Katie's Kale Salad (and a few other recipes from this week)

Katie's Kale Salad
I made a few more pinterest recipes this week but this one was offline from my good friend Katie.  Katie is an excellent resource for all things vegetable or healthy eating, and is known to be a big fan of kale.  So much so that she's joked at times that it is her very favorite food.  So naturally she was the first person I asked about how to make kale so that my family would eat it (rather than choke it down like they did last time). She recommended her favorite kale salad that has walnuts, cranberries and mandarin oranges.

2 bunches thinly chopped kale (take the middle vein out first)

1 bunch cilantro leaves

walnuts

cranberries

mandarin oranges

green onions

dressing:

2 parts orange juice

1 part olive oil

crushed garlic (I use about 3 cloves)

a dash of honey (to taste)

a dash of sea salt and pepper

*shake WELL before tossing salad.

Toss and serve! 

Did you know that kale needed the middle vein taken out?  That was new to me.  I thought the salad was pretty good, and the dressing light and not-too-sweet.  The garlic was a bit spicy so I might do only 1 clove next time, but all in all it was great!  Thanks Katie. :)

Provencal Beef Stew

Today I made Provencal Beef Stew a recipe I found on pinterest.  It is a fabulous crock pot stew that has zucchini instead of potatoes.  It smelled amazing all day and was a big hit with both the 4 year old and the husband.  A little warm french bread smothered in butter (from Costco, they are small loves that go in the freezer) made it a perfect meal for our cold (well it's in the upper 50's) day.

Ranch Dressing

Another recipe that I tried out was a buttermilk ranch dressing.  I love ranch but not the store bought/bottle kind.  I prefer a fresh house ranch and rarely eat it at home since I can't stand any that we've purchased.  I found this recipe to be pretty good and the only change I made was to use just chives and not parsley (I ran out).  This ranch can be used as a dip or dressing.  We used it to dip peppers, carrots and snap peas.

Penne a la Betsy

The final pinterest recipe that I tried this week was the Pioneer Woman's Penne a la Betsy.  It is basically creamy tomato sauce with shrimp. This dish was VERY good but I had a few mishaps along the way.  I tried to use rice-noodles for the penne and something went very very wrong.  They were mushy and tasted like paste.  So I quickly started a new batch of pasta (whole wheat this time) and stopped the rest of the recipe while that cooked.  Of course as this was happening my baby started getting fussy and my 4 year old had a million questions.  Sigh.  After pasta #2 was ready I continued with the recipe and was pleasantly surprised to find that the sauce was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.  So good.  I could have just eaten the sauce as a soup.  Perhaps it was the heavy cream? Ha!  I will definitely make this one again.  This was my first Pioneer Woman dish and I'm sure it won't be my last. 

What did you make this week that was fabulous?  Any kale recipes to send my direction?