1. Orecchiette with garbanzos, grape tomatoes, and feta

This pasta salad has gotten raves at every dinner party, bbq, or work function I’ve ever taken it to. As my mom said, it’s nice to have a go-to recipe that you can count on to wow people every time. And with just a handful of ingredients—grape tomatoes, feta cheese, green onions, mint, garlic, cilantro, and garbanzo beans—the prep time for this dish is minimal. Served warm it’s great for dinner with a side of greens or portobello mushrooms.

2. Roasted chicken stuffed with feta and bell pepper, served with roasted potatoes and broccoli

My first stuffed chicken ever! Only seven ingredients in this recipe produce tasty results. Next time I might roast the broccoli and potatoes with whole garlic cloves, since I find an excuse to add garlic to everything.

3. Grilled pizzas topped with grilled green onions, zucchini, and ricotta cheese, served with a radish, cucumber, and arugula salad

This was also the first time I’d grilled pizza dough, and watching it puff up in my grill pan and get perfect sear marks was, as a pizza enthusiast and lover of all-things-dough, very exciting.

Just leave a comment if you’d like any of the recipes!

So pretty and sweet, you’re guaranteed to want two pieces.

Saturday afternoon felt right for baking and I happened to see some enticing plums at the grocery store, so I revisited this recipe with happy results. Note, my plums were not red-fleshed (or 100% ripe…) so this recipe has the potential to be even more beautiful than pictured.

Upside-down cake is fun. That final moment of flipping the baking dish is nerve-racking and exciting, and when it sucks out of the baking dish and plops onto the plate all glistening and gorgeous—it’s a proud moment.

I used Cooking Light’s recipe, and started by sautéing plums in butter, then adding sugar, cardamom, and a pinch of salt. Once plums are tender, remove them with a slotted spoon and bring the remaining liquid to a boil; reduce until it’s a jammy consistency.

 

 

 

 

Arrange the plums in the bottom of a greased baking dish and pour the reduced plum juice over the plums—let cool. Next, whip up the cake batter with amaretto, pour over plums, and bake for 50 minutes. Top with whipped topping.

 

 

 

I’d like to try pineapple upside-down cake sometime. It’s such a classic, dotted with maraschino cherries; see images from every 50s/60s dinner party ever for reference.

Easter brunch at my home yielded a meal that was oh-so-delicious, and oh-so-bad-for-ya. Served with a side of greens this meal might have begun to approach something well-rounded, but we didn’t go that route. This was buttery, sinful, and amazing.

Starting with the biscuits, I used Alton Brown’s recipe (skipping the Crisco and using more butter instead) and doctored it up with pepperjack cheese and green onions. While I mixed the dough and rolled out the biscuits, Josh got to work grating the potatoes for hash browns—then mixing the potato with olive oil and grated jalapeno, salt and pepper, and pressing all the moisture out of the mixture before frying it up.

He browned Italian sausage and then started a roux for gravy—we used flour, butter, milk, and a bit of chicken broth. Salt and pepper to taste: done.

Serve with eggs as you like ‘em, and it’s a bang-up breakfast with southern flair.

 

 

It’s a breakfast casserole, y’all. We’re talkin’ cheesy, eggy, moist bread all-soaked-in-milk breakfast goodness. I’ve made a few stratas in my day and find the recipes to be kind of hit or miss. What has changed everything though is soaking the bread in the milk mixture rather than just pouring it over the top of the assembled casserole, which I’ve seen a few recipes call for. I also liked this rendition a lot because it called for blending the goat cheese with the egg and milk.

This is an artichoke heart, goat cheese, mushroom, and roasted red bell pepper strata. It smelled a bit like pizza while cooking. The recipe I used calls for artichoke hearts, goat cheese, and ham, but I made several substitutions for the love of a vegetarian friend. I also did not use the egg-substitute called for in the recipe—I just used real eggs.

My pal erin hosted brunch this morning, and in addition to the strata we had waffles and roasted asparagus. It was a feast. Her home is incredible, a real urban farm. Her kiddos played with the baby chicks in the coop and we visited with the chickens, the dog, and the lone turkey out back, and she sent me home with fresh eggs—straight from the farm to me.

This weekend has been a vitamin-D fest, in January, which is worrisome, but I’m thankful for the sunshine nonetheless. Yesterday brought my neighbor Holly and I to the lake with a blanket and books for sketching and reading, and we shed layers and soaked up sun, and my sunglasses made of zebrawood actually started to release this earthy wooden fragrance as they warmed. It was perfect.

And for dinner I combined two different recipes (one, two) pulled from Real Simple a while back, and made a garlicky kale pasta with cheesy broiled tomatoes.

While the spaghetti noodles are boiling, slice and prepare beefsteak or heirloom tomatoes. Arrange tomato rounds on a broiling pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, a slice of mozzarella cheese, and a little sprinkling of parmesan cheese. Broil the tomatoes for about 3-5 minutes until the cheese is golden.

Once the pasta and tomatoes are ready, toss the noodles with olive oil, the kale and garlic mixture, salt and pepper, and serve with the broiled tomatoes on top and an extra sprinkling of cheese, if desired.

And someone is playing the harmonica on the porch next door as I write this. I ❤ my home.

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve cooked anything. I’ve been absolutely drowning in work. But, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and, with a bit of breathing room tonight, I made a quinoa (pronounced keen-wah, to my knowledge) dish that serves well as a light dinner or it can be packed up for lunch to-go.

A few weeks ago I helped make a lamb curry served over quinoa, and I was surprised at how quickly it cooked. For some reason I thought this grain required the same amount of cooking time as rice, but quinoa cooks up in about 15 minutes.

I started by bringing 1 cup quinoa and 2 cups water to a boil, then added chopped zucchini to cook with the grain. While that was simmering, I diced grape tomatoes, chopped parsley, avocado, and sliced a lemon.

Once the quinoa had cooked, absorbing all the water in the pot, I tossed it with tomatoes, parsley, chickpeas, feta cheese, salt and pepper, and then squeezed a quarter of a lemon over everything. To serve, I added the avocado on top and an extra sprinkling of feta.

I thought walnuts would be a great addition to this dish—a nutty flavor to contrast with the cheese and the bite of the lemon—but I didn’t have any on hand, unfortunately.

This soup will wow your ever-livin’ pants off, guaranteed. My friend Kumi made a chicken tortilla soup for dinner Friday night so delicious that I wanted to enjoy it again immediately. So I attempted to recreate her recipe with a few tweaks of my own. She rattled off some of the ingredients to me after dinner as a reminder—her soup had chicken, diced zucchini and carrot, corn, tomatoes, onion, and garlic, and she served it with cilantro, diced avocado, and sliced jalapenos for garnish.

To her recipe I added just a few other ingredients that sounded good to me: black beans, lime, and jack cheese.

To start, I diced the onion, carrot, and zucchini. I sautéed the onion and carrot until tender, added the garlic and cooked until fragrant. Next I added chicken broth, black beans, and whole peeled tomatoes, chopped in half. I brought the broth mixture to a boil, added zucchini, corn, and several chicken breasts, and simmered on low about 20 minutes until the chicken was thoroughly cooked and the zucchini was tender.

Note the very patient kitty keeping me company while I worked:

Next I toasted a few tortillas, removed the chicken breasts from the pot, and shredded the chicken and set it aside.

Top with the cheese of your choice and you’ve got a winner on your hands. I didn’t measure anything as I chopped, but this potentially makes a big stockpot full of soup so you’ll have plenty of leftovers.

Jeannie and I were talking about the movie Waitress recently and how every pie the character Jenna makes in the movie has a funny name like bad baby pie, or, baby screaming its head off in the middle of the night and ruining my life pie. And, who could forget, I can’t have no affair because it’s wrong and I don’t want Earl to kill me pie.