Recipe for Steel-Cut Oats in the Crockpot and Steel-Cut Oats with Agave and Pecans

One of my favorite breakfasts is Peanut Butter Oatmeal, which I usually make with Extra Thick Rolled Oats cooked in the microwave, using a method I learned from Alanna. Since I've become such an oatmeal fan, I've been wanting to try steel cut oats, but I wasn't sure about the longer cooking time, reported to be as much as 45 minutes on the stove. Then I heard about cooking steel cut oats in the crockpot, and when I tried it, I loved the crockpot version of steel cut oats. I ate them with peanut butter stirred in, and also with agave drizzled over and sprinkled with nuts, which you see in the photo above.

Friday Night Photos: House Renovations v. 2.1.5 (New Rooms Ready to be Filled with Memories)

This has been a week filled with end of school stress, plus an amazing retirement party on Wednesday night, hence not much cooking or blogging. I'm grateful to my beautiful sister-in-law Amy, who handled all the details for the party, and it was a fun-filled, kid-centered party, just like I wanted. I felt loved and honored by how many former students, parents, friends, and family members showed up to wish me well as I enter the new phase of my life.

Grilling Recipe Ideas for Memorial Day Weekend 2009

Greek Souvlaki will always be one of
my favorite things to cook on the grill.

It's Memorial Day Weekend in the U.S., the unofficial start of grilling season. I'm a big fan of cooking on the grill, but because of house renovations, this year my grill is still packed away in the garage. The house will get done, and I'll be grilling soon, but meanwhile here are some ideas from the recipe archives for those of you who are lucky enough to have grilling plans this weekend. Check after the photo for links to more collections of grilling recipes. Happy grilling everyone!

Friday Night Photos: 2009 Garden Update #2 (Lots of Veggies and House Renovations)

I'm still enthusiastic about gardening, but ever-ongoing house renovations are making it challenging this year. My sprinkling system is still torn up, and above is the view from the garden to the construction zone that's currently my back yard. Even with those issues, the weather says time to garden, so I've managed to keep the volunteers alive and plant a pretty good variety of veggies. (Warning, lots of photos ahead; this is partly for me to keep a record of what I'm growing. Links to plant descriptions are purely for information and aren't intended to be an endorsement of any seed purveyor or plant distributor.)

Recipe for Marinated and Roasted Vidalia Onion Rings with Parmesan

There's nothing I love more than an ultra-easy recipe that produces a truly memorable dish, and this recipe is definitely one of those. I recently bought a big bag of Vidalia onions as part of a fundraiser, so I've been thinking of ways to use them. After I marinated some onions for the Greek Salad with Marinated Onions and Oregano, I had the idea of marinating and then roasting the onions. If you're a fan of carmelized onions, this dish has that same umami-laden flavor. Next time you're cooking something in the oven, try roasting some marinated sweet onions for a delicious side dish.

Salad Recipe with Asparagus, Cherry Tomatoes, Kalamata Olives, and Feta

Cooking and blogging are getting harder to fit into the schedule around here, and you can blame it on house renovations that are starting to take over my life. I vowed not to complain, because I completely appreciate how much I'm blessed to be able to create such a wonderful working space, but having my house torn apart at the same time I'm ending the school year and packing up my classroom is taking its toll. These days dinner has to be something simple that can be made in a few minutes! If you have some leftover asparagus, this simple salad turned out to be quite delicious and can be on the table in under ten minutes.

Greek Salad with Marinated Onions and Oregano

(Updated and added to Recipe Favorites May 2009.) Recently I got a big bag of sweet Vidalia onions, and it seemed like the perfect time to make this salad again. I confess, I partly wanted to update the awful photos from 2007, when I made this right before school got out for the year. Now it's almost that time of year again (with a lot more to celebrate) and this still seems like a perfect dinner after a long, hot day at school. Greek salad is pretty basic, but marinating the Vidalia onions in olive oil and balsamic vinegar plus the addition of fresh oregano gives this version a little something extra.

Friday Night Photos: House Renovations v. 2.1.4 (Desk, Photo Corner, Tool Cupboard, and Deck!)

You can see from this photo that my house is still very much a construction zone, but there's some real progress happening too. In the last set of photos we talked about bookcases, a double pantry, and window trim. Now you can see a desk, photo corner, and tool cupboard coming together inside the new addition, and outside the covered deck is starting to take shape. Above, amid the construction mess, is a photo area that runs along the east wall of my office.

Kalyn's Kitchen Picks: Penzey's Dried and Minced Lemon Peel

Some people may be aghast to see that I'm picking dried lemon peel for Kalyn's Kitchen Picks, because I'm a well documented fan of fresh lemon zest. I've used it in recipes like Pan Fried Asparagus Tips, Stir-Fried Green Beans with Lemon, Parmesan, and Pine Nuts, and Chopped Tomato and Cucumber Salad. I'd never substitute this dried lemon peel in one of those recipes where the fresh lemon zest is an essential part of the recipe. However, there are times when you want just a tiny pinch of lemon zest flavor, and that's where this dried lemon peel is great to have in the pantry.

Recipe for Lentil Salad with Green Olives, Red Bell Pepper, Green Onion, and Greek Oregano

For years I've been crazy about brown lentils, a relationship that started with Mujadara at a now long-gone Salt Lake City restaurant called Cafe Mediterranean. Since then, whenever I'm thinking about what to cook, lentils are one of those ingredients that pop into my head. This salad started with an idea of combining brown lentils and green olives, something that was new to me. Then I was inspired to add some Greek oregano from my garden, a decidedly strong flavor, but one that I really thought added an interesting twist to the salad.

Recipe for Deviled Ham Spread for Stuffing Whole Wheat Pita or Celery

How do you feel about ham? Around here, it's something I don't buy that often, because ham needs to be pretty low in fat to be South Beach Diet friendly. Occasionally I do see ham that looks lean, and I might buy it if I have a recipe in mind that uses ham. Around Easter I was walking through Costco and saw a display of hams. Suddenly I thought about a post at Sweetnicks where she made Deviled Ham Salad Sandwiches, using a recipe from Gourmet Magazine. Well you know what happened next. One of those hams jumped into my basket and came home with me.

Recipe Favorites: Bobbi's Egg and Green Chile Breakfast Casserole

(Updated and added to Recipe Favorites May 2009) These days I frequently get comments or e-mails from people who've tried a recipe on the blog, but when I first started blogging, I could go days without anyone leaving a comment, and I never got e-mail about recipes in those days. Recently I got an e-mail from Gudrun from Kitchen Gadget Girl, who I'd met in San Francisco in 2008 when I was attending the BlogHer Conference. She told me she was going to try this recipe to surprise her husband who loves green chiles, and when I looked at the recipe I realized it didn't have a single photo, and there were no comments either. Such a shame, and I'm slowly updating recipes from my archives, so I decided I had to make this myself so I could take photos and update it.

Friday Night Photos: 2009 Garden Update #1 (Friends from last year are back.)

One part of spring that's rewarding is venturing out into the garden to see what perennials came back from last year. In Utah, there are always a few casualties, but because I'm usually pretty haphazard about clearing away the plants in the fall, lots of years I have garden "volunteers" where old plants have dropped seeds. This year I've been slow to get started on the garden for a variety of reasons, including house renovations that have left torn-up sprinklers all over the yeard. I've only planted a few things so far, but there are quite a few friends back from last year. Above are green onions that came up (or survived the winter?) in one of my herb beds. I was afraid they'd be bitter, but I used a few of them and they actually tasted fine.

Kalyn's Kitchen Picks: Bob's Red Mill Extra-Thick Rolled Oats (Oatmeal)

Kalyn's Kitchen Picks is a blog feature where I spotlight products that really wow me. These are not to be confused with product reviews, where a PR person sends something in the mail and the blogger talks about how well he or she liked it. Although I do occasionally (but rarely) accept new products to sample, my picks are products I purchase myself, and happily buy over and over again. It's been a while since I featured anything new, but I started thinking about these extra-thick rolled oats when Utah food bloggers Vanessa and Maria were both talking about oatmeal on Twitter recently. I've been eating this extra-thick oatmeal from Bob's Red Mill for weekday breakfasts for the last few months, so I decided it really should be added to my list of picks.

Recipe Favorites: Un-Scrambled Eggs (Mini-Frittata) with Bacon, Green Onions, and Feta

(Updated and added to Recipe Favorites, May 2009) I shake my head sometimes when I look at my earliest posts, and apparently when I named this recipe back in 2005 I thought it was clever to call it Un-Scrambled Eggs. Now I'd probably call this type of egg dish a mini-frittata. This one has three of my all-time favorite ingredients, and it's just the the kind of breakfast I love to make on the weekend.

Friday Night Photos: House Renovations v. 2.1.3 (Bookcases, Pantry, Window Trim and More!)

As you can see, it's pretty much still a construction zone around Chez Kalyn. Last time I reported on the progress, I was thrilled to have sheetrock, and there've been many more exciting developments since then. Above are shelves for cookbooks along the west wall of my office, which some of you already saw when I posted a sneak preview. I'm definitely excited to have these bookshelves!

South Beach Diet Phase One Recipes Round-Up for April 2009

Kalyn's favorite Phase One Recipe for April was
Turkey Lettuce Wrap Tacos with Chiles, Cumin,
Cilantro, Lime, and Tomato-Avocado Salsa

Every month I post round-ups of South Beach Diet Phase One Recipes I've cooked that month or found on other blogs, but I confess, some months the process of saving the bookmarks is pretty serendipitous. Interestingly though, even when it's hectic around here, I always end up with a pretty good collection of phase one recipes. Since one reason for doing these round-ups is to illustrate that it's not that hard to find good things to eat for phase one, it works out just perfectly!