I am recapping a bunch of new recipes that I made over the last couple weeks/months for you guys! I will review and let you know what changes we made for each recipe.
New blog author favorite: The Defined Dish
I love following the Alex from The Defined Dish! The recipes are all very approachable, healthy, and delicious. Plus, she lives in Dallas TX, so her seasons are the same as mine… which is helpful when all the other bloggers I am following are posting soups and chilis right now but it’s still 90+ degrees in Texas.
These are the recipes I have tried so far from her website:
- Paleo Sweet and Sour Chicken Stir Fry (5/5) — Trey and I love this one and have made it several times since first discovering it! We are not following a paleo diet, so we use regular rice and the “normal” versions of some ingredients. For example, we use soy sauce instead of coconut aminos. The amount of sauce is great for just the chicken, but when you add rice, I think we prefer a bit more sauce so I would 1.5x the sauce recipe if you are similar-minded. (If you are worried it would not be enough sauce, I’d go ahead and 1.5x the recipe.)
- Easy Chicken and Vegetable Curry (4/5) — I really like this one, but I feel like I prefer the vegetables in it to the chicken. I think that is a personal preference though because Trey likes the chicken a lot in this meal. I usually have made it with regular potatoes, not sweet potatoes, because that is what I’ve had around to use. We serve this with regular rice as well, not cauliflower rice.
- Ginger-Scallion Chicken Fried Cauliflower Rice (3/5) — This one was OK but we didn’t use cauliflower rice, which was probably a mistake! We tried to use regular rice but the volumes of cauliflower rice to regular rice do not equate… so we ended up with a huge volume of rice to chicken. What I would do next time, I would probably just make the ginger-scallion chicken with the sauce and serve it over the rice instead of doing it as a fried rice. I would also add more scallions than it calls for!
- Sizzling Shrimp Fajitas (2/5) — We liked the concept of this but found our shrimp to turn out way too watery for some reason. I think it may have been something to do with the brand that we bought, but I’m not 100% certain. We didn’t buy the tail-on shrimp and ours were a lot smaller than hers appear to be in the picture. I would maybe try this again, but I’m not dying to do it again.
Besides Alex’s blog, we have also made the recipes below.
- Pesto Mac & Cheese (5/5) — This is such an easy recipe, and the addition of the basil pesto makes this meal feel more elevated than a normal mac & cheese recipe. The only change we made was just using normal sharp cheddar (tillamook brand!) cheese because we didn’t want to splurge on Havarti.
- Chocolate Olive Oil Cake (5/5) — I was looking for a good potluck cake, and I didn’t want to head to the store… so this is what I ended up on. It is very delicious and extremely fudgy! Plus, it is very simple. I think you could make this honestly with any sort of oil because the taste does not come through at all.
Hope you all find something you enjoy! Let me know if you try any of these recipes!
Enjoy this photo of our delicious chocolate olive oil cake.
