The team at Martha Stewart Living sent me a little care package this month with a challenge! The December issue features some amazing pasta dishes with just 5 ingredients, making them perfect weeknight meals (which is so crucial during this busy time of year!). Armed with a box of Barilla® Rigatoni, their new issue for inspiration, and a cute new serving bowl from the Martha Stewart Whim Collection, I was challenged to create my own 5-ingredient pasta dish. Loving the fall flavors of a brown butter sauce and sweet seasonal squash, I narrowed down my five ingredients to butter, Parmesan cheese, sage, walnuts and butternut squash (plus some salt and pepper!). The result was a hearty autumn meal with a balance of sweet and nutty flavors (and it’s so easy too!). Full recipe below:
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One of my favorite nerdy cooking challenges I like to give myself each year is thinking of new ways to use leftovers after the big Turkey-Day feast! Sometimes it feels like those leftovers can last for weeks, and you’re eating turkey sandwiches until you never want to see another turkey again until next Thanksgiving. I made a few of the Thanksgiving classics and experimented with a new idea for leftovers this year: layering them into a Thanksgiving leftover inspired pot-pie! Everything in this recipe can be pulled from your holiday leftovers. Start with some pie dough leftover from your holiday baking, toss in chopped up turkey and keep it juicy with some leftover gravy drizzled on top, and layer it with leftover mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce before baking with another layer of pie crust on top. The result is a slice of Thanksgiving that has just about every key leftover packed into each bite! My husband jokingly suggested that I should call this Pilgrim Pie, a rustic little nod to Thanksgiving’s roots, and I think it fits the dish perfectly! Earmark this one for your turkey-day leftovers next weekend, full recipe below:
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Labor Day is a friendly reminder of those fleeting summer moments, so I took it upon myself this weekend to make sure I got in as much summer flavor as I could. That meant pizza on the beach, ice cream from our local ice cream shop, and any recipe I could think of that was chock-full of summer corn and juicy end of summer tomatoes. This pasta dish is a new weeknight dinner favorite in the summer, it takes about 15 minutes to make. The base of the dish is based on a traditional Cacio E Pepe, a super simple Italian pasta that combines butter, pasta water, parmesan cheese, and tons of fresh cracked pepper. I gave the classic a summer-spin by folding in the sweet flavors of corn and tomatoes, which are a perfect balance for that bite of all of the cracked pepper. Full recipe below:
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Ever since the weather has warmed up, we have been out on the porch grilling every change we can get. Over Memorial Day weekend we hit up friends’ BBQs, enjoyed a clambake at my parent’s house, and experimented at home with some new burger recipes. I am all about loading up a burger with a ton of tasty toppings and tested a burger that’s full of cheesy, avocado-y goodness. I mixed up a rustic ‘salsa’ with diced avocados, tomatoes, onions, roasted corn and scallions to top a burger melted with two cheeses: colby and pepperjack. I used Pepperidge Farm® Farmhouse Hearty Buns to hold it all together, these are key — they don’t fall apart under the pressure of all of these tasty toppings! The result was almost like enjoying my favorite nacho ingredients a top a juicy grilled burger on a fluffy, hearty bun (with some baked sweet potato fries for good measure!). Do I have you drooling yet? Full recipe below! 
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Life goal: find ways to make pasta more healthy. I could seriously eat pasta for every single meal, but know that I shouldn’t! Salt for Life and their team challenged me and a few other bloggers to come up with healthy recipes featuring a few key ingredients (like our own version of Chopped!). This is my second recipe in the series, check out the avocado-toast appetizer I created for my first recipe.
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About 90% of the time when I ask my husband if he has any ideas for dinner, he replies “tacos?” (in case you’re wondering, the remaining 10% answer is always fajitas — clearly we were meant to be). I’ve never met a taco I didn’t like, but every staple dinner idea can use a little spicing up now and again. When Family Circle Magazine challenged me to create a new recipe using Hidden Valley Sriracha Ranch, I had just the dish in mind! I created an easy dinner of pulled chicken tacos with tasty toppings and an extra kick with Hidden Valley Sriracha Ranch Sour Cream. It’s the perfect combination of coolness and spice to bring tons of flavor to taco night. I loaded these up with my favorite toppings — big slices of avocados are a must, and I love scallions and red onions for some bite. Plus cheese, lots of cheese! If you need to sneak some more veggies in there, chopped up tomatoes and lettuce work too. Add a little Sriracha ranch sour cream to finish them off. You can check out the tacos in Family Circle, and get the full recipe below:
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Last weekend when Alison and I stayed at the Lark Hotels property in Narragansett, RI — The Break Hotel — we got the opportunity to meet their Chef Basil Yu at Chair 5 and partake in a little cooking class. We walked in not knowing what we were making, but were greeted by Basil and some fresh Narragansett Lobsters chilling out in the kitchen. He let us know we were going to be making their creamy Narragansett Lobster Fettucini with homemade pasta, and my eyes lit up. Give me all the cheesy, creamy pasta and top it off with some buttery fresh lobster plucked right out of the water down the street and I am a happy girl. Basil was awesome, he walked us through making the pasta by hand, we learned how to break down the lobsters (I’m going to be so much more confident ripping into a lobster this summer!) and went step by step through the recipe to create this gorgeous dish. It was ah-mazing, like I couldn’t stop eating it. And lucky us, he gave us the recipe to share with you so you can make it at home!
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How’s everyone doing with their New Year’s resolutions? I have a practice of not starting my resolutions until Mid-January because that first week back after the holidays is just too much of a bummer to stick a diet on top of; and then my birthday rolls in on the 10th (which is usually a long-weekend of celebrations, I like to drag that baby out), so around the 14th-17th I start to feel that urge to ‘start the year off right’ — two weeks late of course! So while I’m getting my head around goals for the year I figured I could at least start the week with some healthier eating. I made a big batch of these turkey-taco stuffed peppers over the weekend and they’ve been easy to reheat after work for a quick dinner. The lean protein and veggies are a pretty-good-for-you option — I also drizzled a little bit of chipotle sour cream on top — but you can opt to leave it out if you’re watching calories extra closely. Full recipe below!
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Do you have those go-to recipes in your head that you can just make with your eyes closed? You know that pinch of this and a dash of that are the perfect measurements, no need for measuring cups or recipe cards. That’s my chili recipe — honed over the years to be both classic and at the same time totally unique to me. For example, I alway do half beef, half ground turkey — you still get the flavor of the beef but it cuts down on fat; I also feel strongly that all chili should be made with tasty golden kernels of corn (fire roasted is the way to go!) and simmered for hours in a sturdy cast iron dutch oven (I love our Martha Stewart one.). And my secret ingredient — a trick my dad taught me as a kid — is to add a can of baked beans into the mixture for a little punch of sweetness to balance out the spice. A few weeks back my sister pointed out that even though I make this 2x a month all winter long, I never posted about it before on the blog. So here it is, finally written in stone for her to use (and hopefully you too!). 
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I feel like I claim a lot on here that my recipes are pretty easy — which makes sense because while I love to cook, I’m not the most patient person (and hate following a complicated recipe step by step!). But this recipes? I mean you almost don’t even have to look at the instructions below. All you need it some fresh white fish, a few pieces of butter, and chopped up tomatoes, shallots, corn and chorizo — wrap it all up in parchment paper and pop it in the oven while you have a glass of wine and scroll through instagram for 20 minutes (you know that’s what I do when I’m waiting for dinner to cook — no shame here!), what’s better than that? 
Ingredients
- 1 lb Cod or haddock loin
- 2 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1-2 ears of corn
- 1 cup of cherry tomatoes
- 1 small chorizo link, chopped
- 2-3 small shallots, chopped
- Fresh lemon and chives for garnishing
Instructions
- Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
- Place cod loin, divided into 2-3 portions, in a pan lined with parchment paper. Salt and pepper cod, drizzle with olive oil, and disperse cubed butter over fish.
- Combine corn, tomatoes, shallots and chopped chorizo, spread out over fish.
- Pull parchment paper up over fish and fold edges to seal. Bake in oven for 20 minutes or until fish is cooked though.
- Garnish with a squeeze of fresh lemon and chopped chives. Serve over rice.
