Easy Meal Mondays! Lime Cottage Cheese Jell-O

Happy Monday again everyone!  This weeks easy recipe is a great item to bring to a potluck or barbecue.  Also, it may sound weird or even gross, but this is really really good!  I hope you enjoy it!

Lime Cottage Cheese Jell-O (recipe from Dawn Clifford)
Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup boiling water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 package lime Jell-O
• 1 cup cottage cheese
• 1 cup crushed pineapple (drained well)
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 8 ounce tub of cool whip

Directions:

1. Dissolve Jell-O and sugar in boiling water.  Let stand until the Jell-O starts to set.  You can put it in the refrigerator to speed this up, however do not let the Jell-O set completely.  
2. After the Jell-O starts to set up, stir in the cottage cheese, pineapple, walnuts, and cool whip.  Refrigerate until right before serving.  

Easy Meal Mondays! Homemade Hummus

Hello again everyone!  Welcome to another addition of Easy Meal Mondays.  Today I am not going to be providing a full meal recipe, but a meal component that Jason and I love and eat regularly.  Jason packs carrots and hummus in our lunches everyday and when I am feeling up to is, I make this fresh.  The only (sort of) problem with making this fresh is that it does not keep for as long as when you buy the kind with preservatives.  So here is my easy homemade hummus recipe.  It is adapted from the Williams and Sonoma one.

Homemade Hummus

Ingredients:

• 2 cans of chickpeas or the equivalent amount of chickpeas from dried
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1/2 cup tahini - this is very important.  I have tried to make hummus without the tahini and it does not taste quite right
• 2-4 tablespoons olive oil
• 4-5 garlic cloves
• 3/4 teaspoon salt - this may need to be adjusted if you are using canned chickpeas
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 large pinch of paprika and a drizzle of olive oil for garnish - you can also add parsley as a garnish if you wish.  We are very rarely serving this as an appetizer and are just eating it ourselves, so we do not normally do the garnishing step.  

Directions:

Combine all listed ingredients in a food processor or blender (excluding those labeled for garnish).  Process until a soft, creamy paste forms.  Taste the hummus to see if any additional lemon, salt, or olive oil are needed.  Add these to your preference and blend everything together again.  I also like to check the consistency, because usually when I think it looks good, it still seems a bit gritty to me and needs to be blended further until the consistency is much smoother.  

If you are serving this at a party or event, place the hummus in your serving container and using a spoon smooth out the surface of the hummus.  Make a small well in the surface and drizzle a bit of olive oil into this well.  Then sprinkle chopped flat leaf parsley and paprika over the top of the hummus.  

Let me know if you make this and if you like it!  Until next week!

Easy Meal Mondays! Summer Macaroni Salad

Hello Everyone!  This is the seventh installment in my series on easy and healthy meal options that Jason and I have made and love.  This recipe is again from SkinnyTaste.com.  Jason and I both love this blog and we follow and make almost everything this blogger does!  This recipe for a summer macaroni salad is so refreshing and is perfect to bring to summer barbecues and potlucks (I don't know what people outside of the midwest call these, but here they are potlucks).  Jason does not think that this is a good recipe just to make for dinner, but I think it is perfect for that since I love macaroni salad.  This is really good fresh, but I liked it better the second day.  By then all of the flavors have melded together and it is very cold.  Let me know what you think about this and if you enjoy it as much as we do!

Summer Macaroni Salad

YIELD: 16 cups (only 115 calories per cup)
PREP TIME: 5 minutes
COOK TIME: 40 minutes
TOTAL TIME: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

• 16 oz uncooked elbows
• 4 cups grape tomatoes, cut in half (I got the mini heirloom tomatoes and they were lovely in this)
• 2 cups (1 small) zucchini, sliced and quartered
• 1/2 cup red onion, finely chopped
• 7 tbsp light mayonnaise (I used the Olive oil mayo, but I think it would taste better with miracle whip, though we don't use this much since it has high fructose corn syrup)
• 2 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp fat free Greek yogurt (plain - using vanilla would be a mistake :) )
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 1/4 tsp oregano
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Cook the pasta in generously salted water according to package directions.  Drain and rinse with cold water.  (I rinsed for quite a while with cold water because I like pasta salad to be very cold) 

In a medium bowl, combine onions, mayonaise,  vinegar, yogurt, mustard, oregano, garlic powder; mix well.  Add tomatoes (and any juice from the tomato), zucchini, pasta, salt and pepper to taste.  Toss well and place in a large serving bowl.  Enjoy!

Let me know what you think!  I would love to see how you make this and what tweeks you make to it!

FTC: This is not a sponsored blog post.  All of the products I have mentioned and have listed were purchased with my own money and all reviews are my honest opinions.  I am an amazon associate and the links in this post may go to amazon for possible purchases.