Fajita Quesadillas

I have found that Mexican dishes are pretty dang easy to make vegetarian, so I’ll probably be eating a lot of it from now on, which frankly isn’t hurting my feelings one bit. I should have married a Mexican man so that my mother in law could teach me all of the goodness that is tamales, tacos, and enchiladas. That’s my love language right there.

Quesadillas are a crowd pleaser and my house and we often make Chicken and bean quesadillas. For Vegetarian week, I decided to make up my own thing completely, mixing two of my favorite dishes together: Fajita Quesadillas!

Ingredients:

• mushrooms
• 3 red peppers
• 2 green peppers
• half of a huge walla walla sweet onion (or Vidalia)
• 3 garlic cloves minced
• tortillas
• cheese
• black beans, precooked and rinsed
• a few tablespoons of avocado oil
• a few tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
• sea salt/pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Get a sauté pan going on medium heat. Add a tablespoon of avocado oil, and  get the mushrooms, peppers, onions and oil sautéing. Add Worcestershire sauce.
2. After the onions are caramelized and everything is smelling amazing, take off the heat and let the veggies rest while you start the quesadillas.
3. In another pan, get some more avocado oil heating up on medium. Put one tortilla down. Add cheese, beans and fajita veggies and put a tortilla on top. Cook until golden brown on both sides.
4. Remove from heat, let cool a couple mintues. Cut with a pizza cutter. Serve with Guac and Pico De Gallo!

Enjoy!

Ranch Dip

If you are following my Vegetarian week, you will see that one Day One I ate celery and ranch dressing as one of my snacks. I wanted to share with you the recipe I found for this amazing Ranch that is totally guilt free!

I found this recipe off of pinterest, and I tweaked it slightly. Click Here to see the link to the ordinal recipe by The Foodie and the Fix.

Here is my version.

• 1 cup of cottage cheese
• 5 tablespoons of plain Greek yogurt
• Juice of one lemon
• 1 teaspoon of onion powder
• 2 teaspoons of garlic salt
• 2 teaspoons of dill

Pile all the ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste if you wish. To be honest, I was afraid to try this recipe because I hate cottage cheese, but surprisingly it actually taste like real ranch, and its a way better option then the oils and other nasty stuff hiding in commercial ranch dips/dressing. If you would like to use this as a dressing instead of dip, you’ll need to add a few tablespoons of milk until its thinned out to your liking. Enjoy!

Kung Wow

If you are anything like my husband, you are obsessed with Asian food. Obsessed. And if you are anything like me, you think Panda Express is greasy and NOT Asian at all. Gross. So here is where we meet in …

Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers

I love peppers, A LOT. So naturally, this recipe appealed to me when I saw it on pinterest. Philly Cheese Steak without bread, YES please!
I didn’t have the time or patience to actually cook a steak and cut it very thinly, so instead I used Natural Nitrite-Free Roast Beef.

Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers:
Ingredients:
2 6oz packages of Natural Nitrite-free Roast Beef
6 slices Provolone Cheese
1 Walla Walla Sweet Onion (or whatever local variety you have on hand)
6 Organic Green Bell Peppers

Ingredients

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Dice onion. Cut roast beef into strips. I cut the pepper in half lengthwise so I can have an easier time cutting them up for the kids and it’s also better for portion control. Pop the halved peppers into the oven with some water in the dish to soften them up for a few minutes. While that’s happening, put the onions in a skillet with the roast beef to heat up. Add salt and pepper. Take out the peppers and fill them with the roast beef. Pop back in oven for about 10 minutes. Take out and add Provolone Cheese. It only takes a couple of minutes to melt! Take it out and enjoy! I served mine with a salad tonight.

Straight out of the oven

Our Dinner Plate

So delicious!

Family review: This recipe fed my whole family with a half of a pepper left over (for my lunch tomorrow!!). I was thoroughly impressed with this dish. SO yummy! My kids didn’t want to eat the pepper at first (this is the one veggie we have a hard time with) because they thought it was spicy. After I told them it was sweet, they went ahead and ate it. Sam loved it and wants to have it again! So for a first time recipe, it was a success. I will be making this again! Tomorrow I am making one of my favorite meals ever. Kung-wow Chicken!!

Taco Salad

This is one of my favorite meals ever! Its also extremely easy to put together, taking literally a few minutes! I often do this meal before church on Saturday evenings or on a weeknight when I have NO time.

This meal starts with prepping the ground beef with homemade taco seasoning. If you’ve ever looked at the package of Taco Seasoning you get from the grocery store, you will find a lot of chemicals mixed in with the seasonings. I am not a big fan of that, so I decided to make my own Taco Seasoning!

Homemade Taco Seasoning

Recipe for Taco Seasoning:
1 Cup Chili Pepper
1/2 Cup Cumin
1/4 Cup Onion Powder
1/4 Cup Oregano
2 Tablespoons Garlic Powder
2 Tablespoons Paprika
2 Tablespoons Crushed Red Pepper Flakes (more if you like the heat)
1 Tablespoon Sea Salt
a few dashes of Cayenne pepper (after all, my kiddos aren’t a big fan of heat)

Put ingredients in a pint canning jar and shake! Easy Peasy! The batch that this recipe produces has lasted me FOREVER!

So onto the Taco Salad! First I’d like to give Fred Meyer’s Grocery Store a huge thumbs up! For the first time in any major chain grocery store I found this beautiful little package.

Grass Fed Organic Ground Beef

Grass Fed Organic Beef!! WOW! Way to go Fred Meyers! You are amazing!! I see organic beef ALL the time, and yes Organic Beef is a little bit better than regular beef, but Grass Fed Beef is the best you can eat! I will reserve this topic for another post because I could talk about this forever. All I will say is it was $7 a pound, which is a little crazy, but I was thankful to see this in stores. HUGE step in the right direction.

TACO SALAD:
Ingredients:
1 pound of Grass Fed Beef
2 tablespoons of taco seasoning mix
1 lettuce head shredded
1 tomato, diced
1 bunch of green onions, sliced
1 can of black olives, sliced
1 small bag of shredded medium cheddar cheese
1 4oz of tomato sauce
2 tablespoons Organic Thousand Island Dressing

Directions:
Brown the beef in the skillet, and add the taco seasoning. Once completely cooked through, put in a container in the fridge to cool it down. While the beef is cooling, get a big bowl out to assemble salad. Put lettuce, tomato, green onions, black olives, and shredded cheese in the big bowl and mix. Empty can of tomato sauce into the salad mixture. Add thousand island and mix again. Once beef is cooled down enough, put it in the salad and mix. Garnish with some Organic Tortillas chips. YUMMMM

Taco Salad

This is JUST enough for my family of 6. Soon I will have to adjust this recipe for a bigger quantity.You can put this salad into a tortilla wrap and eat as a burrito as well. That is what my kids like best. I just like it straight up! I hope you enjoy! Tomorrow I’m making Philly Cheese Steak stuffed Bell Peppers!!