Tag Archives: Whole Foods

Are we back in the swing of things? I think we are!

12 Sep

Back to delicious fall meals on our menu!

Happy fall y’all!

Technically, it’s not quite fall yet, and it’s actually still warm out. But, meal-wise, we’re all in. It’s fall on our menu here at home.

After a pretty lengthy absence here on the blog, I am back at it. Our kitchen is fully functional, although not completely finished (and won’t be for a while) and our kids are back to school- week two, so my schedule is much more normal and structured, our meals are back to normal, and I’m ready to share some great new things with you.

Today’s photo does not do my new recipe any justice at all, but I didn’t realize it until I looked at the picture later on, that I must’ve taken it after we’d eaten all of the broccoli, and there was barely any left on my plate when I snapped the photo that night. (I guess I still wasn’t 100% back in the game at that point last week!)

So you must take my word for it, our word for it. This recipe was simple and amazingly good; a great way to dress up a simple vegetable. Everyone in my family raved about it, and to be honest, it wasn’t even the recipe I started out looking to make. I stumbled on it completely by accident.

Just a few recipes I’d put aside to go through “some day.”

When we first emptied our kitchen, I had a whole big, long countertop of cookbooks to store until I found them a new home. On top of that big pile was a big pile of torn out, pulled out, printed out recipes I’d stuck on top of the pile to go through at some point.

During the summer, after the kitchen work had ended, I found my cookbooks a new home on a couple of closet shelves, but I couldn’t avoid the obvious: I had to go through the pile.

In doing so, I found many new recipes I’d been meaning to try and a whole year’s worth of Gluten Free Living magazines to go through. Some my daughter and I had already tabbed the recipes we wanted to try, and some still needed to be tabbed. Then I needed to pull those recipes out and put all my single recipes into a folder to store on the shelf.

A couple of weeks later, I was looking for a smashed broccoli recipe from Whole Foods that I’d tried a couple of years ago, and I went to my folder and pulled it out. Turns out though, although it was on the same paper as the one I’d gone in for, this broccoli recipe wasn’t the same one. Instead, it was for a Broccoli Parmesan side dish. It looked good though, easy and it looked like something everyone would like so instead of hunting around for the other recipe, I tried this one out. It said right on it that we’d tried it before, but I had no memory of it.

Everyone loved it. They all thought for sure I’d never made it before and all requested that I make it again. Being such a simple recipe, I told them I definitely could do a repeat performance, even if this might have been a repeat already.

So, although you can’t quite get a good look at it here, since we’d eaten most of it by the time I took the photo, you can get the general idea, and then when you make it, you can get the full picture.

Here is the recipe, thanks to our local Whole Foods.

Garlic Parmesan Broccoli

Ingredients

1/2 Broccoli

1 tsp. minced garlic

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

 

Instructions

Cook broccoli to your preference. Add oil to saucepan.

Add broccoli, minced garlic and Parmesan cheese. Cook until broccoli is coated.

Enjoy!

 

Quick and Easy Garlic Parmesan Broccoli

21 Mar
The "after" picture

The “after” picture

“Oh yay! This is my favorite broccoli!”

I kid you not. Those words were spoken at dinnertime tonight when I put this side dish on the dinner table.

This broccoli recipe has in fact, become a new favorite. It might even be neck and neck in line with this one as a favorite broccoli side dish.

We were given this recipe at our local Whole Foods store one Saturday afternoon. Although I don’t do a ton of shopping there, I do have a few things that I need to buy that I can only find there, so one afternoon we were all together and we stopped in to pick up those types of things.

 

Such a simple recipe!

Such a simple recipe!

Being a Saturday afternoon around lunchtime, the samples were in full swing. Roaming a store, trying out new things, is one of our family’s favorite things to do. On that day we were given samples of a new favorite granola and of this Garlic Parmesan Broccoli. Although my family tends to really like broccoli, they really LOVED this recipe. As we took our samples, the employee at Whole Foods handed us the paper copy of the recipe. I folded it and put it in my purse and kind of forgot about it. It was late January or early February when we were there, and it was probably the end of February when I remembered I had it and tried it out one night. Sometimes when you make something at home after having had it out, it might not come out the same way. This recipe was seemingly impossible to mess up, and it came out great. I don’t always have fresh broccoli on hand, but I use my Pampered Chef hand-held food chopper to chop frozen broccoli florets after they’re cooked, and it works out great.

Looks unexciting in the bowl, but gets rave reviews every time!

Looks unexciting in the bowl, but gets rave reviews every time!

And so, tonight when I made it again and I got the exclamation that this is the favorite broccoli recipe, I knew I had to share it with you today. It’s fast and easy and delicious. There’s almost never anything left over, which is always a good sign of a great recipe. I also like that although we got it from Whole Foods, which tends to have a reputation for being very expensive, this particular recipe is very budget-friendly. You can use frozen broccoli, a jar of minced garlic and sprinkle cheese, or you can use fresh broccoli, fresh garlic and fresh grated cheese, depending what your budget looks like and what you happen to have on hand. You can also do any combination of fresh and not fresh also.

Next time you’re looking to spice up a plain side dish like a bowl of steamed broccoli, give this one a try! You never know, you might find that your kids have a favorite broccoli too!