Kitchen Sink

Hi friends! So it's been a while since my last blog.  The next couple of weekends are going to busy also so not sure how many times I'm going to be cooking. I can already tell you that in 2 weeks I will probably be missing due to the last series of baseball games =/

So last night, I decided to make pasta since Eric and mentioned wanting it.  We had gone to dinner the night before for my bday and had some pesto and it was pretty delicious.  I looked in the fridge and had a lot of random ingredients that I figured I could throw together to make some pasta so here's kind of how it went.

Ingredients:

cream cheese

noodles

sour cream

tomatoes

sun dried tomatoes

basil

parmesan

chicken stock

mushrooms

lemon

garlic

leftover rotisserie chicken

Just in case you're wondering, those aren't socks on my counter.  They're gloves...so you don't think that I cook and place my socks in the same place :)

So to start, I cut the tomatoes in half and chopped up some garlic, chicken, and the sundried tomatoes.  I also began boiling water for the pasta.  once my olive oil was heated, I added the garlic and cooked for about 1 minute and then added the sundried tomatoes and mushrooms.  Once those cooked down for a bit, I added the tomatoes and chicken. 

I let all of that cook for a bit just for it to heat through and then added the cream cheese I had leftover from making spinach artichoke dip, sour cream, lemon juice, and chicken stock. 

 I let this all cook together for a while...basically to let the cream cheese and sour cream melt down.  I also seasoned it a bit with some nutmeg.  I guess you could say this was a little like an alfredo but without cream/milk.

For an appetizer, I made honey roasted figs wrapped in prosciutto and served it with ricotta cheese.  I've been wanting to do something with figs for a while now before they went out of season but couldn't figure out what so I finally bought some yesterday and decided to make something with them.  The ingredients were:

cinnamon

figs

butter

prosciutto

honey

ricotta

This is incredibly easy and really good so I suggest it. I didn't take a lot of pictures b/c all I did was halve the figs and then wrap them in prosciutto and put them in a dish.  Then, I cooked all the ingredients together in a pot and when they cooked together, I poured the honey mixture on top of the figs.  Then I baked them in the oven for about 15 minutes until the prosciutto started to melt and the figs softened.  

Final products looked like this!

The figs were great!  You could put them on top of ice cream or mascarpone or any time of light dessert cheese or cream.  They had a great amount of sweet and salty due to the honey and the prosciutto.  I also must say the pasta turned out really well!  The sauce was a great creaminess and it seemed like it would be really heavy but it wasn't due to the use of chicken stock instead of milk/cream as the liquid base.  It had a good tartness and was almost tomato-like but still creamy.  I was pretty impressed with myself, I must say, seeing as how this was all made with random things leftover in the fridge