Movie Night

Once a month we get together with our friends Gerd and Maria to catch up, have dinner and watch a movie. It’s a nice way to keep in touch and they are happy to try some of my food experiments some of which turn out and some well not so much. 

I’ve been trying to perfect my vegan cashew cheese; each time I make it I tweak the flavors just a bit; sometimes I add more garlic, sometimes I change the herbs and sometimes I add more/less nutritional yeast to give it a cheesy flavor. I think the batch I made this week was quite tasty and may be my go to recipe going forward. 

I recently acquired the Pampered Chef RockCrok Stand, which turns the amazing RockCrok into a slow cooker. What’s cool about that is that you can use the RockCrok on pretty much any surface. So I was able to brown the onion and veggie crumbles in the Crok on the stove then add all the other ingredients directly into the pan, put it in the stand and slow cook it for 4 hours. Can you say fewer dishes to wash - I can.

I’ve been hungry for Calico Beans lately - for those of you who are not familiar with the dish it involves meat, bacon and beans; pork n beans, kidney beans and traditionally lima beans. As a vegetarian (who occasionally eats fish) this just wouldn’t work so I took a standard recipe and replaced the meat with veggie crumbles, the pork n beans with southern beans (vegetarian) and even though I like lima beans not everyone likes them so I substituted butter beans - the result was delicious - but we forgot to take a picture - ugh. 

What we did get a picture of was my spiralized cantaloupe salad with mozzarella, a  little prosciutto and mint. I picked around the prosciutto - it was quite tasty! If you don’t own a Spriralizer you could simply cut the melon in chunks it would taste the same but I really like the look of the threads of melon with the cheese and meat. You can get the full recipe with beautiful photos and a video on how to spiralize a cantaloupe from the Inspiralizer blog. 

I followed the recipe exactly (surprising right) and the result was delicious.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 teaspoon honey

1 tablespoon freshly chopped mint

1 medium cantaloupe, peeled

Mozzarella approximately 1/3 of a ball of fresh mozzarella cubed

~2oz prosciutto 

Instructions

In the bottom of a large mixing bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lemon juice, honey, mint and season with salt and pepper.

Set your Inspiralizer to Blade C. Load the cantaloupe onto the Inspiralizer and spiralizer until you start hitting the seeded interior. Scoop out the seeds and continue spiralizing until you yield about 4-5 cups of noodles. You can keep going and save the excess for future use or you can stop spiralizing, cube the cantaloupe (or keep whole) and save for future use.

Add the cantaloupe noodles to the bowl along with the mozzarella and toss well to combine.

Plate the cantaloupe salad on a serving platter and add in the prosciutto. Serve.

Thanks for stopping by!