What we do when it rains

This weekend did not have the most gorgeous weather in Philadelphia. We had plans to go to a blueberry festival on Saturday, but the rain changed our minds for us, and so we decided to have a lazy day at home instead.

But that's not really true because we worked almost the entire time. We decided to have a big cooking day since we were going to be stuck inside, and because lately neither of us has been in the mood to cook anything too elaborate during the week.

Don't get me wrong, we LOVE to cook. We've just been out of it a bit lately. Nick and I found a few recipes we wanted to try, hit up the store for those ingredients we didn't have, and then we spent several hours in the kitchen getting lots and lots cooked. Oh, we need the food processor for this recipe? Might as well just rinse it and reuse it for this other one! Oh, you're baking some bread? I need to roast some tomatoes, so why don't we just get the oven hot once! Perfect!

Since I did our last sweet zucchini dish, Nick tackled this version. He found this recipe for Blueberry Zucchini bread. It was perfect for using two of the most in season ingredients around and we both thought it sounded amazing. Then I looked up its nutritional information and almost had a heart attack. To make it lower carb, we substituted some stevia powder for most of the sugar. Nick also used some whole wheat flour in place of the total amount of white flour. Here's the result:
Yum! I will say, I don't love the stevia powder as a substitute, and Nick likes it even less. It's got a bit too much of an aftertaste. Still, this bread is amazing.

In the background, you can also see the chicken legs that Nick brined and smoked this weekend. Also amazing.

I needed to roast some red peppers for a pasta sauce I was making, so we also decided to grill up some chicken breasts. We salted and peppered one side, on the other we seasoned them with Emeril's Southwest Essence.
These are perfect for making Monterey Chicken sandwiches. We eat these on English muffins with ranch dressing, lettuce, avocado, bacon, and monterey jack cheese. YUM.

Since it was rainy, I was feeling in the mood for soup. Since it's summer, we went for a cold one: gazpacho!
We used the recipe out of one of our Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, which is very similar to this one. It made a ton and is a great quick veggie sidedish for dinner.

After roasting my red peppers, I made the base of that pasta sauce I was talking about, processing them with some toasted pine nuts:
And here's the end result:
This is a recipe I've made several times before. My love for red peppers and for the Pioneer Woman are nearly equal, so what better than her Roasted Red Pepper Pasta recipe? I just made this part of the sauce this weekend, stuck it in the fridge, and made the meal in full last night. SO GOOD. This is absolutely one of my favorite meals, and it paired perfectly with some hot Italian sausage and a bowl of gazpacho.

I love soup, and tomato basil is probably my favorite one. I decided to stick with Ina Garten again since I had that cookbook open. Here it is in the middle of preparation:
I oven roasted the tomatoes first, and it gave them such a delicious smoky flavor. Here's the soup at the end, after pureeing:
SO GOOD! We froze half of this, along with the red pepper pasta, to pull out and enjoy whenever it sounds good. For me that would be always :) Now that I'm typing this, I think this might be the perfect thing to have for lunch in a few minutes, maybe with a monterey chicken sandwich. We're having slow-cooker carnitas for dinner, so this will be a nice contrast.

I love cooking with my husband. It's probably our favorite mutual activity and the rewards are the best! Compared to our other weekends this summer, it was fairly tame, but it was a great change of pace and stocked our fridge for our busy week. I think we'll have to do it again sometime soon. No doubt we'll need to since our garden keeps offering up so much zucchini. Buon appetito!