divide the potato mixture among the 4 potato skins. Sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cheese has lightly browned. Serve immediately.

https://chattavore.com/twice-baked-spinach-and-artichoke-potatoes/

Click here to print the recipe for twice-baked spinach and artichoke potatoes!

Tortellini Primavera Soup

April 3, 2015

Tortellini primavera soup is delicious, full of spring vegetables and cheesy tortellini in a creamy broth flavored with wine.

Tortellini primavera soup is pretty much an excuse to eat cheesy tortellini and all the spring vegetables you can think of all cooked in one pot. I mean, I guess you could just make pasta primavera, but I just really loved the idea of making pasta primavera into a soup. Can you believe that when I was working on this recipe I did a Google search for pasta primavera soup and really came up with very little? I figured the internet would be saturated with ideas. Funny, I just now searched for tortellini primavera soup and there were several of those. Oh well. None of them are like mine so I don’t feel too bad about it.

Honestly I never really liked pasta primavera. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you why…it’s because I’m so obsessed with pasta in creamy, cheesy white sauces that the idea of a pasta dish with all those luscious vegetables tossed in a super-light, barely if at all creamy sauce seemed pretty blah to me. By the way, I used to not care much for red-sauced pastas either. I’ve grown a lot, though, and while I will usually still vote for Alfredo over red sauce, I can eat all manner of pasta dishes now and be happy.

If white wine (or Vermouth, which I have started subbing pretty much 100% of the time for white wine, since it is fortified and doesn’t care that it takes me months to use it up) is involved, any recipe is made at least 1000 times better and this tortellini primavera soup is no exception. As I’m sure you’ve heard many a television chef say, most of the alcohol cooks out (but not all, so if you are concerned, check out my note at the bottom of the recipe). It doesn’t impart a “wine-y” flavor at all…just a deep flavor note that enhances the flavors of everything else. Oh, and then there’s heavy cream. I heart heavy cream.

Don’t let the 30-minute sweat scare you. It’s a trick I learned from Deliciously Organic that makes the vegetables really meld together, marrying their flavors and making them tender and soup-tastic. While you obviously don’t want to leave a pot completely unattended on your stovetop for thirty minutes, that thirty minutes will give you time to chop up the rest of your vegetables, make your lunch for the next day, empty the dishwasher…whatev.

I hope that you’ll celebrate spring with me by making this tortellini primavera soup!

Mary

Yield: 6-8 servings

Tortellini Primavera Soup

20 minPrep Time:

30 minCook Time:

50 minTotal Time:

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Ingredients

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 leeks, halved, sliced, and thoroughly washed
1/2 red, yellow, or orange pepper, diced
2 carrots, scrubbed and thinly sliced on the diagonal
4 ounces button mushrooms, wiped clean and thinly sliced
1/2 cup Vermouth or dry white wine
1 large or 2 small zucchini, quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced
1 large or 2 small yellow squashes, quartered lengthwise and thinly sliced
8 ounces asparagus, woody ends removed, cut into 1 1/2 to 2-inch pieces
4 1/2 cups low-sodium chicken stock
1 pound cheese tortellini (frozen or refrigerated)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 pint grape tomatoes, halved
salt

Instructions

Melt the butter in a 6 to 8-quart Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the leeks, peppers, carrots, and mushrooms. Stir to coat the vegetables with butter. Cover and reduce heat to low. Leave the pot covered for 30 minutes.
After the vegetables have sweated for 30 minutes, remove the lid and raise the temperature to medium. Add the Vermouth or wine and cook for one minute. Add the zucchini, squash, asparagus, and chicken stock. Bring to a simmer and cook until the vegetables are tender.
Add the cheese tortellini and cook according to package directions. Stir in the tomatoes and heavy cream. Cook to heat through. Salt to taste and serve immediately.

Notes

If you prefer to leave out the Vermouth/wine, just use an additional cup of chicken stock.

https://chattavore.com/tortellini-primavera-soup/

Click here to print the recipe for tortellini primavera soup!

Black Bean Tortilla Soup

March 30, 2015

Tortilla soup usually has chicken and lots of tomatoes, but black bean tortilla soup is full of black beans…and deliciousness. It’s topped with baked tortilla strips.

I try to do a few meatless meals a week for a lot of reasons. The most obvious? Meat is kind of expensive. The second is that a few years ago my doctor told me that my LDL (aka bad) cholesterol was borderline high and I freaked out a little bit. See, I’m the kind of person that likes to be good at everything, including cholesterol. Being 33 or however old I was at the time and having high(ish) cholesterol did not sit well with me. I love bacon and heavy cream and butter but I did not love having a cholesterol number that was almost too high (though my HDL was awesome, and that was a good thing). At that point I told Philip that I thought we should cut down on our meat intake and see what happened.
So, we jumped in feet-first. For a long time, we ate bacon on Saturday mornings and other meats when we went out to eat in a restaurant or at someone else’s house. I didn’t cut back one little bit on the amount of butter or heavy cream I used. The next time I had a physical? Cholesterol = normal. Now, I know that there are a lot of conflicting ideas about whether animal products actually contribute to high cholesterol, and I will admit that high cholesterol runs in my family…but I made one major dietary change and my numbers were well within ideal range. I’ll take it.

I love vegetarian cooking. It gets picked on a lot in the culinary world as being “less-than” cooking with meat, which is silly. I don’t buy all the stuff about meat being superior (though you guys know I love a burger). Vegetarian cooking takes creativity and skill, because vegetables don’t have the same flavor compounds as meat. Bringing out all the wonderful flavors in vegetables requires thought. And it’s totally worth it. I’ve found myself cooking more and more meat here lately and have realized that it’s because I’ve let myself get a little lazy about thinking of great ways to make vegetarian food the best it can be.
I probably won’t go back to the never-cooking-meat-except-Saturday-morning-bacon ways of my past, because I’ve realized that wasn’t the kind of balance that I want to have. This isn’t a vegetarian blog and I want to cook vegetables and meat and share them with you. However, I’m challenging myself to being a little more creative with my vegetarian cooking so I can share some great stuff with you and dispel the ridiculous myth that Southern food is meat-heavy.

It’s not Southern, but this black bean tortilla soup is absolutely delicious and your slow cooker and food processor do all of the heavy lifting for you. Enjoy!

Yield: 6 servings

Black Bean Tortilla Soup

20 minPrep Time:

8 hr, 20 Cook Time:

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Ingredients

1 pound black beans, picked through, rinsed, and soaked
8 cups low-sodium chicken stock (use vegetable stock to make this completely vegetarian)
1 large onion, peeled and quartered
4 garlic cloves, peeled
2 tomatoes, cored and quartered
1/2 jalapeño, seeded
1 chipotle and 1 tablespoon adobo sauce
2 tablespoon canola or vegetable oil
8 corn tortillas, cut into strips 1/2 inch wide
salt
garnishes-shredded cheese, sour cream, avocado, chopped cilantro

Instructions

Drain the black beans and place in a 4-5 quart slow cooker. Add the chicken stock, half of the onion, 2 cloves of garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook on low for 8 hours. Remove the onions and garlic cloves.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Place the tortilla strips in a bowl and toss with 1 tablespoon of the oil. Bake for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until light brown. Sprinkle with salt and set aside.
While the tortilla strips are baking, place the remaining onion quarters, garlic cloves, tomatoes, jalapeño, chipotle, and 1 teaspoon of the adobo in a food processor or blender and puree.
Heat the remaining oil over high heat. Place the puree and 1/8 teaspoon of salt into the pan and sauté until dry and dark in color. Add to the black bean mixture and stir to combine. Cook for a few more minutes to heat through. Salt to taste. Add more adobo if you would like more heat.
Serve the soup with tortilla strips and other garnishes as desired.

https://chattavore.com/black-bean-tortilla-soup/

Click here to print the recipe for black bean tortilla soup!

Tortilla soup usually has chicken and lots of tomatoes, but black bean tortilla soup is full of black beans...and deliciousness. | recipe from Chattavore.com

Cornmeal Pancakes with Blueberry Maple Syrup

March 27, 2015

Cornmeal pancakes are homey and filling. Blueberry maple syrup is so much better than any flavored syrup at your local pancake house!

Saturday mornings are a sacred time in our house. I always laugh when I look at the Facebook posts of some of my friends…people who are up and at ’em by 9:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings always perplex me. We prefer the slooooowwww method of waking up on Saturday mornings…sleep a little late, watch a few minutes of Weekend Today, make breakfast, and catch up on our sitcoms on HuluPlus until about 11 a.m. before we get ready to head out for the day.

Saturday morning breakfast is usually baking powder biscuits with cream gravy (and bacon and eggs, of course) but I do try to mix it up from time to time. Waffles, pancakes, French toast casserole…they’re all on the menu from time to time. Usually I just do my standard pancakes, but let me tell you that I looooove cornmeal pancakes (or corn cakes, whatever you want to call them). They have a little more texture than your average pancake…a little more flavor too. They soak up maple syrup deliciously, but let’s be honest…they’re enough like cornbread that you could top them with chili too. Yeah, that’s right. Turn these bad boys into dinner!

Now, I talk a lot about food tantrums, and for some reason pancakes used to be public offender numero uno when it came to causing me to have a complete meltdown. I remember trying to make pancakes for dinner at my parents house one night when I was in college and my dad looking at me like I had three heads when I burned the pancakes and threw the spatula. The first time I made cornmeal pancakes? I cried. That’s right, full-blown tears, sweating and red-faced in the kitchen with my still fairly new husband probably wondering what he had gotten himself into by marrying a girl who was clearly teetering on the brink and could be thrown right over the edge by a slightly blackened edge on a pancake (remind me to tell you about the time I tried to smooth-ice a cake for a decorating class…).

I’ve learned to turn the burner down, though. Medium to medium-low is just right for pancakes, and I actually bought my 12-inch Lodge cast iron skillet specifically for the purpose of making pancakes (though it gets lots of other uses too). Watch for the bubbles, and when they’re all over…flip. Carefully. I keep my finished pancakes warm in a low oven and usually just serve them with maple syrup…but this blueberry syrup took me less than 5 minutes to make and is 1000% better than what is served at your local pancake house.

Try these cornmeal pancakes for your weekend breakfast or brunch!

Cornmeal Pancakes with Blueberry Maple Syrup

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Ingredients

For the Syrup

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
1 cup pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon unsalted butter

For the Pancakes

1 3/4 cup buttermilk
1 1/4 cup cornmeal (not cornmeal mix)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, but into small pieces
1 1/4 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
canola or vegetable oil

Instructions

Make the syrup: Heat the syrup and the blueberries in a small saucepan until bubbly. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter. Set aside.
Place a large baking sheet in the oven and preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Whisk together 1 1/4 cup of the buttermilk and the cornmeal in a medium microwave-safe bowl. Stir in the butter. Cover with plastic wrap or a plate. Microwave for 90 seconds. Stir, cover, and let rest for 5 minutes.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In small bowl, whisk together the remaining buttermilk and the eggs. Whisk the buttermilk/egg mixture into the cornmeal mixture then stir this mixture into the flour mixture until just combined and let rest for 10 minutes.
While the batter is resting, preheat a large skillet or griddle over medium heat. When the batter has finished resting, lightly grease the pan/griddle with canola or vegetable oil. Ladle 1/4 cup of batter onto the pan for each pancake. Cook until bubbly on top and light golden brown on the bottom, about 2 minutes. Carefully flip and cook until golden on the other side, 1 1/2 to 2 minutes longer. Remove from the pan and place in the oven. Repeat with remaining batter.
Serve pancakes warm with blueberry maple syrup and butter.

https://chattavore.com/cornmeal-pancakes-with-blueberry-maple-syrup/

Click here to print the recipe for cornmeal pancakes!

White Chicken Enchiladas (Make-Ahead)

March 20, 2015

White chicken enchiladas are a great make-ahead meal. You’ll be over the moon knowing creamy enchiladas are waiting in your fridge at the end of the day!

White chicken enchiladas are one of those meals that threaten to make me crazy, only because I’m such a perfectionist when it comes to my cooking. I’ve told you guys about my food tantrums, right? Well, I’m a grown-up and I’ve told myself that having food tantrums is ridiculous, but when I make enchiladas all bets are off. Now, if I cook the tortillas for a few seconds in oil to soften them, they won’t break…but let’s be real. Who has time for that?

So, when I made these and heated the tortillas in the microwave I held my breath and hoped for the best. As you can see…they broke. And I almost threw in the towel and stopped taking photos of this dish because broken tortillas. Then, however, I remembered that the people who read my blog are real people who also break tortillas and this is not Food and Wine paying me to get glamour shots of the enchiladas. Because let’s be honest…food photos are about lies. If you see pretty enchiladas in a picture, they have probably been fabricated in some way very different from the way that you would actually make enchiladas in your own kitchen. So I’m here to tell you: Chattavore makes real food in a real kitchen. I promise not to get too real…I’ll always wipe the crumbs off the counter before I take a picture!

These may not look pretty, but the beauty in these white chicken enchiladas lies in the fact that you can cook up all the components when you have about 20 extra minutes (assuming you have some shredded chicken stored away somewhere, which I usually do), put everything in the fridge, and then assemble and bake. Perfect for a night when those 20 extra minutes might put you over the edge on time. There’s nothing like coming home and knowing that dinner is in the fridge, almost ready.

Oh, and the other beautiful thing about these white chicken enchiladas is how great they taste. Honestly, I am not a fan of the usual red enchiladas. Enchiladas always look and sound so good when I see them on a restaurant menu, but then I’m always disappointed when I order them because they’re so….meh. These though? These are not meh, not at all.

So, if coming home to almost ready to eat white chicken enchiladas waiting for you in the fridge is your idea of a great evening, you should definitely make these. You will not be sad that you did.

Yield: 4 servings

Make-Ahead White Chicken Enchiladas

10 minPrep Time:

45 minCook Time:

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Ingredients

2 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 red, yellow, or orange bell peppers, seeded, quartered, and sliced
1 jalapeño, seeded and diced
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sour cream
8 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, shredded and divided
salt and pepper to taste
2 cups shredded chicken (I used smoked chicken, which was a fantastic idea)
8-ounce can salsa verde, divided
8 corn tortillas
toppings: sour cream, chopped cilantro, avocado

Instructions

Melt the butter in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until beginning to turn translucent. Add the bell pepper and jalapeño and cook until tender.
Sprinkle the flour over the cooked vegetables. Cook and stir for one minute. Add the cream and cook until thickened. Remove from heat and whisk in the sour cream and 1/4 of the cheese until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour into a covered bowl and store in the refrigerator.
Combine the chicken with half of the salsa verde. Pour the remaining salsa into a bowl and store in the refrigerator. Wrap the tortillas in paper towels and microwave for 30 seconds.
Place 1/4 cup of the chicken and a tablespoon of cheese into each tortilla and carefully roll up (some of them will probably break, but that’s okay!). Arrange the tortillas in 2-2.5 quart oblong baking dish. Cover and store in refrigerator. Place the remaining cheese in a bag or covered bowl and store in refrigerator.
To finish the dish: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Heat the sauce in the microwave or a small saucepan until it reaches a pourable consistency. Spread over the top of the enchiladas. Sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until cheese is browned. Serve immediately topped with remaining salsa and other desired toppings.

https://chattavore.com/make-ahead-white-chicken-enchiladas/

Click here to print the recipe for make-ahead white chicken enchiladas!

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