Chili-Lime Roasted Squash Salad

Continuing our health kick, we (well, I) picked out some tasty looking salads for us to munch on in the new year, trying to avoid meat and processed carbs where possible.
 

Our first foray into the salad world was this chili roasted squash salad with a cilantro lime dressing.  I had seen it in the November Martha Stewart Everyday Food Magazine (RIP!) and then again on The Bitten Word, so I thought it was worth a try. Squash (we used the readily available (in Jakarta) kabocha squash, or Japanese pumpkin) roasted with chili powder, lime, cilantro and honey dressing, feta cheese, pepitas (we brought some home from Trader Joe's... I cannot explain to you how much I miss TJ's...), your lettuce of choice (we went with a mesclun mix). 

I thought this was a solid and really easy recipe, but nothing spectacular to write home about (and yet here I am, writing home about it).  I'm not sure what it was missing, but perhaps a little bit of spice?  The chili powder I have is a dark chili powder and it's not too spicy.  Maybe I should have jazzed it up with some cayenne powder...?

Sweet Potato and Black Bean Chili

Snowpacolypse/Thundersnow/Traffic Nightmare of 2011 left us at 1346 relatively unscathed... while others in the DC area were sitting in their cars for 13 hours and having babies on the Beltway, I took advantage of OPM's early dismissal for the federal government, made it home pretty quickly on the bus, and made some sweet potato and black been chili and cast-iron skillet cornbread with corn. Chili and cornbread... ain't nothin' wrong with that!
Colleen came over for some intense crafting (the results of which will be posted soon), we chowed down on this warming meal, and we topped if off with some "special" hot chocolate. No better way to spend this year's Thundersnow/Snowpacolypse/Traffic Nightmare.

Stacked Veggie Quesadilla

I saw this stacked veggie quesadilla recipe, labeled as a "last minute Super Bowl supper," in the most recent issue of Bon Appetit magazine... we made it tonight while watching the AFC championship game. It's pretty good, but I don't think I'll be serving it at Super Bowl, mostly because it's really hard to eat!!
The flavors were good and it really wasn't very hard (especially since they advocate microwaving pre-cut butternut squash- I cut up my own from the CSA, but did do the microwave thing). However, the stack of tortillas with all of the fillings is super tall and difficult to maneuver. You can't exactly pick it up without it totally falling apart. Part of this difficulty may be due to the fact that we got a little bit overzealous when crisping up our tortillas at the beginning, but I'm not convinced that floppier tortillas would make it any easier to handle.

Just a warning... don't be scared, but definitely bring a fork and knife if you make this!

Spicy Black Bean Balls

Spicy black bean balls... no relation to chocolate salty balls.

Based on this spicy black bean burger recipe from Real Men Eat Green (a cute website from an earnest Canadian trying to convince men that eating and living green is cool/good for you), I decided to make these into dippable balls (ha! I said 'dippable balls'!) rather than burgers since we didn't have any buns.

Served with a chipotle/lime/cilantro sour cream dipping sauce. Mmmm.