I… I can’t speak.

This creamy comfort food veggie Alfredo lasagna is heaven to me. And I will elaborate on that, I promise, but I can’t move on without talking about what makes this whole thing work: the garlic-butter-Parmesan-flavored, 50-calories-per-serving sauce. Made with love from cauliflower.

You’re like, yeahhhh, you told me about that already. Yes I did. And I’m back for more.

This sauce controls me. I make it, like, a lot, and I’m contstantly dreaming up new combinations that mostly involve carbs and cheese. And of course vegetables, because this sauce is made from veggies! That’s what I love about you, sneaky cauliflower. A few readers commented on the creamy cauliflower sauce post that they had used it to make lasagna, and I just about fell off my chair with happiness. Soooo I stole your genius idea and made lasagna. I owe this one to you.

Just for a little walk down memory lane, here’s where we’ve seen this veggie sauce make reappearances:

Creamy Cauliflower Garlic Rice

Healthy Chicken Alfredo Pizza (with a really yummy whole wheat crust)

Healthy Fettuccine Alfredo

and now this lasagna.

Like I said, carbs and cheese.

The truth about this lasagna is that even with the carbs and cheese in there, it’s completely jam packed with fresh vegetables (like, more than 5 cups worth of fresh tomatoes, carrots, and spinach) and it’s only got 240 calories per slice. I mean, hello?! This is basically homemade, better tasting Lean Cuisine. Alright. To be fair, I actually do like Lean Cuisine sometimes, which reminds me that my favorite frozen meals await me in the freezer section somewhere in a suburban Minnesota grocery store: Amy’s Indian Palak Paneer (LOVE) and Kashi Mayan Harvest Bake (double love). These are the random thoughts that pop into my head nine days before the impending move across the ocean.

That, and figuring out how I’m going to brave Super Target for the first time. It’s kind of a joke and kind of serious. Whew – big changes ahead.

To a comfort food junkie like me, this lasagna is divine.

If you are a person who likes thick, super layered lasagna, please. Make this. And please make this in the world’s largest baking pan, because I crammed five delicious layers of veggies, cheese, Alfredo (cauliflower) sauce, and noodles into this pan and it was a little crowded in there and yet I still wanted more layers. You can never have too many. Never.

But really, this lasagna is great because first and foremost, it tastes incredibly creamy, rich, and lightly garlicky without all the guilt. Also noteworthy is the fact that it sticks together perfectly. There’s just enough sauce to keep you happy without making it soupy, which is important because I know you guys like your sauce. You and I both, my friends. You and I both.

This is what my face is seeing all week long. It’s like it gives me goosebumps or something, that’s how much I love it.

One final tip for my sauce-lovers out there –> SAVE THE EXTRA SAUCE. You will want to smother your hot piece of super-layered lasagna in a little extra of that delicate garlic creamy goodness.

And then you’ll be seeing this all week long, too.

That feels inappropriately messy, but also necessary because now you know what it’s like to eat that mountain of vegetables, pasta, and cheese. Also totally unrelated, in my lasagna bliss I have not gone wild with my photo editing and started putting white vignettes on the bottom of my photos. It just turned out that way. Promise.

One more thing! It’s important. You don’t have to be a veg-head to love this one – Bjork gave it two thumbs up. Yip-skiddly-doo!

The post Veggie Alfredo Lasagna appeared first on Pinch of Yum.

When we first came to the Philippines to work at this orphanage one year ago, I was totally enthralled with the babies. And some things do not change, in a year, orrr in a hundred years. I am still totally enthralled with the babies.

The other day I was standing in the yard and I saw one of my most adored babies – one of the ones that actually liked me back right from the beginning – walking around holding an auntie’s hand.

Wait, WALKING? When did that happen?

I immediately flashed back to the first week that we were here, when I would lift her high in the air to see her smile, and hold her, and roll the balls to her, and watch her laugh hysterically whenever I would dip down with her on my hip in anticipation of the bounce back up.

I just stood in the yard, totally captivated watching her walk around like such a big girl. I was crouched on the ground trying to get a picture of her and trying not to get overly emotional thinking about how much she had changed and grown in just one year, and all of a sudden the most ridiculously perfect thing happened:

she ran to me from across the yard with a flower in her hand and threw her arms around my neck in a giant baby hug.

This is the same little girl whose feet barely used to reach the floor from her bouncy walker when I first met her.

How? Why? Wait, time, waaaait!

Time has passed. It has left us. The sweet pea who used to need holding and feeding is now not only walking, but running, squatting, jumping, falling, getting back up, and bending down to pick flowers. And that’s just the beginning. It’s that kind of happy-sad that makes you get a little knot inside your stomach.

And to add to my mushy heart today, I always feel especially emotional about the passage of time here because this is an orphanage. These kids have yet to meet their forever mommies and daddies. Every day, another developmental milestone is reached, another funny moment happens, and another part of their personality emerges. Every child gets another day older, and that the people who will eventually be these little ones’ parents aren’t able to experience those moments. Praise the Lord that this place is full of loving aunties, house parents, and staff who take joy in the little moments that their future parents will have to miss.

Ok, enough with the heart-deep-watery-eyes stuff. How bout a few more pictures of growing up? Cause it’s happening everywhere
around here. Like holding, pointing, reaching for toys.

Rolling and screaming, aka learning how to ask for attention.

Taking turns.

Expressing personality.

Losing teeth.

Reaching the age of pulling your hair to the side for a picture.

The beauty of these kids is beyond words. I ♥ you, sweet and caring blog readers, for allowing me to
get bring pieces of this world into yours. In honor of growing up, and time passing, and moments that we can never have back, let’s
have a fun weekend enjoying our most loved ones for exactly how they are right now. And then let’s come back and make something yummy together on Monday. Okeeee?

XOXO

The post Growing Up appeared first on Pinch of Yum.

So here’s the deal: this salad is the current love of my life, and our oven and stove are broken.

Like, leaking gas into our house whenever it turns on and I’m not allowed to bake anything at the risk of exploding the building. And as I might have mentioned 100 times this year, we also don’t have a microwave, so I’m at this point in my life where I’m being forced to eat something cold, and considering that we also don’t have a freezer for ice cream (this is turning into a perfect sob story of life abroad) I am being forced to eat a cold salad.

With that darn quinoa, AGAIN, because it’s already cooked and there’s a bunch left over in the fridge. How annoying/awesome.

The last cold salad I had was so delicious: a Chopped Thai Chicken Salad. And it was chopped. Hey, guess what my favorite kind of salad is? CHOPPED.

This salad comes in with equally high marks from both me and Bjork. It’s sososo good that I’ve made it at least four times in the last, er, two days. Something healthy that we both like? Heck yes.

I didn’t even plan on posting it, actually, because it’s so simple and I’ve posted so many quinoa recipes lately that I thought it might be overkill. Because actually, it IS overkill. Buuuut then the oven broke so I had to. Ha-ha to you, Alfredo veggie lasagna. Salad wins today.

500 quinoa recipes later, quinoa is totally growing on me, but the star of this salad isn’t really the quinoa. It’s the perfectly juicy, crisp, colorful produce like sweet pink apples, fresh greens like spinach and arugula and parsley, and earthy-delicious carrots.

And here’s the kicker. The “dressing” for this salad is store-bought apple chutney. Not joking. I found some Stonewall Kitchen apple chutney at our little neighborhood grocery store here in the Philippines (?!) and it was in my cart before I even knew what had happened. And as if that isn’t enough, then I noticed that there was not just one but TWO varieties of apple chutney on the shelf. Sooo you can’t find raspberry jam, but you can definitely find apple chutney. What in the world.

I actually liked the second variety of apple chutney better – the brand is Essential Waitrose. It had walnuts and caramelized onions and chili powder and lottts of sticky-sweet apples. I could definitely eat it with a spoon. But since that’s a European brand, I’m afraid that’s not going to work for you North American friends. I’d suggest just finding any apple chutney (or something similar) with a spicy, warm, nutty, sweet flavor.

So my final thoughts on this salad are that I L-O-V-E-D it.

1. The flavor and texture combo was so yummy: fresh and sweet, crispy-crunchy-soft, and spicy from the chutney.
2. It only took 5 minutes to make since the quinoa was already cooked.
3. It can be eaten with chips. Pita chips, pretzel chips, brown rice chips, Hint of Lime chips… trust meeee.
4. It can be eaten plain. Totally a meal-worthy salad, says Bjork. See what I mean?

If there’s one thing I need right now, it’s chips. I mean, salad. Any time, day or night.

I hope your oven “breaks” soon.

The post Chopped Apple Quinoa Salad appeared first on Pinch of Yum.

And to think that I used to not even like quinoa. What’s happening to me, you guys?

So this Mexican-type casserole is life changingly amazing, but first, let’s catch up. Mother’s Day just happened.

Did you have an awesome one? I was far far away from my mom and family, but something really sweet happened: our young married neighbors invited us out to lunch with them to celebrate Mother’s Day with their sweet 6 month old baby girl, Maggy. Even though he won’t hold her, or any baby for that matter (working on that one), Bjork says she’s the cutest baby he’s ever seen in his entire life. And he has good taste in babies. She is seriously adorable.

The cheeks. Ohhhh the baby cheeks. We were thrilled that they invited us and a little nervous since this last year, we’ve spent most of our time socializing with kids under 10 years old. But they are so friendly, we had a great time, and I was honestly so touched that they showed such hospitality to us.

Now for a flavor explosion. Do you see all that goodness in the slightly bent skillet? That’s onion, garlic, and JALAPEÑO. Truth: I had to capitalize that because I don’t know how to make a tilde on the n using lower case letters. But it works because that spicy green guy adds capital D-ELICIOUS flavor, right along with that fragrant garlic (♥) and sweet onion.

And then those peppers that look like they’re roasted? That’s more of a 5 minute trick that I do sometimes when I don’t want to sweat to my death in our hot apartment. They just get fake-out blistered a tiny bit by leaving them in the hot, dry skillet without stirring. Not fancy, but still totally pretty and yummy.

This whole quinoa black bean casserole thing is actually a remake of an earlier post I did: Southwest Black Bean Casserole. By earlier, I mean like 2 years ago earlier.

At that time I was probably still calling quinoa kin-o-wa because I was clueless. Or because I didn’t like and I was being spiteful. Now I’m more open-minded, I call it keen-wa, and I actually know how to hide it in my food to make myself enjoy it.

I basically replaced the ground turkey in the older version of this recipe with the quinoa in this recipe. It’s possibly the most I’ve ever loved this weird healthy semi-crunchy stuff, although I also equally loved it in last week’s curry squash quinoa. I dry-toasted it (that’s fancy terminology for “put it in a hot pan with nothing else”) with some spices and and salt, and it was so delicious even just plain. What? Plain. I said it.

Then it gets layered between the most delicious black bean garlic onion jalapeÑo mixture reminiscent of homemade refried beans, and a top layer of blistered sweet bell peppers, and then you bake it with my favorite ingredient of the whole world lately: cheese. White, melty, ooey gooey cheese.

I didn’t bother finding Mexican cheese… it just doesn’t exist here. So I used some really melty Mozzarella and my new favorite, Emmental. Yum. Do they have Emmental cheese in America, and is it cheaper than it is the Philippines? I feel so out of touch.

PS. Chips chips chips chips chipschipschips.

PSS. HINT OF LIME. It’s kind of trickery because I’m showing you Bjork’s man-hand dipping a girly RiceWorks chip into this yummy mountain of Mexican black bean casserole goodness, but if you’re a Hint of Lime person, you won’t be dissapointed with this combo. Or maybe you could buy some of those citrus-y and extra salty ones from Chipotle?

I think I just had a business idea.

I love this so much that I’ve decided it will be my TV snack when I watch the last ever episode of the Office. Which, by the way, I’m already emotional about. I read an article about Pam today (ok fine, Jenna Fischer) and I almost cried. That’s… my real life.

Distracting myself with chips now.

The post Southwestern Quinoa and Black Bean Casserole appeared first on Pinch of Yum.

Hi there! Bjork here, checking in for the monthly income and traffic report.

Every month I put together a post detailing the income and traffic from the previous month. In these reports I also include tips about the things that Lindsay and I are learning about growing a food blog. Our hope with these reports is that you can learn something new and apply it to your own blog.

We started this journey back in August 2011. None of this happened overnight. Growing a blog to the point of creating a decent income is a lot of work. There have been countless failures and frustrations along the way, and we are consistently battling something that author and speaker Seth Godin calls “the resistance.”

The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the [the resistance] hates change and achievement and risk.

Do you know that feeling? If you do, you’re not alone. Lindsay and I are right there with you.

What’s the solution for conquering the resistance? There isn’t one. It’s a constant battle. One that needs to be fought daily. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t. The key is to continually push back against it. Keep creating. Keep experimenting. Keep keeping on.

So, let’s go ahead and do that by jumping into this month’s report. I’ll be sharing the usual numbers, some new information (Pinch of Yum’s monthly expenses), and some updates on changes we’ve recently made.

Income

• BlogHer – $2,247.83
• Tasty Food Photography – $1,342.00
• Bluehost – $910
• Google AdSense – $650.69
• Thesis Theme – $205.26
• Elegant Themes – $58.50
• CPM Only – $56.10
• Lijit Networks – $51.68
• Amazon Affiliate Program – $38.42
• Ziplist Recipe Box – $16.06
• CrashPlan – $9.00

Total Income:: $5,242.54

Expenses

• Media Temple (Hosting) – $350
• Tasty Food Photography Affiliates – $334
• Web Designer – $247.50
• Web Optimization Round 2 – $240.00
• Food Expenses- $207.40
• Amazon S3 and Cloudfront – $174.29
• Web Optimization Round 1 – $150.00
• PayPal Transaction Percentage – $65.81
• PayPal Website Payments Pro – $60
• Genesis Theme – $59.95
• Adobe Creative Cloud – $32.13
• VaultPress – $15
• E-Junkie – $15

Total Expenses: $1951.08

Net Profit: $3,291.46

Thoughts on income

You’ll notice a big change in this month’s report: expenses. Seeing as to the fact that these posts are focused on the “business of blogging,” I thought that expenses would be an important element to include.

This month’s biggest expense was hosting. We upgraded to the next level of hosting with MediaTemple in order to help the resource usage issues we were having after updating the design of the blog. The upgraded plan is $200 more a month then the previous plan. It’s a bit of a bummer to be spending more, but it’s necessary in order to maintain a decent load time. Let me know if you have any other questions about the expenses. I’d be happy to explain them.

We’ve started the process of experimenting with other advertisers, so you’ll see that the income list includes Lijit and CPMOnly. We don’t have enough data to come to any solid conclusions yet, but we’ll be sure to keep you in the loop. We currently have Lijit running as the main sidebar ad, and when there aren’t any ads that Lijit can run we show Google Adsense.

Have you used Lijit or CPMOnly before? How’s your experience been?

Traffic Breakdown

Below are some screenshots from Google Analytics. You can click on these screenshots to view a larger image.

Traffic Overview

Top Ten Traffic Sources

Thoughts on traffic

Traffic was almost exactly the same in April as it was in March. However, there were two metrics that I was really excited to see change: pages per visit and average visit duration.

Working with brands

In last month’s report I updated everyone on my dismal progress with connect with brands. In one month I had connected with one brand. The response I received was warm, but nothing ended up developing from it.

I quickly realized that between Food Blogger Pro, my “regular” job, and my work with the Children’s Shelter of Cebu, that I personally wouldn’t be able to reach out and connect with brands on a regular basis.

So, what then?

Enter the Sway Group.

Sway will fill the gap that I couldn’t. They have super savvy folks that work to connect brands to Pinch of Yum and handle all of the details that go into the partnerships.

Exactly. What. We. Need.

We’re honored to be a part of Sway’s roster. As mentioned above, it’ll be nice to be able to continue to focus on creating great content and let Sway handle the brand partnerships.

Bluehost links and changing color

Bluehost is the hosting company that we recommend to new food bloggers on our how to start a food blog page. The affiliate income from Bluehost has almost always been in the top five on the income reports. Before we redesigned Pinch of Yum we were consistently getting 600-800 clicks on the Bluehost affiliate links, but after the redesign it immediately dropped to half of what it used to be.

In Google Analytics, I compared the March numbers to the April numbers on the how to start a food blog page.

This is the part that really stood out to me:

What stands out gets clicked. What blends in gets ignored.

That was the issue. All of the links on Pinch of Yum were blending in. This resulted in a drastic decrease in the click through rate (CTR). I decided to make the change right away.

1. Here’s an example of what a link looked like before.
2. Here’s an example of what it looks like now.

Do you see how big of a difference that makes? I’m guessing this change will result in an increased CTR. I’ll report back next month to let you know for sure.

Thanks!

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Thank you!

If not for you this blog wouldn’t exist. It really means a lot to us that you come and read the posts, leave comments, or drop an email to say hi.

Until next time, cheers!

The post April Traffic and Income Report – $3,291.46 appeared first on Pinch of Yum.

Lettuce wraps, you sneaky things you.

You make me want to wrap vegetables in the leaves of more vegetables and top it all with more vegetables. Just kidding – meant to say PEANUT SAUCE but we’ll get there later.

First things first: the vegetables wrapped in vegetables, for the love of vegetablesss.

I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that it didn’t take kind of a long time to chop up all these green, yellow, red, and orange beauties. My perception might be a little skewed considering my 2-second attention span and low tolerance for cooking related work. Cause, I want you to like my recipes, but I just don’t like cooking that involves work. Yeah? Totally makes sense.

In truth, you will thank yourself over and over again for all the chopping. In fact, TWELVE times over because you’ll get at least 12 deliciously fresh, crispity, crunchity, rock-your-face-off-flavor-y lettuce rolls outta the deal.

Can you just imagine it in your mouth right now? It’s soy sauce salty, lime juice tangy, and bell pepper crunchy all in one amazing veggie boat. IT’S SO GOOD.

Ok, now’s the time when we talk about the peanut sauce. Because up until this point you probably have seen the peanut sauce and mistakenly thought it was ground chicken. I hope it doesn’t bug you that the peanut sauce is a little awkward looking, because… well, it is. But it’s so, so good. And even better the next day. Can I put a request in? Make this sauce ahead of time. I just loved the flavor of the lemongrass, garlic, lime, soy, fish sauce, and sugar after those magical 24 hours in the fridge.

So just to make sure we’re clear on what’s what, here’s a before and after.

So that chunky peanut sauce you see poured all over the top? Yes. It’s peanut sauce and it’s a deal-winner.

I liked mine the best topped with a little sauce, a little drizzle of extra soy sauce because I love to eat too much salt, and then lots and lots of green onions. I didn’t have cilantro but all you fellow devoted cilantro groupies, you know what to do.

Another thing we should discuss. These aren’t actually lettuce wraps! Ha. Trickery. These are cabbage wraps. You can use lettuce if you want watery, tasteless rolls that fall apart after one bite. Just kidding. That was kind of mean. You really can use lettuce and I won’t be mad because that peanut sauce can make anything taste good.

But here’s why I love cabbage:

1. It has a taste.
2. It’s strong enough to hold a TON of filling.
3. It’s better for you.

And speaking of holding a ton of filling, here’s how we get it done round here. Lettuce wrapping style, his and hers.

Perks of being in the same room as your wife when she takes pictures of lettuce wraps:

And perks of making lettuce wraps in the first place:

I’m exhausting myself.

You guys? I hope you make these and adore them as much as I do.

Nutritional information is for 1 lettuce wrap with peanut sauce.

The post Light Thai Chicken Lettuce Wraps appeared first on Pinch of Yum.