I’m not gonna lie, I’ve never been a huge fan of baked beans. And then I had this. In a hats off to a Full English Breakfast (since it’s been 3 years since our trip to London), Shawn decided to make these today, and they were *awesome.* The first time I’ve ever really liked baked beans. They would be good for breakfast, and they also made a great side dish. Can’t wait until he makes them again!
You have to love a recipe that combines two comfort foods – pot pie and soup! And if you’re a huge fan of all things comfort food like Shawn is, this is totally a winner in our house. I confess that I’ve never really had actual pot pie, but I liked this a lot, and Shawn said it tastes like the real thing…in soup form, anyway. This was great with some crusty bread (yeah yeah, this was not a low carb weekend, not even a little 😉 ). A nice winter soup to have again on a pending snow-day.
First week back after vacation is always sort of a shock to the system…especially after a vacation as awesome as that one! We highly recommend Riviera Maya, Mexico, that’s for sure. But it was nice to get back to some home cooking (though I won’t lie, I already miss the copious amounts of Mexican food and Corona ;)). This was a great back to reality weeknight dinner – took all of 45 minutes to cook and you could do this with any bony cut of lamb. We used a lamb shoulder roast that had been sliced into thick chops. Just a tossed bunch of roasted veggies (also generically Indian spiced) as a side, and it made for a great, low carb dinner.
This was a super quick, tasty, weeknight dinner. We did not put this over pasta (low carb considerations for me), but I actually think that it would be way too much if you did – the beans were plenty. We really liked this! Totally one to make again. We had this with garlic zucchini spirals.
So I pretty much refuse to refer to veggies cut with a spiral-cutter as “noodles,” but that doesn’t make them any less awesome. This was a great side dish, and if you were so inclined, you could make a main dish out of it as well. Standby, we may even be trying this in March. 😉 Anyway, this is a prep method we will definitely continue to use. This was tossed with garlic, red pepper flakes, and a little bit of parm to go with a main dish.
Another awesome dumpling from Andrea Nguyen’s “Asian Dumplings” book. I had wanted to try one we’d never made before. These are actually pot stickers, and as bad as I am at pan-frying, I still gave it a go. Verdict – filling is awesome, but I should stick to steaming or boiling our dumplings. I overcooked these bad-boys like whoa. But they were still good, which stays pretty much everything you need to know about how ridic they are. Luckily, we have another 30 or so dumplings from this batch frozen for another day, and I am super excited to steam them next time!
We had a little farm sleepover party for the horsey friends this past weekend, and I used it as an excuse to cook a couple of elaborate meals and talk endlessly about horses. 😉 I liked this gnocchi recipe, although I made a couple of errors – 1) should have baked the potatoes longer, it was an effort to really mash them and 2) I overworked the dough and they were a bit dense. But all in all, still a fun meal and worth making again when I don’t beat the dough into oblivion. 😉 I served this with my fresh tomato sauce that I canned over the summer.
Pretty much traditional cocktail meatballs, and they were awesome. The recipe I was using pointed us to the slow cooker, but we ended up using the dutch oven and that worked out fine. Definitely about to be a party staple.
These were pretty little cookies that made a nice addition to our holiday tin. They were not super sweet, but still had a lot of flavor and the red and green from the pistachio and cranberry was obviously very festive. They were small cookies, but made a lot, so they were worthwhile to add some interest. They are also very quick, which is quite welcome during holiday cookie-fest!
So it’s possible we ate a lot of these before we got a picture (and I forgot to take one while packing the holiday cookie tins this year). These were outstanding. I cannot resist anything peanut butter, and could pretty much have eaten the batter and said ever so sorry to the cookie tins. 😉 This is an America’s Test Kitchen recipe, and the only change I made was to use smooth peanut butter instead of chunky. I like it better that way, but it will clearly work whichever way you prefer! A definite winner.
Om nom nom! 