Sweet Pepper Chicken with Whole Wheat Penne and Roasted Garlic Asparagus

My favorite part of leaving winter behind is the explosion of color in my fresh produce options. Suddenly, my kitchen transforms into a rainbow of delicious possibility, and the dreary days of winter and dull, lifeless food seem to fly out the window. This dish is a celebration of colorful rainbows of culinary possibility. Oh, and it's super easy, super healthy, and a great way to get your vitamins in for the day.

Prepare your palate for a delicious treat of Sweet Pepper Chicken with Whole Wheat Penne and Roasted Garlic Asparagus.  We ate this with a crisp spinach salad and savored every bite!   

Let me say-I have always hated peppers. I remember being served stuffed green peppers as a child and hated them, and I think my aversion comes from that. I have learned to like red and yellow bell peppers, but my world was literally rocked a few weeks ago when I had my first sweet baby pepper. It was like eating vegetable candy, and I have been hooked every since. This simple dish was a great chance to allow some chicken to absorb the sweet, succulent flavor of these peppers. The green onions added another flavor dimension and really bumped this dish up to a 10 for me. The asparagus was a deliciously simple pleasure, and the addition of a nutrient-rich spinach salad rounds this out and makes it both healthy and delicious.

Meyer Lemon Meringues

I love to bake and cook. It is a passion so intense that lately I question my decision to become a teacher and wonder why I never went to culinary school. Being a complete amateur and self-taught cook gives me lots of room to make culinary mistakes though, and for that I am grateful. The cookies that I am posting about today are anything but a mistake. They are a delicious, relatively guilt-free, home-run of a treat. That's great for my recipe binder, and even better for my ample hips. A quick, pre-recipe note. I love to eat healthily. I have made a lot of changes to my diet over the past three years and for the most part, we eat a really balanced, whole foods diet in our home. Sometimes, this conflicts with my intense, long-standing love affair with all things butter and sugar and yeasty deliciousness. I have reconciled some of my guilt by realizing that anything I make at home, from scratch, with quality ingredients, is a bazillion times better for me than something from the store out of a preservative-laden box. So I bake. And I use sugar. And butter. And eggs. And I sample the batter along the way, and eat giant slices of cake. Yup. As long as I know what's in it and I make the choice to consume those things, it's okay. So you will see a variety of delicious, healthy recipes on here, and also some major indulgences-or rather, foodulgences.