Green Macaroni and Pound Cake

As of late, I have been slacking off on my cooking duties and Jonathan has been making most of the new recipes. I decided I would have something nice ready for dinner when Jonathan came home on Thursday. While stumbling along the internet, I found this recipe. It caught my eye for several reasons...
1. The blog is called "the food in my beard" which is wonderfully weird almost to the point of being gross.
2. Green? As in eco friendly? Or pesto-y? Either way, I'm game!
3. The picture of it looked awesome compared to the peanut butter and crackers I was having for dinner that night.
4. And I had a whole box of basil in my fridge that I was planning on using for pesto anyway.

I decided to change a few things: I had no fresh arugula, oregano or marjoram available to me, so I decided to just add lots of cilantro and a zucchini to the pesto mix instead (the food processor is a wonderful, wonderful thing!) I also added some grated parmesean.


...it made ALOT.

For the cheese bechamel sauce I used monterey jack, provolone and parmesean and only used 3 cups of milk. I didn't know how I was going to fit all the pesto, all the cheese and all the pasta into our little 9x13" pan and I don't think bechamel freezes well.

So! In went both sauces, the pasta, some broccoli and kielbasa to round it all out and it just barely fit in the pan. Topped off with more parmesean and 30 minutes later...

...we had dinner!

I thought it was pretty tasty, though a little heavy as mac and cheese usually is. I loved that it has so many vegetables built in (zucchini, spinach, cilantro, broccoli crowns and stems and onion). I definitely would have added more sausage as it adds the extra protein and flavors. All in all, I would say I enjoyed the recipe very much (and the leftover pesto will make an appearance in pesto bread... (though possibly after the move).


Now onto Dessert!

Thanks to both Jen and Stephanie, this pound cake recipe is ultimately from Martha Stewart magazine. As Jonathan already had two dishes, I took over dessert responsibilities. I originally was going to make the toasted coconut and chocolate chip varieties, except that yours truly was retarded and got all the ingredients except for the coconut (quick! plan b!? what do I have in the fridge?) blueberries! eureka! blueberry almond pound cake!

So, after divying up the batter base into two parts, one half got 1 cup of chocolate chips and a quick mix, the other half got 1/2 teaspoon almond extract and a small clamshell of fresh blueberries. About 10 minutes after putting the loaves in the oven I was inspired by this morning's breakfast almond croissant to throw some slivered almonds on top.



I was pleased! The blueberries stayed fairly uniform throughout the batter and were nice and moist without staining the loaf. I would have added some more extract, maybe 3/4 tsp. or 1 tsp. instead. The almonds on top provided a nice contrasting texture. I think this loaf was my favorite.
Jonathan preferred the chocolate chip loaf, though I think it was missing something, maybe ice cream :). I was sad to find that the chips all mostly sunk to the bottom of the loaf. boo.



All in all, a successful weekend of cooking so far!