veggieTOT

Vegetarian Recipes For Kids + Adults

Sheetpan Chickpea Fajitas with Cumin-Lime Crema

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Sheetpan Chickpea Fajitas
Normally when I make fajitas, I make them in a skillet. I also like to call them fa-jee-tas, because I’m a weirdo. Anyway! Skillet fajitas are good, but I thought I could make them even tastier by baking the filling on a sheetpan—the veggies would get nicely browned that way and, if I used chickpeas, I could get them to have a perfectly crisp exterior. Crispy chickpeas! They are the best, right?

This is the part where I make the case for buying dried chickpeas. Buy dried chickpeas! I used to always buy canned beans because, hello, who wants to spend all that time cooking the dried ones? But then I read that even BPA-free cans might not be safe—the chemical used to replace BPA is kind of sketchy too. If I were just making food for myself and my husband, I probably wouldn’t think much of it, but since I’m cooking for Little Pea now, I decided to switch to dried beans.
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Lemon Pepper Parmesan Orecchiette

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Lemon Pepper Parmesan Orecchiette
I was going to call this Cacio e Lemon Pepe Orecchiette, but I figured someone out there would have a rage stroke over it because: 1) cacio e pepe isn’t made with lemon; 2) cacio e pepe isn’t made with Parmesan cheese; 3) cacio e pepe isn’t made with butter; and 4) cacio e pepe isn’t made with orecchiette. So let’s just call this a very loose adaptation of the Italian classic.

Why Parmesan? Well, the traditional version uses Romano cheese, but I haven’t been able to find a vegetarian version of that locally, so I opt for Parmesan instead (which, as I explain in this post, can be vegetarian if it’s not made in Italy). And I swapped out the spaghetti with orecchiette because spaghetti is unwieldy and I’d rather not have Little Pea with noodles plastered to her body by the end of the meal. Orecchiette is the perfect pasta for toddlers, in my humble opinion, because it’s not too small to pick up with fingers, but it’s not too big to need more than one bite or pre-cutting by mom or dad. Also, orecchiette means “little ears,” which is adorable…but I guess a little macabre if you think about it too much. Let’s not!
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This Week’s Eats

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Last week, something awesome happened. The co-op we belong to had a Facebook giveaway and I was one of the winners. The prize was two big bags full of local foods. It was like Christmas, my birthday, and Thanksgiving (because: food) all rolled into one glorious day.

I can’t really put into words how much I love Willy Street Co-op. If I could wrap my arms around it and give it a hug, I would. We do nearly all of our grocery shopping there and I just love what they do for the community, I love their selection of produce, I love that they support local food makers, and I really freaking love their brownies. It’s one of the things that makes me happy to live where we do.

ANYWAY. Since we had two bags full of unexpected groceries, I decided to skip shopping for the week and use what I had gotten and what I already had on hand to make our meals instead. Which was fun! Here’s what we had:

Apple French Toast BakeApple French Toast Bake from King Arthur Flour
We had a baguette from Batch Bakehouse and lots of apples to use, and since French toast is always a winner with Little Pea, I thought I’d give this recipe a try. I enjoyed it because it wasn’t cloyingly sweet and the apples got tender in the oven without becoming mushy.
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