Num-nums

Jan got me an awesome Moleskine recipe journal for my birthday and I'm slowly filling it with our favorite everyday recipes that are easy to make for dinner. A lot of recipes that I use for dinner parties are ripped out of Sunset magazine and others so those go in a binder, but my mom had passed down a number of her yummy recipes (she makes THE best soups, I'm going to have to do a few of those soon) and those are all over the place. I'm trying to consolidate all my recipes into the journal so that on the weekends we can flip through the book and pick out dinners for the week.

Tonight was spaghetti with a spicy red clam sauce and an arugula, pepper and shaved parmesan salad. Deeelish! I've seen a bunch of ways to make this but I think mine is the easiest, fastest, and tastes pretty damn good.

I puree the tomato basil sauce because Jeff doesn't like the "rat hearts", then I mix that into 4 minced cloves of garlic sauteed in a few tablespoons of olive oil for a few minutes. I dump in the juice from one of the cans of clams, sprinkle in a bunch of pepper, bring to a boil and then simmer on low for 15 minutes. Then add in the three cans of drained chopped clams (I prefer chopped to minced because I like chewing the clams), stir it up and serve over pasta! Easy.

And I'm pregnant, so of course there is dessert. This is another one of my mom's passed down recipes, that I grew up on. I looooove peanut butter popsicles. She started making these when we were little and sick and didn't want to eat. It's kind of impossible not to want to eat these though. And they're nutritious too, full of protein and calcium. I lost my popsicle molds in the move so instead I'm just making ice cream. Even easier. 

To make them, you start with a cup of yogurt and dump it into a blender. I like the fruit on the bottom yogurts, especially a berry, because then they end up tasting like a PB&J popsicle. This time though I used Greek yogurt on my mom's suggestion. So creamy. Using the empty yogurt container, measure out a container full of milk (I use soy milk- turns out great), and a container full of peanut butter. My mom puts in a 1/3 of a cup of honey but I just do a couple long squirts, so probably half that. If you use a sweetened yogurt, I think you could even skip the honey, especially if you're making it for a baby. I poured it into a glass container and I'm counting down the minutes until I can dig in...