Veggie-ful Appetizers

Miss Yunks knew plain pizza wouldn’t be enough for dinner for her BF; and with her new aspiration to eat more veggies, she was determined to find a creative side dish.

Smitten Kitchen to the rescue!  This is one of my favorite foodie blogs.  Her photos are always perfect.  I almost hate that.  My photos never look as great as hers and my finished dishes never look as perfect, even when I follow her recipe.  But, I’m okay with that because it always tastes good.  A recipe posted on Smitten Kitchen is guaranteed to impress.  That’s what I like to do; and that’s what I did.

My first idea was to snag the Eggplant Salad Toasts recipe.  I couldn’t resist the photos and we both like eggplant, it was perfect.  I didn’t think this would be enough either, so I also made her Creamed Spinach recipe.  I thought these recipes would go well together and could both be served on little slices of bread.  We’ve made creamed spinach before, but Smitten Kitchen’s recipe was a little different so I thought I’d try it.  Hers uses only cream, no cream cheese.  I decided I like it better with less cream and a little cream cheese, but this recipe definitely tastes good – it tastes like cream!  You don’t even know you’re eating a vegetable, which I like sometimes.  The eggplant salad was so simple and tasty.  Plus, I like that Smitten Kitchen calls it an eggplant version of bruschetta.  Makes perfect sense.

I definitely picked good sides to go with the pizza (more on the pizza another day!) and I definitely made too much.  I’ll be eating eggplant and spinach all week, but I’m not complaining!

We also used leftovers of each veggie dish in omelets.  Creamed spinach omelets and and roasted eggplant with feta omelets – definitely restaurant worthy dishes.  It was all so good that BF said, after a bite of roasted eggplant and feta omelet, “This might be the best thing you ever made.” That’s what I like to hear!