homemade bulk italian sausage

We made lasagna this past week but didn’t find any bulk Italian sausage at the store. So, I thought I’d take a shot at making it myself. I combined a recipe from Alton Brown with another one I found online at Sausage Mania, added a little extra flavoring, and voila! It turned out very well [...]

oven baked bbq chicken with mashed sweet potatoes

I went looking for a baked chicken recipe today and remembered that Paula Deen had one of her sons on her show demonstrating how to make BBQ chicken in the oven. I used the Deen Brothers’ recipe as a starting point and added a few modifications. I then found a recipe for whipped sweet potatoes [...]

updated: “you STILL can’t spell…” chili

Four years ago, we were watching the 2005 Notre Dame-USC game (infamous for the “Bush Push”… cheaters) with some friends and I made a pretty good batch of chili, which I posted on the blog last year as part of the Wedding Gift Recipe Series. We were going to make a batch yesterday for this [...]

pork asado, filipino style

Today was a great day – I used two different dutch ovens to create two different braised dishes. MMMMM. The first one was a small batch of kare-kare, a Filipino peanut stew that I’ve written up before. The other was a batch of Pork Asado, which braises pork in a soy sauce and brown sugar [...]

pork loin roast, cuban style

My mom brought me a 3+ pound frozen pork loin when they came up for Easter (Let me explain. No, wait, it is too long. Let me sum up: they were moving and needed to clean out their freezer.), and when Mike came home with some fresh Honeycrisp apples, I went looking for a good [...]

“I’m so sick (of my dissertation)” beef and lentil soup

I held off as long as I could, but I finally had to include my dissertation in the name of one of my dishes. Today was one of those great writing days… you know, the ones where you think that banging your head on the keyboard will produce better results than you staring at the [...]

potato smash soup

My good friend Kelly shared this recipe with me long ago, though it used to be called “Mashed Potato Soup”. It was renamed by someone at one of the potlucks we took it to, and the name stuck. Though we haven’t made this vegetarian dish in a while, it’s one of our favorites, and [...]

buffalo chicken dip

Last week we were visiting Mike’s family in OH. We arrived late on Friday night and I (not surprisingly) was hungry. Mike’s brother, Joe, had some of this dip in the fridge, so we heated some up and WOW it was super tasty! Joe was kind enough to share the recipe and his modifications, and [...]

grilled zucchini planks

These couldn’t be any easier – and they’re pretty tasty! The trick here is to use “younger” zucchini so the skin is still tender. Once the skin gets too dark, that is a sign that it will be tough and the seeds will be too mature to enjoy in this form.
INGREDIENTS
2 medium to large [...]

a tip for tomatoes, and Nanay’s chicken with peas

It’s tomato season here in MN, hooray! After a very cool summer, the tomatoes are finally taking off here… but all at once, of course. So, before I get to today’s recipe, I wanted to offer a quick tomato tip if you’re harvest (or CSA haul) is taking over your kitchen: just wash them, check [...]