This salad is so fancy I feel like I should be charging myself $15 just to eat it.  A bed of baby spinach topped with sliced sirloin steak, sauteed thyme mushrooms, crumbled goat cheese and a hot caramelized onion vinaigrette.  Can’t you just picture that salad gracing the menu of a fancy restaurant?  People like to toss around terms like “flavor profile” and espouse about the combination of flavors in a dish, but all I can say it that this salad is flippin delicious!

Imagine a perfect steakhouse dinner.  Steak.  Mushrooms.  Spinach.  Now, imagine that perfect dinner transformed into a mouth-watering, one-plate salad.  A bed of tender baby spinach wilting under a hot caramelized onion vinaigrette.  Thinly sliced steak paired with earthy thyme mushrooms and melting goat cheese.  With food this good at home, you won’t ever have to go out again!

Keep reading …

If you enjoyed this recipe, make sure you subscribe to receive free updates by email or RSS feed!

Raise your hand if you think you are getting enough veggies and whole grains in your diet?  Anybody?  Seeing no hands, I’m going to assume that we could all use more veggies and whole grains in our diet.  Doesn’t that seem to be the mantra of the health food movement lately?  Eat more vegetables.  Eat more whole grains.  This super simple, delicious soup is the perfect answer to that seemingly hefty requirement.

Advertising this soup as the Healthiest Thing You Will Eat This Week does it a disservice.  It also happens to be creamy, chewy, filling and perfectly delicious.  It’s the kind of soup you would order at a restaurant, fall in love with immediately, tell all your friends about and then drive twenty-minutes out of your way to pick up on the way home for dinner one night.  It’s that good.

Keep reading …

If you enjoyed this recipe, make sure you subscribe to receive free updates by email or RSS feed!

Italian food intimidates me.  I’ve heard the stories about Italian women spending entire days making sauce and unspoken recipes with no actual measurements. This scares me.  I didn’t grow up eating a lot of pasta and as a result never developed much of a taste for it.  But I’m well aware that the rest of the world is rather fond of it.  I’ve heard all the campaigns: It’s so easy! It’s so versatile! It’s so delicious!

These social pressures have, in fact, led me to obsessively keep a box of dry pasta in my pantry out of the fear that I will have an unexpected guest show up who wants pasta for dinner.  Now, this same box has moved with me to at least three different apartments.  As it turns out, people don’t frequently show up at my house demanding pasta.  Nonetheless, I’ve always been terrified that someone will ask for pasta and I won’t know how to cook it! Oh the embarrassment! Can you imagine? You can’t cook pasta!?!?! For shame!

They always say “But it’s so easy!  Just boil water and throw in the pasta!”  I didn’t believe them.  I was certain there was something they weren’t telling me.  Then they would toss around words like al dente and I’d be done for!!  But I had a revelation.  Thanks to Giada.

Keep reading …

If you enjoyed this recipe, make sure you subscribe to receive free updates by email or RSS feed!

We are major mushroom fans.  Sauteed mushrooms, stuffed mushrooms, sliced mushrooms all make frequent appearances in the kitchen.  It’s been so cold lately that I’ve been looking for more soup recipes and when I saw Kalyn’s Double Mushroom Soup I knew it would only be a matter weeks before I was making it myself.

The trickiest part was locating the dried mushrooms. Not a single employee at our decent-sized grocery store could say whether they carried dried mushrooms and if they did where they would be located. Luckily, I have an extremely patient boyfriend who searched high and low until finding a box of dried porcini mushrooms.  I had never worked with dried mushrooms before but was pleasantly surprised to find that the rehydration process was painless and they added a nice extra mushroom-y dimension to the soup.

Keep reading …

If you enjoyed this recipe, make sure you subscribe to receive free updates by email or RSS feed!