Friday, May 4, 2012

{Recipe Recap} Birthday Bites

So I got home from Florida on Monday the 23rd.  Most of you know how I always take the day after traveling (usually a Monday) off.  If my birthday happens to fall on a Monday or a Friday, I’ll take it off, too.  That’s the upside to never getting sick; I have plenty of vacation days to use however I choose.

Anyway, if it weren’t for Jenny’s surprise birthday trip, I wouldn’t have had my birthday off since it fell on a Tuesday.  But “day after getting back from traveling” trumps “birthday on Tuesday” so I got to enjoy one of those random vacation days that I’m famous for.

Since I was at home and the McHusband had to work, I decided to make my birthday dinner.  As I typically only cook on Sundays, I have more recipes saved to make than opportunity to cook them and after four days away from home, I was ready to stand at the stove and eat at the coffee table.

This meal was inspired, once again, by a Lean Cuisine.  I searched my Google Reader, the Tasty Kitchen site, and Allrecipes for the term “makhani” and couldn’t settle on a recipe from any of those web sites.  So I turned to everyone’s best friend in this digital age: Google.  That led me to this recipe, which is a lightened up version of the traditional Indian dish.

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I served it over brown rice.  It had some kick to it and both the McHusband and I really liked the heat it packed.  I could’ve done with a little less tomato sauce flavor so if I chose to make this again, I’d probably cut the tomato puree down to 1.5 cups.

If you like Indian food, or know you like spiciness and tomato sauce, you should give this a try.

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Now on to dessert!  Remember, I came home to an abundance of very ripe bananas.

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These cookies were in my Reader and had several flavors I like or love: peanut butter, chocolate, and banana.

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They baked up beautifully and had a really nice texture and I made sure they were overloaded with chocolate chips.

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Personally, I didn’t really like these very much.  The banana flavor just threw me off.  But I seem to be in the minority as my coworkers and the McHusband’s all enjoyed them.  One of the McHusband’s coworkers even asked for the recipe.

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So I guess my recommendation is try these if you think you’ll like ‘em, but don’t complain to me if you don’t love ‘em.  I thought they were right up my alley, but it turns out they were one street over.

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But they sure look good, don’t they?

{Birthday Dinner}

{Birthday Cookies}

(Check back after lunch today for a healthy snack recipe.  Might as well kick off the weekend with the right foot.)

1 comment:

McHusband said...

And for the record, I tried to take the McWife out for dinner on her birthday, where ever she wanted, but she opted to cook. So I'm not the awful/demanding husband who said, "Stay home and cook me dinner woman!" :)