EASY Mediterranean Eggplant Salad

Spring is here and so are SALADS! No, I’m not talking about ones only filled with leafy greens, but instead grain salads which can be packed with just as many nutrients and can be added to liven up your leafy greens or featured at your next potluck. This Mediterranean Eggplant Salad has become a staple in our house and was inspired by the homemade kitchen of a healthy deli and cafe that gave me my first job at 14! I learned so much about cooking from working there (something I am FOREVER grateful for) and I’m so excited to be sharing one of my favorite dishes from there. It’s light, packed with flavor and protein and even though I still can’t make it quite as good as they used to, I like to think this version is pretty close!

*My posts may contain affiliate links and/or commission links which means that I make a small commission from sales generated through my page at NO COST TO YOU.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups of couscous (I love the Rice Select Brand)

• 1 container cherry tomatoes

• 1 bunch scallions (more or less depending on your love for them)

• 1 medium eggplant, cubed w/skin

• 1/2-1 cup crumbled feta

• 2 tablespoons avocado or olive oil (Chosen Foods is my favorite brand!)

• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

• Salt & Pepper

Directions:

• Wash, dry and shop eggplant into medium size cubes. Lay chopped eggplant on non-stick baking sheet (here’s my favorite kind) and sprinkle with kosher salt. Allow to sit for 30 minutes to draw water out of eggplant. After 30 minutes, blot eggplant with paper towel. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 425.

  • **I never skip this step with eggplant. It helps reduce bitterness and also excess moisture that can make your eggplant a mushy mess when cooking!

• Place salted eggplant in oven and roast for about 20 minutes until tender. After eggplant is tender, drizzle it with your favorite oil (I love avocado oil).

• While eggplant cooks, chop up your tomatoes (in half) and scallions.

• Cook couscous according to your package instructions. It takes all of 5 minutes. I add a tablespoon of avocado oil to my water before cooking the couscous. Set aside in a large bowl to cool slightly after cooking.

• Now it’s time to assemble! Fluff your couscous and add salt, pepper, and garlic powder to taste. Add in chopped eggplant and toss again. Toss in tomatoes and scallions, and you guessed it, toss again! Finally, add in the best part…the CHEESE. Make sure your couscous and eggplant aren’t too hot so that your feta doesn’t melt!

• Once everything is tossed together you can enjoy it right away as is or add it to your favorite salad as well! This time around I topped my Mediterranean Eggplant Salad with some nutrient packed Speckled Pea Shoot microgreens from Elevated Earth, the company I talked all about last week on my Instagram stories. They added a delicious extra crunch and elevated this recipe even further!

Enjoy your first fun salad of the spring! Feel free to leave any questions or comments, below!

XOXO - Jamie

Easy Make Ahead Zucchini Rollatini

With summer here that means summer squash is everywhere! Zucchini, yellow squash, etc. are all in abundance at the farmers market, grocery stores, and maybe even your backyard. One of my favorite ways to cook is through using in season ingredients because they are fresh and also budget friendly! This easy Zucchini Rollatini has become a staple in our house and it can easily be modified with whatever you have on hand - yellow squash, eggplant, even large carrots! Your kids will also love it too and you will get your pasta fix without feeling like you weigh 20 more pounds after indulging.

The best part? You can prep this ahead of time and throw it in the oven when you are ready!

Zucchini Rollatini

Ingredients:

• 2 Large Zucchini (or other preferred vegetable) - the wider the better

• 1 egg

• 2 to 2 1/2 cups of Part-Skim Ricotta - I always make a little extra and go with the 2 1/2 cups

• 1/2 tsp. garlic powder

• Fresh or Frozen spinach - cooked, drained, and chopped

• 1 handful fresh oregano (or 1 tsp dried)

• 1/2 Shredded Cup Mozzarella Cheese

• 1/8 Cup Grated Romano/Parmesan/or any similar blend

• Kosher Salt

• Fresh Ground Black Pepper

Step 1:

First, cook the spinach until it is slightly wilted. Drain, cool, and chop. Then set aside.

Step 2:

Preheat oven to 375 and slice the zucchini thin (about 1/8 inch). Drizzle with olive oil and bake for 15 minutes or until soft and pliable - you want to be able to roll them without breaking.

Step 3: While zucchini cooks, mix together Ricotta, egg, oregano, garlic powder, salt and pepper.

Step 4:

Add in the chopped spinach to the ricotta mixture. Check your zucchini and remove from oven when finished. Then grab your favorite tomato sauce!

Step 5: Take your zucchini slices and lay them flat. Blot dry with a paper towel to remove excess water. Fill the slice with the ricotta mixture and roll each slice up.

Step 6:

Layer the bottom of a baking dish (I used 8x8) with the sauce. Place your rollatini with the ends facing down to avoid a cheesy explosion!

Step 8:

Top off your rollatini with more tomato sauce, freshly grated cheese and the shredded mozzarella. Place in oven and bake for 30 minutes.

FINAL STEP: Remove your rollatini from the oven when it is bubbling! Let rest for 10 minutes to cool and set. Then, ENJOY!

**You can complete steps 1-8 and throw the entire baking dish into your fridge until you are ready to bake it! I suggest with this method to let it sit for 5-10 minutes and come closer to room temperature before baking to ensure you don’t crack your pan or have excess water.

Now, get a fork, and DIG IN! If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below or shoot me an email!

XoXo - Jamie

I picked up all of my ingredients for this recipe at Stew Leonards! If you haven’t been, it’s worth a trip!

Organizing A Pantry for $100 or Less!

I think I have hit full blow "nesting" mode because I suddenly have had the urge to organize everything in my house! One of the things that I desperately wanted to get organized was the pantry in our kitchen.  Now the pantry we have isn't huge, it actually started out as a broom closet but I quickly convinced my husband this wasn't the most efficient use of space and asked him to install some shelving.  After the broom closet was converted, I sort of just threw a bunch of stuff in there, but quickly found it was getting harder and harder to find things, things were expiring, we were opening multiple packages of the same thing....it was a mess! 

To give you an idea, here's what it looked like BEFORE! What an unorganized mess! 

It's pretty apparent from the picture that something needed to be done, so I turned to Pinterest for some inspiration.  There were some great general ideas, but a lot of the pictures featured these LARGE, gorgeous pantries that you could walk into or at least fit a ton of stuff in.  Unfortunately, I was still working with my broom closet so I knew I would have to measure and be a little methodical when organizing it. So, below I'm recapping the steps I took to make sure things would fit before I headed out shopping.

Step 1: Measure the height and depth of your shelving.  My shelves vary in height and they certainly are not very deep, so I needed to make sure I took proper measurements so I didn't have to make multiple trips to the store to pick up all of the organization supplies. 

Step 2: Estimate how many containers you will need and what they will be used for.  I started out with my cereal - on average, I have about 3 boxes of cereal open at any one time, so I figured I would need at least 3 containers to hold that.  Then I moved on to things like canned goods, I wanted to determine how many cans I keep in my pantry normally.  I estimated around about 15 between soups and things like tomatoes and vegetables.  If there are other things you'd like to keep in storage containers that seal, then make sure you also account for those items.  Lastly, I tried to estimate about how many open containers I would need for things like granola bars, snack items, etc.  You can do this by using a shoebox as a good estimator for how many can fit across your shelf. 

Step 3: Go shopping! I picked up the majority of my supplies at the Container Store, but if you don't have any interest in shopping there or there isn't one close to you, you can find these items online and through retailers like Amazon as well.  I will link everything I bought throughout this post!  I set a budget for myself for around $100.  I knew I wanted all BPA free plastic and also some higher quality sealing containers for the things like cereal that I wanted to keep fresh for a long time.  

OKAY - now it is time to clear out the mess and start ORGANIZING! This is the fun part! Or at least I thought so...............

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STEP BY STEP GUIDE to the ORGANIZATION

STEP 1: REMOVE EVERYTHING: You'll want to start with a completely clean and open space so you can see what you are working with! 

STEP 2: PLAY AROUND WITH THE LAYOUT - In this part you'll want to lay out everything you bought in order to determine if you have enough things to store all of your items and also to figure out how you want to space the containers, what things you want on what shelves, etc.  Play around with it for a while!  You'll notice that the picture I took here with spacing everything out ended up being a little different from how I actually ended up organizing the pantry.  

STEP 3: ORGANIZE & LABEL - Now it's time to actually start making some progress.  After you've figured out where you want to place everything, you can start labeling and organizing.  I opted to use adhesive chalkboard stickers and a Chalk Ink marker for my labeling, but you can print labels or make them however you want, put your own spin on it!  The thing I like about the chalkboard labels is that you can easily wipe them clean and re-write if you make a mistake or change what is in your containers.  You can also write directly on the bins and containers if they are plastic, glass, etc. with the Chalk Ink markers!

For the containers, I chose a variety of different types of containers and bins.  With the cereal, I knew I wanted to get the sealing OXO POP containers which help to lock in freshness since cereal seems to always go stale (gross)!  If you have a lot of different foods you plan to store in your pantry like pasta, grains, etc., I recommend purchasing an OXO POP Set like this one.  I then found some smaller bins with handles (I purchased the SMALL size) for things like granola and cereal bars.  At the Container Store, there was also an awesome deal on clear shoebox size bins.  If you bought a case of 5, you saved 20%, making each container about $1.60 each..pretty good deal if you ask me! I also found open stackable bins for soup cans and they are the perfect width for large and smaller cans - I got the MEDIUM size!  All of the fancier things made specifically to store cans wouldn't fit into my narrow pantry so when I found these, I figured I'd give them a shot and they are perfect! You can easily stack cans on top of each other but also see everything that you are storing for easy access. They even came with labels already attached so all I needed to do was write on them.

When organizing, I tried to group things by category.  At the top of the pantry we have a really narrow shelf so I tried to come up with some solutions for it.  I realized that it could easily fit bottled drinks like Gatorade which take up a ton of room in a cabinet.  I also have s'mores stuff for the summer, so I figured I would group all of those items together so when we entertain, it is easy to grab the whole bin out and have everything in one place.  I placed all cereal and breakfast items together on one shelf and just below that shelf I grouped together things like granola bars, breakfast bars, and protein bars.  I figured this would make it easier to find and for my husband to find the things that he wants without rummaging through various shelves and messing up the beautiful organization! On the next shelf I grouped together snacks, chips, pretzels, and cookies. Below that shelf, I placed my canned goods like soups, veggies, and broths.  I tried to organize the canned goods by type.  For example, canned tomatoes placed together and cooking soups placed together.  The idea is that when you go to cook, you don't have to spend time sifting through various bins to find what you need.  

One big thing I figured out is it is always important to utilize floor space! Now I can see people saying ew, not going to put my food on the floor, and my response is you don't have to!  Use any space below your shelves to store miscellaneous items that you don't want taking up space elsewhere in your house, but that you use frequently and want easy access to.

As you can see in the picture above, I used my floor space to hold things like our dog's food.  By the way, don't spend tons of money on those fancy dog food bins, head over to Home Depot or any hardware store and pick up an airtight bucket!  I found this one that is food grade on Amazon! You can fit a ton of food in it and the lid seals even better than some of the specially designed dog food containers do! Now, back to the floor storage...Aside from the dog food, I decided to use a small set of storage drawers for things like paper plates, napkins, and koozies (don't ask me why we have SO MANY koozies) all things that I hate cluttering up my cabinets with! I also had an extra shoe box bin so I decided to put all of my reusable shopping bags in it!  This way, I might ACTUALLY remember to use them.

STEP 4: UTILIZE DOOR SPACE - Don't forget that your door is also useable space in your pantry! Now at some point I'll probably try to make even better utilization of it, but for now, it's the perfect place to keep a calendar, since I can't remember anything these days and also those dreaded plastic grocery bags! Does anyone else feel like they haunt you?  They are everywhere! I highly recommend getting one of these cloth bag holders because you can easily hang it on the door and it doesn't take up any space and they won't be falling out everywhere! 

You can see how I utilized the door space and finally the FINISHED PRODUCT! 

I've linked all of the products for you within the step by step guide so you can get organized too!  By no means do you need to use everything that I did, but I found that these products worked really well for me and also for spaces that are shallow and don't have a ton of room.  Let me know if you have any questions - you can always email me directly or reply in the comments below! 

HAPPY ORGANIZING! 

XoXo - Jamie 

**Post contains affiliate links for products which I personally recommend.  By clicking the links and purchasing the products, I may earn a commission. I do not include affiliate links for the purpose of solely earning product commission, I do so in order to share products I love with you! Purchases are made as-is as the consumers discretion**