• Black beans and rice with chicken and apple pico

    Beans and rice: healthy, cheap, easy, filling… and kinda boring, right? But it doesn’t have to be. This recipe from Bon Appetit takes what is probably the most frequently eaten dish in the world and gives it a little extra oomph (without adding too much extra time). The most interesting part of this, for me, […]

  • Raspberry muesli with hazelnuts

    When I told y’all I was a picky child, you probably thought I meant that I would only eat, like, chicken fingers, macaroni and cheese, Cheerios and PB&J sandwiches, right? Because that’s what a normal picky child eats. But I was not a normal picky child (just like I’m not a normal picky adult — […]

  • Spinach salad with quinoa and chicken

    So, here’s the thing: I hate salads. Not all salads. Bean salad, pasta salad and fruit salad that doesn’t include cantaloupe or honeydew are fine. But I really don’t like raw leaves. And I despise cucumbers. So that eliminates the vast majority of salads. Unfortunately for me, though, raw leaves are a lot healthier than, […]

  • Puff pastry pizzas

    Halloween is all about costumes and candy. But before the kids go out with their superhero pillowcases and plastic pumpkins (or before you rip open the bags of fun-sized Kit-Kats), everyone needs some dinner. And it seems like trick-or-treating gets earlier and earlier every year. We always had pizza before we went on our hunt […]

  • Super-fast fettucine alfredo

    Back in my days of super-high metabolism and super-picky eating habits (aka the 80’s), fettucine alfredo was my go-to choice at Italian restaurants. I don’t order it very often anymore (a lot of restaurant versions aren’t good enough to justify the fat/calories/etc), but I was intrigued when I saw this recipe in the “quick and […]

  • Bourbon-glazed grilled chicken

    If you haven’t noticed, we kinda like bourbon around here. So I decided to go out on a limb and try this bourbon-glazed chicken from Cooking Light when two friends/former co-workers came over for dinner recently. Sometimes recipes from Cooking Light taste a little… like someone took all the fun out of them. But we […]

  • Peach enchiladas

    Originally I was going to have a recipe for grilled chicken with peach barbecue sauce. Sounds great, right? It was one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s recipes in Bon Appetit a month or so ago. The first thing I made from that issue was sweet corn gelato (from the letters section, where people ask how to make […]

  • Lean, green fighting machine smoothie

    I thought you could use something somewhat healthy after the cheesy grits, pie and milkshakes. This smoothie is easy and has a ton of good-for-you ingredients, but it doesn’t taste chalky or weird — it tastes like pineapple and banana. Yum. Yeah, I was a little freaked out by the spinach, too. But I swear […]

  • Spicy(ish) bean salad with roasted corn

    I talked to my friend Aaren for the first time in a long time a few weeks ago, and after talking about a lot of other stuff, she mentioned that she and her sister Jenna read my blog and were wondering why I was posting things like Mexican wedding cakes when I am supposed to […]

  • Grasshopper pie

    I love reading The Pioneer Woman’s cooking blog and looking at all the fabulous photos. But I don’t actually make a ton of the things she posts, mainly because she likes a lot of things that I don’t like or can’t eat — like mushrooms (gross) and seafood (allergic). HOWEVER. As soon as I saw […]