I have two adult daughters, both of whom live in Austin. I try to visit as often as I can. It always seems like our visits revolve around food… generally Tex Mex kind of food, because that’s what they eat, more often than not. When they first moved there, it was the design your own burritos at a place called FreeBirds. Later, it was Texas beef brisket barbecue at Rudy’s and other places. We’ve also had good Texas steak at a few different locations.

But lately, what my girls have adopted as a regular habit is what they call breakfast tacos. We have something similar here in Boise that we call breakfast burritos, but the Texas variety is definitely better! The place they go to the most makes their own tortillas and are they ever good… and fresh, of course.

So anyway, I was thrilled recently when one of my readers added a recipe for egg tacos on the site. Perfect!

This version is a bit different, but it could still form the basis of something wonderful. If you want to check it out for yourself, go to the Egg Tacos recipe page on my main site. After you get there, you may want to look at our other egg recipes or even share one of your own very special recipes. Either way, I’m happy to have you!

This is a recipe from Kathi’s Test Kitchen, where I test various recipes from other chefs, foodie blogs, cookbooks and cooking shows. Sometimes, I change them up a bit; sometimes I make them exactly as written. Then I evaluate the recipe against a variety of rating factors. This week, I made Aarti Sequeira’s (Aarti Party) Chicken Tikka Masala, along with the cauliflower recipe from traditional Indian fare called Aloo Gobi.

I loved them! If you like Indian food, you’re going to love how accessible and easy Aarti makes it. I’ve tried quite a few of her recipes, but this is one of my favorites so far. I think I could eat it every day.

I didn’t have as great luck making Aarti’s Simple Basmati Rice recipe, but that may have been because I substituted brown Basmati rice for the regular white variety. Brown rice doesn’t have quite the same consistency. I happen to like it better, but that’s just me.

The chicken though, along with the cauliflower side dish, were so scrumptious.

To read my whole review, visit this Chicken Tikka Masala page on my main site.

With this week’s recipe, I paired flank steak with whole wheat orzo and asparagus and gave them all an Asian spice treatment. It wasn’t one of my greatest successes ever, but hubby seemed to like it.

I paired my flank steak with a marinade I found at one of my favorite recipes sites, AllRecipes.com. I should have let the flavor develop a little longer by  marinating the steak overnight, but never one to plan… I waited too long for that. I gave it about an hour, which is probably why it didn’t turn out as great as all the reviews led me to believe it would.

If you’d like to view my Asian flank steak recipe, click here. Or, you can also view other beef recipes, more Chinese recipes or even share your own favorite flank steak recipe with me. It’s all good…

I love chili! I grew up on it, but my mom made it the old-fashioned way, with dried beans that had to be soaked overnight, fatty ground beef and large chunks of tomatoes. Much as I loved it (and made it that way myself for years), once I became a single, working mom, I had to come up with an alternative if I wanted to keep eating chili.

So, I developed this easy vegetarian chili recipe. I went vegetarian because my girls became finicky about eating beef during their teen years and neither white chili nor ground turkey were too mainstream in the early 90s… at least not that I was aware of. So I developed this recipe that has lots of protein, but it comes from TVP and beans, rather than from beef.

These days, I often make this recipe using ground turkey because I cook now for my hubby and mother, both of whom like meat, but if you want to stick with the vegetarian version, you certainly can.

You’ll find my Easy Vegetarian Chili recipe here on my Thrown-Together-Meals.com website, along with some suggested variations. It’s certainly not the only vegetarian chili recipe out there, but it is uniquely mine and it’s fast and easy, not to mention healthy! Hope you enjoy…

This Greek Chicken Rice Casserole recipe is a riff on an old standby family recipe that my entire extended family loves. The traditional version is very American. I decided to play around with different flavor profiles to add some ethnic flair to this tried and true recipe… in order to make it a bit more current.

One result was this Greek food-inspired version of MacNaughton Chicken Rice Casserole. It adds in some black olives and feta cheese and substitutes a wheat thin topping for potato chips. Plus, it has oregano, the original Greek spice, of course!

You can make the recipe healthier by using skinless, boneless chicken breasts, brown rice, and substituting Greek yogurt for at least some of the mayonnaise.  And low fat, low salt cream soup would help, as would using your own veggie broth, rather than bouillon or canned broth.

However, you mix it though, this is one delicious and flavorful recipe. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Here’s where you’ll find it:

Greek Chicken Rice Casserole

Other pages you might enjoy on the Thrown Together Meals site include:

• Easy chicken recipes for dinner
• Make ahead casserole recipes
• Kathi’s test kitchen, where I test recipes from famous cookbooks, other foodie websites and more

Do you like lasagna as much as I do? Mmm… hearty goodness, Italian-style! But let’s face it… traditional lasagna isn’t necessarily the healthiest meal around, no matter how great it tastes. In fact, my mom, never known for her tact, said to me yesterday afternoon when she heard I was making lasagna… “Wow… I’m surprised you’re making that… it’s not very healthy!”

My response was that THIS lasagna recipe was going to be healthy… and low fat. It was also thrown together, since I made it by using up foods I had on hand, without a set recipe. I’d had some ground chicken in the freezer for a while, along with some eggplant, so I thought why not combine them for a new take on lasagna?

You’ll find this delicious Chicken Veggie Lasagna recipe here… I hope you enjoy it! We sure did!

I’m always looking for new quick & easy & delicious dinner recipes too, so please feel free to share your favorite recipes, won’t you?

Or, if you have a favorite cookbook, I’d love to have you share a cookbook review with my other visitors too…

In fact, on that note, did you see my latest Rachael Ray cookbook review? This time it was her Just in Time Cookbook. Find out what I said about Rachael’s Just in Time offering right now…

That should keep you busy until next week!

We love our pork chops at our house! Usually I just make my go-to standard pork chop recipe, using cream of mushroom soup, but this week, I decided to mix it up a bit with a different flavor profile and also aiming at a more healthy dinner recipe too, since I’m currently focused on losing weight while still enjoying good food.

So, here is this week’s pork chop recipe, Italian-style. Hope you like it as much as we did! To view this recipe, got to our main site, Thrown-Together-Meals.com at our Italian-seasoned pork chop recipe page. You can also find more great pork recipes or share one of your own special recipes. Enjoy!

Risotto is an Italian form of rice that is simply delicious. You might have heard that it’s hard to make, but that’s not really true. It does take precision and time, however.

It’s not a meal you can just start on the stove and then forget about for a half hour. It needs pretty much constant attention. But the efforts are SO worth it! Delicious, flexible, useful either as a side dish or the foundation of a delicious one-pot dish, risotto recipes can be whatever you want them to be!

Risotto comes to us from the Italian culture. Basically, risotto is just an Italian method of cooking a specific type of rice, called arborio rice. Arborio rice is an Italian short-grain rice that is named after the town of Arborio in the Po Valley in Italy, where it is grown.

When cooked, the rounded grains are firm, creamy, and chewy, due to the higher amylopectin starch content of this rice. It has a starchy taste of its own, yet blends well with other flavors in a variety of risotto recipes.

Besides arborio rice, risotto recipes are crafted from broth, wine, onions/garlic and Parmesan cheese. Slow, steady cooking is the key.

Here are a few of the possible variations of the basic recipe:

• Roasted red pepper risotto
• Mushroom sage risotto
• Bell pepper risotto
• Artichoke and roasted almond risotto

You’ll find the instructions for those recipes and even more at my risotto recipes page on my main Thrown Together Meals website.

Enjoy!

Chicken Broccoli Alfredo is a thrown together meal recipe using a simple white sauce recipe with chicken and broccoli… yummo!

One night I had a hankering for Alfredo sauce (yumm… Parmesan), and I had chicken and broccoli on hand, so I decided to put them together in one quick dish. A few other ingredients and a new classic was born!

To view this recipe, go to our Thrown-Together-Meals.com website and visit the Chicken Broccoli Alfredo recipe page. You can also find more great chicken recipes or share your own special recipes. Enjoy!

Our Mexican Rice Casserole is another thrown together meal, crafted on the fly from stuff I had sitting around the house, including ground turkey.

Even though I love to cook, I hate to shop, so I frequently find my cupboards and fridge getting a bit bare around the time I need to force myself to head to the grocery store for my monthly trip. One time, I came up with the Mexican Rice concept using the only kind of meat I had left in the house (ground turkey), some old prepared rice side dish packets (Southwestern Style and Mexican) I’d bought for lunch and never used and a few of my usual staples that I almost always have on hand, no matter how overdue grocery shopping is.

My hubby, mom and I were pretty pleased with the results!

I hope you like it too…

Serve the casserole with a green salad and/or cornbread or corn muffins. Yumm! To check out this recipe, you can go to our main Thrown-Together-Meals.com website and view the Mexican Rice Casserole recipe page. You can also find lots more great ground turkey recipes or ethnic recipes too. Or, if you’re feeling inspired, you can even share some of your favorite recipes there too!

Enjoy!