Italian Chicken Lettuce Wraps

I've wanted to make lettuce wraps for a long time. I always enjoy them when I order them as an appetizer, and they seem easy and healthy. When I saw a recipe for Chicken Lettuce Wraps in the September 2011 Cooking Light -- even though they're Italian-flavored, rather than the typical Asian-flavored -- I thought I'd give it a try.

I made a few adjustments, based on what we had and what I could find:

• I ended up cooking the onions a bit with the chicken. I thought the raw onion flavor might be too overpowering.
• Instead of green olives (which I love but Nate does not like), I used capers, which we already had.
• I couldn't find Bibb lettuce, so I just big leaves of green lettuce.

Unfortunately, this dish didn't turn out well at all (which, if I would have read the comments on the recipe, I would have discovered others didn't care for it either). It really didn't have much flavor, and surprisingly, the lettuce flavor was really overpowering. I think some of it had to do with the fact that the chicken I used -- while it was safe in the freezer -- was fairly old and dry.

I'd love to try making lettuce wraps again, but I think I'll go for the more traditional Asian-flavored ones. Anyone have a good recipe?

Vegan Pumpkin Alfredo and Pasta

I really, really, really wanted to love this recipe--but it didn't turn out so well. I could kick myself, though--I just now read through the comments on the blog post where I found the recipe and I see I used the wrong tofu. Doh!

Anyway, let me back up. When my friend Lisa sent me the "dude" e-mail with the link to the pumpkin pie in a cupcake recipe, I somehow, somewhere, noticed a recipe for vegan alfredo. The vegan part comes from using tofu for the alfredo sauce. I was very intrigued--for one, I love anything with pumpkin. Second, I love alfredo, but I know just how not-so-good it is for me. And third, I love tofu, so I thought this would be a winning combination.



Unfortunately, it just wasn't. It wasn't pumpkin-y enough for my liking. And instead of being a smooth, creamy sauce, like I expected, it was kind of clumpy. I even added some water, thinking that would help. I also added more pumpkin, thinking that would help the flavor. Not so much. Other than adding the water, I followed the recipe exactly, using 15.5 oz. of pasta (on the plus side, we discovered buying pasta in the bulk foods aisle at Outpost is pretty inexpensive!). We found nutritional yeast easily enough in the bulk aisle, too.



The leftovers really weren't good--very dry and even more clumpy. I added a lot of Frank's Red Hot sauce to my leftovers (I keep a small bottle at work!), and that only helped marginally.

BUT, I just realized, from reading the comments, that I used the wrong tofu. I used a pack of the refrigerated kind. You're suppose to use the silky kind you find on the shelves (non-refrigerated kind). Hmm ... I think that would make a world of difference. I just might have to try it again.



With the pasta, we made most delicious Brussels sprouts I have ever tasted. I'm going to devote an entire blog post to them, they were that good. We also had more of that leftover cauliflower mash with shallots (that half head of cauliflower really went far!). If nothing else, I've learned a valuable lesson--if there are comments for a recipe, read them before making the dish!

Not Every Dish is a Winner

It's bound to happen once in a while. Even if it looks really, really good in the picture, there's a chance it's not going to taste really, really good.


That's what happened with Wednesday's meal, a Spring Vegetable Carbonara. As I said before, all our meals this week came from the May 2010 Cooking Light (maybe that should have been my first hint--using spring veggies in the middle of summer). We followed the recipe pretty closely, yet it just didn't have much taste.


Here is the recipe for Spring Vegetable Carbonara. Here's what we did differently:

-We used the bow tie pasta we had leftover from this recipe instead of the cavatappi.
-Since it's not asparagus season, I used frozen.


-We used turkey bacon, rather than regular bacon, since we had some in the freezer. Since it's not as fatty as regular bacon, there wasn't any drippings left to cook the bell pepper, so we used some olive oil.

The sauce didn't get as thick as it probably should have been. I'm not sure why. And it needed some more salt or garlic ... or something. Like I said, not every dish is a winner. We probably won't make this again (it sure did look good, though!). Also, please note: if you do make this and heat up the leftovers, be sure to not heat it too long nor on too high in the microwave. The egg gets a little scrambled-eggy!