My Second Entry In The “Chopped” Cooking Challenge At My Office

A couple weeks ago, I entered a fun challenge at work: to make a dish, over the weekend, that used three mystery ingredients. Check out what I came up with! This past weekend, I participated in the challenge again. The first time, the challenge was to make an entree. This time, the task was to make an appetizer!

But you can’t just make any appetizer. You have to use the three mystery ingredients, which, this time around, were:

My Office is Having a “Chopped” Cooking Challenge and I Am Totally on Board!

Some friends at work came up with a really fun idea: a cooking challenge, inspired by “Chopped” on the Food Network! They posted three ingredients on our internal social media platform on Friday, and over the weekend, everyone that wanted to participate could make a dish using those ingredients. Then, on Monday,

Two New-To-Me Ingredients in One Delicious Dinner

I made a fantastic dinner the other night, and I used two components I’d never used before! Say hello to my Shrimp and Veggie Pesto Pasta!

But first, I want to brag really quickly, because I’m proud of how active I’ve been during this lockdown. I

They Can’t All Be Gems, Folks!

Hello everyone! Sorry for the extended delay between posts. I’ve been keeping busy! I spent some free time working on a maze commission, and this past week just got away from me a little bit. Plus, my birthday was a few days ago (I’m now 41), so I’ve been taking stock on a few things and thinking about this upcoming year. I’ll share more about that in my next post.

This post, however, is about food. I share regularly about what I’m eating, and I’ll let you in on a little blogging secret:

One Quiche is Nice, But Two Quiches are Divine

I had the opportunity to make brunch the other day, and I immediately thought of quiche. But I couldn’t decide what kind of quiche to make… so I upped the ante, and made two quiches. TWO FREAKIN’ QUICHES!

Here’s how I made them:

Bean Soup with Ham and Lots of Veggies

Do you celebrate the holidays with a spiral-cut ham? This post is for you! 

I brought home a delicious spiral-cut ham a few weeks ago. It was huge – much bigger than was needed for three people – and we ended up feasting on ham for the better part of a week. My parents then went out of town, and I set out to make one of my mom’s favorite things using spiral-cut ham… soup.

As you may know from reading this blog, I’m not the sort that follows a recipe blindly. And that worked out well, because my mom didn’t leave me a recipe. So

Two Healthy Swaps, One Holiday Party Dish

I went to a holiday party last night, and contributed a dish, since it was a potluck. I’m not going to take credit and say I invented anything, but I did take a recipe that only had four ingredients and swapped two of them for healthier items. That’s 50%, y’all! It all started with a package.

This is the Pineapple Pecan Cheesespread Mix by Country Home Creations, a local dip mix company that’s

The Easy, Healthy Dinner That’s So Good I Made It Twice in Three Days!

This kinda looks like a lasagna, but it’s not.

Actually, it’s very similar to a lasagna, in that it has layers of ingredients. But this is a zucchini bake, and it’s lacking two major components that a lasagna has: noodles, and sauce.

I’m done talking about what it doesn’t have, though, I’d rather

My New Favorite Way To Cook Fish – You’ll Want To Do This All Summer Long!

Check this my dinner tonight: healthy, gorgeous, and best of all, delicious.

The salad is a salad kit from the store. And there’s some avocado in the upper left. But don’t focus on that stuff… focus on the fish. That’s a piece of cedar plank smoked salmon, and you’ll never want to cook salmon any other way.

Maple Vegetable Salad

I recently shared a recipe for Avocado Deviled Eggs that included a tantalizing tease: another recipe from our Easter meal that was sure to whet your appetite. Well, I wasn’t planning for it to take two more weeks to get this post up, but it did. File this one under ‘better late than never!’

The Avocado Deviled Eggs was one of two dishes