Noelle likes Good Food

I am done with the semester!!! I am relieved and thankful that it is over. Between buying a house, moving to the new house, having 5 tough classes in school, working, starting an herbal school, and the responsibilities of day-to-day living these past four months have been the hardest I have ever had to go through. Many times I felt like I wanted to quit. But, I am now on the other side, I have survived and I am stronger for it. It pushed my limits of productivity and discipline and helped me to realize how much I truly can accomplish when I am dedicated and put my mind to something :). Now for the good stuff. My garden! Since we just moved in January, I had very low expectations for the 2014 summer growing season. I didn't want to invest a bunch of time and money to get my hopes up and then not have anything grow. I have only spent $20 so far. $10 was spent on potting soil and the other $10 was spent on seeds. For the rest, I got old seeds out of the freezer from previous years a...

Before I got married I definitely did not like okra. My experience was with okra that had been fried and had sat too long, and tasted like greasy mush. Not very appetizing. But my husband, he loves okra. Rumor has it when he was a kid he requested a fried okra cake for his birthday. He got it too. I wish I could see the picture of his big bowl of okra with candles pushed in for him to blow out. I am sure it was a magical experience. Since we got married I have had good fried okra when it is fresh out of the pan and super crispy. So, I like it now. But, for the two of us at home I hate frying stuff. The main reason is not even because it isn't healthy, but because it makes a big mess. I have to clean so much anyway, why would I do that to myself?  My new mission was to find ways of preparing okra that didn't require frying. I found that roasting it in the oven produced very tasty, slightly crispy, nuggets of okra gold and I have been doing that since last summer. But roasting ...

Hey everyone! I can't believe I have only blogged once since classes started back in January. I was challenged in many ways, but it was a great first semester, and I finished my last final on May 5th. I decided not to take any classes over the summer, and will start back up in the fall. Since school has been out I have catered a wedding, worked a lot, and last week I had surgery. The surgery went really well, and I have just been resting and healing since then.  Now, onto the purpose of this post. Besides all the working and resting, I have been gardening. I don't know a lot about gardening. My strategy has been to prepare myself as much as I can through research and reading gardening books, and then do it myself and learn from my failures and successes. This year I started everything from seed and some stuff has done better than others.  Here are my pepper plants. I have had problems with little bugs on the undersides of the leaves and I am reading around to try and f...

Well folks, I wrote a post about salsa roja yesterday. Somehow the text got erased simultaneously as I pushed the publish post button. Resulting in, what I imagine, was a very boring read. I sincerely apologize. However, I still want you to know about this amazing red salsa. So I will try again. It is fresh, flavorful, bold, vibrant, and spicy. Writing this makes me want to make another batch tomorrow. As you know, I have a thing for sauces and spice. You really can't go wrong. Especially when lime juice and cilantro are added to the mix. I googled roasted tomato salsa and found the recipe for Salsa Roja off of the One Particular Kitchen blog. I made two different batches. The first I only put one or two jalapenos in to make it mild for a Christmas Eve party. The other I put in jalapenos, serranos, and red pepper flakes to give it some intense heat for my Mom's christmas present. I am my mother's daughter in many ways, including my love for spicy foods. It was kickin...

I know I have been off the radar for a little while and I do have a good excuse. I was without power last week, and had to get a new power cord for my computer. I have also been without a camera for two weeks. I can be thoughtless and true to form, I left it at my parents house the last time we were there. My Mom graciously offered to send it to me through the mail, because she is cool like that. I told her not to worry, and we will just get it next time we are in town. I will be so glad to get it back when we go on Saturday. Because I haven't been taking pictures of my food I feel like I can't post recipes about it. But, as I don't get my camera until Saturday, and I have a great soup recipe to share with you, you will just have to imagine what the soup looks like. Or, even better yet, make it and find out for yourself. I had some veggies to use up in the crisper, and I wanted something warm. Hmmm... I thought about it and immediately decided to make soup. I love soup. I...

I like sauces. I like dressings. I like condiments. I like dips. Anything that I can scoop into, dip out of, spoon from, or be squeezed out is a friend of mine.  I was looking for a way to use up some black beans I had cooked up last week. Given my love of anything dip related, this recipe practically jumped out at me. It was a recipe for mexican layer dip from my Clean Food Cookbook. The 'sour cream' was made out of tofu and it was completely gluten and dairy free. I thought I would give it a try and put in my own few twists. The recipe called for 16 oz of bean dip. What I had were unseasoned black beans. I would give you the recipe for how I made my bean dip but I am not sure the exact amounts. I know I started with two cups of black beans, 1/2 diced onion, 2 cloves garlic, 1 tsp pepper, 1 chili in adobo sauce. I blended and tasted. It was bland but spicy. Eck. So I added 1 tsp chili powder and 1 tsp. salt. I tasted it again and realized I put in WAY too much salt. (Thi...