Quick & Easy Lettuce Wraps

Hi foodie friends! We haven't posted in a while, but that definitely doesn't mean we haven't been cooking and eating lots of delicious meals. We've just been crazy busy! A few re-caps of our recent adventures:

• Todd flew a helicopter. And, he was freakishly good at it. I was pretty scared at first, but once we were up in the air, it was AMAZING! I would highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to go up in one.
• It was the 4th of July! My mom and company came up to celebrate. It was a great day full of family, history and fireworks. Despite a lightning delay, we even got to see the Boston fireworks for the first time... pretty much the coolest fireworks show ever.
• I started my second session of summer classes. I'm currently working toward my MBA in the evenings after work, and for some crazy reason, decided to take three classes this summer. We'll just have to work a little harder on the cooking and blogging schedule now that I'm swamped with schoolwork again.
• We had the greatest weekend reuniting with old friends. On Friday, Todd and I went to dinner with my good friend from high school and her family at a tasty place in the North End called La Famiglia Giorgio. It was great food and so much fun to catch up with her here on the East coast. We also picked up some more West coast friends from the airport after dinner and spent the weekend in Connecticut. We ate tons of tasty food, attended a birthday party, went wine tasting, ran through sprinklers, tried to avoid getting ticks, caught lightning bugs, toured the Huntington House, and had two nights of sleepovers. A perfect weekend!

Anyway, that's my attempt at explaining away my lack of positing, but the other big reason is that we actually didn't have a share delivery last week. Since it was a holiday on delivery day, our crop is being pushed out an extra week into October. That just means I'll have to catch up on our recipes now!

One thing that Todd and I REALLY love are lettuce wraps. I guess that they can get pretty unhealthy depending on where you get them (I'm talking to you, PF Changs!), but they're a really tasty way to ditch bread for a night and have a delicious meal. Typically, you'd want to use a stronger lettuce variety so your wraps don't fall apart once you fill them, but two layers of the red leaf lettuce from our share worked just as well. Here's what you'll want to do:

Ingredients

• 1 pound of ground beef
• Lettuce leaves
• 1/2 an onion, sliced
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 3 carrots, sliced thinly
• 1/4 a cup of chopped peanuts. You might want to buy the pre-shelled ones, since it will save some time.

• 1 teaspoon of sugar
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons of soy sauce
• 5 mint leaves, cut into pieces. We picked ours fresh from the garden!

• Salt and pepper
• A pinch of red pepper flakes

Instructions

• Brown the ground beef with the onions and garlic; once almost cooked, add the carrot slices. Season with salt and pepper.

• While the meat is cooking, make the sauce by mixing together the sugar, lemon juice, soy sauce and red pepper flakes.
• Also, prepare the lettuce by washing and pulling apart the leaves.
• Lower the heat to simmer, and add the sauce and the mint leaves. Stir for a couple of minutes until the sauce is incorporated.

• Assemble the wraps! Take two layers of leaves, and top with the seasoned meat and peanuts. You can also add additional soy sauce if you'd like.

Yum! We really love making these, especially since you can substitute different protein and adjust the sauce flavor to your liking. Hope you like them, too.

-Amanda

Chips... Made from Kale!

So, after getting kale last week and using it as a sautéed side for a meal, my sister Lynne, who has an sweet blog too, suggested that we make kale chips. I'd never heard of them, but since I am am huge fan of chips (not the healthy kind), I though it would be a good recipe to try if we got kale again.

The awesome thing is that making kale chips is VERY easy to do. It doesn't take long and you can mix and match the flavors to your liking.

I used a recipe from the Food Network, but all I really needed was the over temperature - 275º F.

You take the head of kale and wash it well, spin dry it in a salad spinner, then cut out the main stems. I think you could cut more, but I only cut out the main tough stem from each leafy section. Then, I cut then into "bite sized" pieces, about an inch or two long.

I threw all the pieces into a big bowl and lightly tossed them in olive oil. I layered them out on a cookie sheet sprinkling them with sea salt.

Then, I baked them for about 10 minutes, flipped them over and baked again for 10 min. That's it! They were ready to eat. We didn't have a huge amount of kale, so we ate our whole batch hot from the oven :-)

The best part of this recipe is making up your own flavors. We did one sheet of sea salt and black pepper and one of sea salt and sesame seeds.

I can't wait to get more kale and try new flavors. There is defiantly a cayenne pepper batch in my future!

-Todd