Archives For Side Dish

[This is Part 4 in our Catering series. To view previous posts, click here.]

Sorry it’s taken us so long (too long!) to get the rest of this series posted. We have said it before, but our lives are a little jam packed! The kiddos have been in full action these days! Over the last month we’ve had vacation bible school, T-Ball, playdates, birthday parties, and Father’s day festivities. Not to mention the usual time we like to carve out for friends, church and TV! Yes…we protect our TV time. Our current TV addiction is Breaking Bad. We are hooked.

Anyways, on to the food..peppers. Quinoa stuffed poblano peppers to be exact. We started with fresh, off the truck poblano peppers from a local Mexican grocery store. Dave had to wait until the very last minute to get these babies. The truck didn’t get there with the peppers until the morning of the party, so he was waiting at the front door when the store opened at 10:00 AM.  Cutting it close! Once all 60 peppers were cleaned and halved we filled them with a warm quinoa salad. We’ve posted a very similar version of this before…it’s one of our favorite ways to use quinoa. It was extra awesome and satisfying when it was stuffed into the peppers, roasted, and drizzled with salsa verde.

Quinoa Stuffed Poblano Peppers

(photo courtesy of The Wedding Format)

Continue Reading…

Diner Dinner

Dave and Sarah Eickelberg —  January 25, 2012 — 2 Comments

A couple weeks ago, we mentioned how we wanted to “healthify” in 2012. We’ve been doing a pretty good job so far, but we recently had a craving for a good ol’ fashioned diner meal. We really wanted to eat a burger, fries and shake. But instead of going out to eat somewhere to satisfy our guilty craving, we decided to make it at home and make a few healthy swaps.

We ended up making a BBQ Turkey Burger with Caramelized Onions, Parmesan Garlic Fries, and a Chocolate, Peanut Butter, Banana, Smoothie!

Continue Reading…

60 freaking degrees today. That is insane for Iowa weather! The warm weather has us thinking about some of our favorite spring and summer meals. One meal that we can’t stop thinking about is the Chicken Milanese that rocked our worlds last summer..so good! While we could eat that exact same meal every week, we try to practice self control. But, we did feel like we should definitely make a more seasonal version.

Continue Reading…

We’ve had fun recreating some of our favorite school lunches. There has been Chili and Cinnamon Rolls, Italian Dunkers and Chili Cheese Dogs. This time we’re going with another Chili related meal. (There seems to be a theme here…apparently we Eickelbergs love our chili!) Remember this from the school lunch calendar…..Baked Potato Bar?! Oh yeah, that old classic! We remade this at home and loved how it turned out. We, of course, put a little twist on it. ;) It was somehow light and filling at the same time. Chili Cheese Baked potatoes in 5 ingredients….

Continue Reading…

Thanksgiving is tomorrow! Tomorrow!! If you haven’t done so already, be sure to take our Thanksgiving Day Poll.

We can’t wait until the day when we can dream up a Thanksgiving menu, spend hours in the kitchen and serve a delicious feast to our friends and family. Until then, we get the honor of feasting on Sarah’s Grandma Betty’s Thanksgiving meal. She is 85 and still rockin it! Of course, we all pitch in with the extras but she’s in charge of the main dishes. It’s such a sweet thing to be able to enjoy a meal made with so much love. The rest of the family loves to cook as well (we even have our own family cookbook!) so there will be no shortage of food. We’re guessing at least 25 dishes! No joke!

Since we’re only supplying the rolls for Thursday’s meal we wanted to make something that tasted like a turkey dinner but much simpler. The star of the show was the Thanksgiving Wild Rice chock full of turkey sausage, apples and cranberries.

We also whipped up two simple sides, Maple Roasted Butternut Squash and Mozzarella and Scallion Corn Muffins. This was all the flavors you love from the giant Thanksgiving meal in only 3 dishes and done in abut an hour. Win!

Continue Reading…

It’s a sad time in the home of 1 cup Awesome.

While it’s true that Fall is our favorite season, there is one downside to the days getting colder…

Dave can no longer spend time with his grillfriend.

She has been so faithful over the last six months, providing us tasty meals like:

Jerk Chicken with Corn Cakes
Pizza Burgers
Lime Chicken Drumsticks and Quinoa Salad
Grilled Pork and Fontina Sandwiches

And many, many more…

The other night we decided to have one last hurrah on the grill before we put her away for the year. What better way to end grilling season than with a thick, juicy steak?! We served the steak with roasted brussels sprouts and pressed potatoes (these are awesome!).

Pin It

We want to start by showing you these pressed potatoes, because it is such a sweet idea. We got the idea from a recent Rachael Ray magazine.

Continue Reading…

Before Sarah and I even started dating about nine years ago, I told my college roommate, “I think I’m going to end up marrying Sarah Adreon.”

How could I be so sure that I would one day marry a girl that I had only known for a few months?

It was simple…she shared the same likes in food. I still remember talking to Sarah an AOL instant messenger one night and finding out that she loved black olives. My heart skipped a beat when I saw those words pop up in my IM screen. I imagined us sitting together at Thanksgiving dinner, enjoying our meal with black olives on our fingers.


(image source)

But it wasn’t just that we both liked the same food, it was also the fact that we both disliked the same food.

Ham and bean soup.

Fish.

Beef pot roast.

Those were meals that we just could not stand growing up. It wasn’t that our parents made these meals awful, we just didn’t like them. You know how it is…we all had meals that our parents made that we just didn’t like. If our parents made any of these meals now, we would eat them right up! Our tastes have changed over time.

But it wasn’t until a couple years ago that we realized we actually do love pot roast, and we owe it all to Tyler Florence. When we saw Tyler make his Ultimate Pot Roast, we knew it was time to give the meal another try. Holy cow, are we glad that we tried it!!! There are two keys to this pot roast that really make the meal. The first is to get a nice crust on the outside of the roast before braising it, which adds tons of flavor to the roast. The second trick is to add a can of crushed tomatoes. The tomatoes give the roast a whole new level of flavor! Pair the pot roast with some roasted butternut squash and sweet potatoes and you have yourself the perfect Sunday meal!

Continue Reading…

Beef Ole.

Personal Pizzas.

Turkey Tetrazzini.

Chicken and Noodles.

Sunday Waffle Bar.

These are some of the memorable foods from our early college years. We both attended University of Northern Iowa, where Iowa Girl Eats also went to school. The quality of the food was mostly awful…like worse than prison food. Some of it was good, but a lot of it was awful. It’s pretty amazing that we all made it out of there with any appreciation for food at all. But here we all are, blogging away about food!

We’ve been following Kristin’s blog for a long time now and if you aren’t…you are crazy! The recipes she posts always looks so amazing. And if something she makes turns out like crap, she isn’t afraid to humorously tell us! She writes with such wit and ease. Basically, to sum it up…she is awesome and you need to read her blog.

Last week, we invited some friends of ours over for dinner. It was the coldest night of the week, so we wanted to make a warm Fall meal. When we think of Fall food, our minds almost always go to some type of squash. We had been looking for an excuse to make Iowa Girl Eats’ decadent Stuffed Acorn Squash, and we knew this night was perfect!

This recipe is soooo delicious and easy to make.

Continue Reading…

Check it out!

Fall weather will be in full force tomorrow! Rainy with a high of only 60° F. That’s what I’m talking about! Our favorite thing about the cooler weather is that it gives us permission to make some our favorite dishes like chili and cinnamon rolls, chicken noodle soup with cheesy bread, and spaghetti squash with veggie ragù.

This recipe has become one of our favorites over the past couple of years. It is a super healthy and delicious way to get your spaghetti fix!  Just look at these fresh ingredients!!!

We love how rustic it looks and feels to serve the meal straight out of the squash shells.

Continue Reading…

School and football have started and there are only two more weeks of Summer left on the calendar. But that doesn’t mean you have to roll the grill into storage for the winter! We love this time of year because we get to experience the best of summer and fall foods. On any given day, we can either make a pot of chili or grill a burger!

[6 tips for grilling perfect burgers]

For this meal we decided to go with a grilled turkey burger. We often have this attitude that we need to load our burgers up with 12 different toppings.

“This is America, dang it! If I want 12 toppings on my burger, I will put 12 toppings on my burger!”

But sometimes the best burgers are the ones that are the simplest…

Continue Reading…