Vida

In the past two weeks we've made our own pizza's twice.  I think this idea is going to stick because it's fun and easy. We've been using this crust recipe and enjoying it: Sally's Baking Addiction . My favorite combination (so far) is adding some chipotle to the sauce and jalapeños , and caramelized onions on top. It's super affordable and delicious. We ate these right before we went and saw Black Panther .  Go see it.

Do you remember a few years ago when one mug desserts were everywhere?   Last week they popped in to my brain again for an easy sweet and I'm here to remind all of you! can you see the steam??? 2 Tablespoons Flour or baking mix (or any flour of choice)
  2 Tablespoons sugar or 1-2 packets of stevia
  1 Tablespoon cocoa powder 
  1 Tablepsoon Coconut Butter/Oil or Vegetable Oil
  1 Tablespoon water dash of salt Mix the sugar, flour, cocoa, and salt in the mug and mix. Next, add the oil and water, and mix the dry and wet ingredients together. Microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Your brownie should be gooey in the center.

Guys, real talk.  Mike is not a fan of leftovers.  I eat a lot of leftovers, I'm not a huge fan of cooking every single night.   I've started using leftovers in different dishes so he doesn't even notice! Last week, I was really proud of my creativity using these leftover  Herbed Goat Cheese Polenta Bites three different ways!  And now, friends, they're all gone. First, we ate them as the recipe directs as a side for Valentine's Day which I put way too much energy in to and we had way too much food. Second, I made a mushroom sauce to go over the top.  Vegan Mushroom Gravy Third, we used them as croutons for Minestrone Soup . We enjoyed each dish, they weren't something we really wanted to have on the side at every meal for the next week.  They made each of the dishes a bit more substantial and less cooking for me!  Win win over here! P.S.  I've also found many leftovers can be put in a tortilla with some different sauce an...

If there's one thing I wish I would have purchased for myself before I got married and had a registry: it would be nice knives!  Oh wow they make such a difference!  (And a food processor, that's amazing too.) So to all my single friends or those who didn't register for nice knives (or you did and didn't receive them).  Watch the sales (they do go on sale) and purchase some for yourself. We registered for a few and didn't receive them.  I cut myself pretty badly in the fall while cutting pumpkin.  My friend asked why I wasn't using knives we got for our wedding because accidents are much less likely with nice knives.  I started watching sales and we purchased our knives with money people gave us as our gift. The first time I used them I gasped with amazement! Do it.  Get yourself nice knives.  Do knives go on sale for President's Day?  You will not regret it.

The whole point of the super bowl is a good excuse to get together, right?  I don't think I would even watch the game if it wasn't for a gathering.  For the past many many years I've gone to my friend's super bowl party in Chicago.  Since this is the first year we're not there, we decided to host one.  It went a little something like this.  Mike & I chatted of maybe having people over but our TV room was still a disaster.  Tuesday of last week I asked if we actually wanted to do it.  He responded that he already invited people, so that answers that question.  The weekend entailed hosting a social for his masters program Saturday, attending a 1 year old birthday party Sunday, and trying to figure out how to space out preparing food! I made what I could Saturday (cookies and the base for the vegan cheese dip).  Sunday morning we made the chili before the birthday party.  And as soon as we got back we ran around like crazy to pull...

Let's talk about it.  Meal planning.  What's your strategy? I think back to before I moved in with Mike and sometimes wish I could still be so laissez-faire. I ate leftovers a lot.  I had the time to plan ahead.  We are definitely short on time around here these days.  Some weeks I sit down, come up with meals for the week and do all my shopping on the weekend.  And I love it!  The truth is, I'm just not usually that organized. Elephant in the room: Mike does not cook.  He will make himself spaghetti or tuna salad sandwiches.  That is all.  We keep saying I'll teach him, but again there's that issue of time. I ended up getting a free box of Blue Apron a couple weeks ago.  Have any of you tried it or a similar service?   Guys, we really liked it.  We will not be spending $50 on two meals right now because we are on a budget, but it was so nice to have all the ingredients delivered (they sent a garlic head for 2...

Yesterday, December 30, Mike & I decided we would have Black-eyed Pea and Quinoa Croquettes with Mushroom Sauce from “ Vegan with a Vengeance ” by Isa Chandra Moskowitz for dinner.  (It's one of my favorite cookbooks and super delicious.  Do not skip on the sauce, it makes the whole dish.)  We were out running errands and stopped at our first grocery store to find them sold out of black eyed peas.  We both thought it was odd until we remembered some people eat them on New Year's Day for good luck.  Apparently there are many stories behind this tradition: feel free to read some here . We found some at the next grocery store, but there were quite a few people grabbing them and I had to sneak in and grab a can before heading to the register.   We ate them last night, hopefully it's close enough to count for 2018!

We carved our pumpkins, Halloween came and went.  Then it's time to cook the pumpkin!  Pumpkins are food after all.  They're a squash. I should note before this year I haven't had outdoor space so I only cooked tiny pumpkins, usually for pumpkin bread or something. This year though, we had two big pumpkins!  And I had no idea how much pumpkin you get from one.  I was planning to use both for a pumpkin mac and cheese.  After one the crockpot was overflowing... I might use the other for a pumpkin soup or something. I cut off the carved part and threw that away, cleaned out the inside and worked on cutting off the skin, just like any squash.  Be careful when you do this, I slice my thumb a bit, which was unfortunate. For pumpkin #1 I ended up combining these recipes a bit:  Crockpot Pumpkin Macaroni and Cheese Recipe and  Creamy Crock Pot Butternut Mac & Cheese .  Essentially I wanted to use spices that make sense ...

Last weekend we went to visit my brother and his family for my nephew's 6th birthday!  They moved a week before the visit so they were a bit overwhelmed with life.  They soon asked if I wanted to take the last box and 1/2 of their farmer's market boxes home with me.  It's the last of the summer boxes they signed up for and they were just tired of the creativity required to cook with vegetables they're not used to. YES! First, you may be wondering what a farmer's market box is.  While I have not signed up for one, what I understand is you sign up for weekly boxes through a season, in their case summer.  You'll get assorted items from a local farmer, but you won't know what you're getting.  They did receive an email each week highlighting a few of the vegetables with a recipe suggestion or two. I was so excited to try out a few things I haven't cooked with before. Creamy Crock Pot Butternut Mac & Cheese - I substituted delicata squash for ...

Zucchini is back and strong and I'm so excited! I went to Stanley's for my weekly vegetable run and saw they were $.69/lb.  $.69/lb!  Half my basket was zucchini. Every time zucchini season rolls around I make this delicious, easy, and quite healthy zucchini soup.  I'm sure I've mentioned it here before, but we all have a lot going on and a reminder never hurts. ;) So here it is courtesy of Food & Wine: Silky Zucchini Soup . I plan on making it at least once more before zucchini season ends. Fun tip:  if you have an immersion blender, the recipe is even easier!  I got mine from groupon years ago and it's still trucking along.

Yesterday was Monday.  I was beat from the weekend.  I didn't want to drive to the grocery store.  I needed to cook something for dinner. My go to summer dish popped in to my mind: one-pan farro with tomatoes I walked over to Target after work to get some tomatoes and I was good to go.   Highly recommended.

Every morning I fire up a skillet and make kale and eggs.  (I like it.)  Sometimes I will have toast or add some cheese or on special days avocado ! I recently came across this idea for breakfast sandwiches - and I love breakfast sandwiches - on Cup of Jo from the lady behind Smitten Kitchen.  I've jumped in full force the last couple weeks and I love it! It's super easy and somehow more delicious than my normal kale & eggs.  Maybe it's just the fact of mixing things up a bit. Add a little water to the egg and beat it before pouring it into the skillet.  Cook briefly before adding the filling. I'm a big kale for breakfast fan so it's kale for me.  Sometimes I add a little cheese if there's some around.  Fold it up, right there in the skillet.  Let it cook a bit longer.  This helps my kale wilt a bit and cheese melt. And done!  Super quick and easy!  I'm a fan of open faced sandwiches so I have a slice of to...

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone!  Even though this is somewhat of a fake holiday...yes, it's a day in Mexico, but they don't even take the day off work and they take the day off work for everything.  Mother's Day?  They're off.  (They don't celebrate it on a Sunday.) It's a great excuse for us to have some tacos, guac, and margaritas.  Coronas too?  Okay! Inspired by the holiday (not really, it's sort-of a coincidence) I made some fajita tacos!  Man, not only were they super easy.  They are super delicious!   I used Budget Bytes Oven Fajitas recipe and just left out the chicken, which I'm sure you could replace with potatoes or something if you feel it's lacking and want a vegetarian taco like me.  I thought it was wonderful. Don't skip warming up your tortillas!  Chicagoans, I recommend El Milagro tortillas, especially if you're a small household and only want a few tortillas.  In Mexico most people have tortilla warm...

Who watches Jim Hamblin's videos on The Atlantic?   I can't help it, I love them.  They make me laugh while learning about something I've typically never thought about. I have two videos for you to check it out below.  (I couldn't choose one!)  Note:  they are all good! They have an option to subscribe so you receive a notification when there's a new video...subscribed! P.S. He writes articles and such too.

Do you have any cookies you associate with Christmas or you just happen to cook around this time every year? I mentioned we had a cookie baking party a couple weeks ago.  We made two cookies and they were a couple of our favorites: Chocolate Chip, M&M Cookies - Make your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe and add M&Ms.  Easy.  Bonus if you use M&M colors for the season.  Right now:  red and green.  We did not do that. You know Peanut Butter Blossoms?  Replace the Hershey's kiss with a Resees Peanut Butter cup and bake in those little muffin tins.  (We always use them for these cookies and spinach balls.) Insert Mike's cookie work competition.  Also insert Mike's competitive spirit.  We picked these Hot Cocoa Cookies (discovered on buzzfeed ).  They were somewhat easy and pretty so we went for it.  Keys to any cookie competition:  it needs to taste good, but more importantly be pretty! He got s...

Oh man, this zucchini soup. I found a huge zucchini at my farmer's market Saturday for $2 or $3.  And this  Silky Zucchini Soup  was recommended.  It's such a simple recipe with a reasonable number of ingredients and it's delicious!  Pretty sure the zucchini I bought was more than a pound and a half...a little extra zucchini can't hurt. :) I used my immersion blender, instead of the standard blender, which I thought was a bit easier.  Dumping boiling food in a blender is a little scary (I have done it successfully before...somewhat).  Immersion blenders solve that problem.  It may take a few extra minutes, but in the end, it's much easier.  Win!

What do you do when you have tons of different veggies in your refrigerator? I often resort to something we made in Mexico frequently:  Caro's speciality.  AKA mixed veggies.  We would take all our veggies (especially if they were starting to go bad), put them in a pan/pot/doesn't matter, and cook.  We added garlic and salt for flavor and finished with hot sauce when serving.  Done. I've been resorting to this meal quite a bit lately.  Without much time to plan out what I'll eat for the week I tend to pick up quite an assortment at Stanley's.  Then I get home and look at the veggies in my refrigerator and I'm not sure what to make with my scattered purchase.  Caro's speciality it is! I can have it with black beans or quinoa or avocado or just plain. Super easy and delicious.  I am also finding chopping the veggies quite soothing as of late.  It could be the very fall-like temperatures we had this week.

Who else hits the kitchen hard core in the winter? I've said this before, but all summer I can happily survive on tomato & mustard sandwiches then we ease into fall and cooking starts to happen more.  Winter hits and I start planning recipes, grocery store trips, and my kitchen always seems to be a mess busy. I rarely make the same recipe twice.  With so many recipes out there, why would I? The Post Punk Kitchen has been one of my favorite sites to get recipes for awhile.  I have one of her cookbooks and it's vegan.  Over the weekend I made  Chipotle Mac & Cheese .  Pretty good one there.  I always love me some chipotle (peppers...not the restaurant). Last night I made  Pesto Soup with Gnocchi, Beans & Greens  I made a few substitutions, using kale instead of swiss chard (kale is cheap right now!) and adding chipotle because I had some extra from the weekend and adding chipotle is never a bad idea to me.  I lov...

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I decided to kick off the new year by making my grandma's cinnamon rolls! After doing some reflecting on 2014 on NYE and journaling my thoughts.  I came to the conclusion for the year that priorities change.  I know.  Groundbreaking.   I don't have a 9x13 pan. Girl's got to do what a girl's got to do. One year ago, some things that were priorities just aren't priorities anymore.  It's not good.  It's not bad.  It's just the fluidity of life. And being ok with that.  Being ok that I didn't achieve something that was a priority is ok.   I have new areas of focus and I'm trying things I hadn't thought of a year ago. Finding the balance of the two and enjoying the steps along the way. And sometimes realizing it's not terrible, but maybe you need more practice.  My first attempt at Grandma's cinnamon rolls was good, but they are nothing in comparison to my grandma's, which I've had severa...

For my work dessert walk a couple weeks ago, I decided to make chocolate dipped pretzels.  I mean, how hard can it be, melt chocolate, dip pretzels, decorate. Well when I started melting chocolate just in a little pot on the stove and it started to burn, I should have know I took completely the wrong approach.  (P.S. If this ever happens to you, add butter and you should be able to still use it.) I've since learned from different sources to use a double broiler (which I don't have) or even just a bowl over the pot of boiling water.  Also Barefoot Contessa has melting chocolate in the microwave tips! Then just a few days ago when I finished eating my leftover pretzels, I saw there was a recipe on the back:  Chocolate Covered Pretzels.  Wow, Lisa. 1 (12 ounce) package milk chocolate chips 1 (10 ounce) bag pretzel rods 2-3 cubes vanilla flavored almond bark 1.  Using a double boiler or a heat-proof bowl over the top of a saucepan, ...