Meal Ideas

If you’re tired of pizza, try calzones. In our house, we love to make pizza.  Pizza to us usually means a movie.  Our kids don’t really watch TV, so we like to have a family movie night every once in a while to hang out and enjoy a good flick.  Lately, we’ve been watching the LIFE ...

What every kid wants on a Saturday morning. Kids always want pancakes.  My kids get RIDICULOUSLY excited about these puppies, but that might be because I don’t make them regularly.  About one pancake in (if they make it that far) they are over it, but for that 15 minutes that I am prepping and the 3-5 ...

So, lately I have been in a soup funk.  I guess it’s not really a funk because everyone around here seems to be happy with it.   Basically, I seem to be only thinking in soups these days when it comes to cooking.  I even convinced my newly minted 3-year-old to have 2 kinds of soup ...

It’s Fall and also October as far as the calendar goes, but it could not be further from cool and scarf-worthy here.  That will not keep me from enticing it with spices my kitchen and soup on my stove.  I made this recipe from good-looking seasonal veggies from my fridge and tons of garlic.   It ...

One of my very favorite things to cook is roast chicken.  It’s one of the few things I enjoy making over and over again, the same.  For this version, I wanted to mix the flava’ up a little. My oregano is so overgrown so I decided to use that along with some lemon thyme for the ...

Kids love pizza.  This is no secret.  What kids love more than pizza is their own personal pizza.   They can have something and make it all theirs.  You can learn a lot about a kid by what they put on their pizza. 2-year-old fingers can’t resist poking dough. In my experience, when kids touch and help make ...

We had our first red tomatoes this week!  Thank you, God, for letting the sun out to make them nice and ripe. I always try my first tomato with a few speckles of sea salt.  Next, I could think of no better way to honor the tomato than with my version of a BLAT.  I baked ...

This dish is a favorite of mine for a quick dinner.  It is a one pot dish which is always lovely if you cook 3 meals a day like me.  I enjoy making food that is simple, but enters your mouth tasting more complex than it is.  This is just part of building flavor and ...

One of my favorites, this salad.  I first had a beet salad several years ago at the Pebble Beach, CA restaurant, Club XIX (amazing place, by the way).  This kind of salad was hardly popular yet and I was hooked right then and there.  This restaurant also is responsible for my husband and myself becoming ...

Like many families, we love to make pizza on Fridays.  We’ve been making it from scratch almost every week since we first got married almost 8 years ago (wow!).  Personally, I prefer white pizza (like above) because it allows for a really great garlic flavor that is not being attacked by tomato sauce.  Don’t get ...