far as the East is from the West

I love cooking, baking, and the creativity that is birthed in the kitchen. Often if I am using a recipe for dinner, I rarely have all of the ingredients I need on hand (unless I just went shopping specifically for the recipe) so I am constantly using substitutions and adding/removing different ingredients to make the dish all flow together – this drives my husband crazy! He just wants all the correct ingredients to follow the recipe but I love a good challenge & I make a “competition” out of it to make my edited recipe better🤪

I often get asked where I find most of the recipes I use to make different meals or desserts. While I do browse pinterest for inspiration or look at Half Baked Harvest for the latest recipes, I honestly make up most of the things I make or majorly tweak them from their beginning recipe. The past few months I have had to cut several different food groups out of my diet for the time being, such as gluten and dairy (RIP). Because of this I will take a recipe that calls for both gluten and dairy and tweak it to not include either of those – this is wayyy easier to do with gluten than with dairy in my opinion. The shifts in the food groups I am including/excluding has allowed me to become a lot more creative with cooking!

At the beginning of each week, I take time to plan the meals that I will be making for lunches/dinners throughout the week. This has been an absolute lifesaver and I rarely feel like I never know what to do for dinner. I go grocery shopping for all the ingredients for the week to set myself up for success. Now, I typically hate to repeat the same meals over and over. I try to do new meals for dinner every single week, this can pose a challenge. A new meal for dinner, every night, every week for 47ish weeks (give & take eating out or dinner with family). That is a lot of different meals! Sometimes to get inspiration, I look around at what the people around me are eating/what I feed to the little boy that I nanny & I go in blind to try and make a recipe that encases the same look/smell and a great tasting meal. This was one of those great tasting meals, I was inspired to make a pasta dish but mix it up with a stuffed pepper recipe that I LOVE.

Ingredients

• 1 lb of Ground Beef (I used Grass Fed 90/10)
• 16 oz. Cooked Pasta (I used my favorite gluten free pasta, Tinkyada Brown Rice Elbow Pasta Gluten Free)
• 2 Bell Peppers Chopped, (I used Yellow & Orange)
• 1 14.5 oz. can of Corn Kernels
• 2 8 oz. cans of tomato sauce
• 1 14.5 oz. can of fire roasted diced tomatoes
• 2 4 oz. cans of green chiles
• 2 cloves of Garlic, minced
• 1 1/2 tbsp Chile Powder
• 2 tsp Paprika
• 2 tsp Cumin
• 1 1/2 tsp Cayenne
• Pink Himalayan Salt, to taste
• Ground Black Pepper, to taste

Directions

1. Brown the Ground Beef, add in peppers to saute once the beef is fully cooked.
2. Add in minced Garlic, Chile Powder, Paprika, Cumin, and Cayenne to beef/pepper mixture. You may need to add 1 tbsp of water to the mixture to help evenly spread the seasonings. Cook until fragrant.
3. Cook the pasta according to the packaging.
4. Pour cans of Tomato Sauce into the cooked pasta and keep heat on Low. Add in Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes and corn into pasta.
5. Add in Beef mixture and mix all together.
6. Top with diced avocado & hot sauce if you want an extra kick, my favorite is Cholula. Serve warm and enjoy!

Notes: I honestly winged a lot of this recipe so these are not exact measurements but pretty close to what I used. Feel free to experiment a little bit with this recipe and let your creative juices flow!

Tag me in this recipe on Instagram, @hannahcchaffin, if you make it & let me know what you think!

Hannah