Tag: recipes

A Delicious Time of Year

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We hope that everyone is enjoying the holidays. We had a wonderful weekend complete with a visit from Santa (the kids are still besides themselves), laughter, love, family and delicious food. We’d like to start by giving a shout-out to some of our blogging friends who made our holiday all the more delicious. Unfortunately I don’t have photos of all the dishes we made, but each one was every bit as good as we hoped!

We spent Christmas Eve having a family dinner with just the four of us. We dressed-up, opened presents, ate our traditional homemade Italian dinner, followed by a tour of Christmas lights in our Christmas pajamas while we ate cookies in the car. Our meal this year featured two amazing recipes from Linda at Savoring Every Bite. The kids especially enjoyed her Calamari Pomodoro. We did too, but the kids beat us out of seconds and thirds. They love their calamari. So while the kids devoured the calamari, Mike and I enjoyed the Pasta with Pecorino Herb Walnut Sauce. (Which incidentally makes for great leftovers too!)

We kicked off Christmas day with our Maple Bacon Biscuits – every bit as good as the first time and then got ready for the festivities.  Continue reading →

It’s Not Christmas Without…

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Mom’s oatmeal cookies. They are the only cookies that are an absolute must in our house.

I know, I know, mom. Couldn’t leave you out of the flashback pics though.

Admittedly, this week has gotten away from us a little. We haven’t had many home cooked meals and we’ve put our cooking around the world on hold for a few days. Rather we’ve been finishing up our holiday to do list – okay, we started and have almost finished up our holiday to do list. Fortunately I’m taking a day off work today and plan to finish everything up, because for the next three days it’s all about playing with the kids.

Now the one thing we made sure to have time for this week was mom’s oatmeal cookies. These little gems grace our holiday dessert table every year. I don’t know where the recipe originally came from, I just know it’s hands-down my favorite cookie. It’s sweet with a hint of vanilla and practically melts in your mouth. I don’t think it’s Mike’s favorite cookie, but he does ask that I only make them one time a year because he just can’t control himself around them. And the kids…well, they would eat these for every meal of the day if we let them. Continue reading →

Cel-e-brate Good Times

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…come on! Why am I cursed with these terrible songs in my head?! At any rate, we’re celebrating this week and not because of Christmas. I’m still not close to ready for that…shopping, baking, menu planning, cleaning, wrapping, etc. all still left to do. I guess procrastination got the better of me this year – that and work. Two more days to go this week and I’m home free!

So what are we celebrating? A four-spoon dish? Yes, but we’ll get to that momentarily. Are we celebrating two new awards? Yes, but again, we’ll get to that.  Our celebration is in fact nothing blog or holiday related. We’re celebrating something that’s been in the making for 16 years…31 seasons…314 games and 117 penalty minutes (for Mike that is). 

The Flock, Mike’s broomball team for more than a decade, clinched the Evanston Broomball League finals. And yes, it was worth the wait. Mike and I were just dating when I experienced my first broomball game. In fact, I don’t think anyone on his team was married. But last night as they took the title, eight pairs of little feet (a pair of which are brand new!) got to join their daddies on the ice. How time flies. Congratulations guys!

So in honor of our champion and because we’re always on the look-out for a great weekend breakfast recipe, we bring you Maple Bacon Biscuits. Yes, they are as good as they sound. We’ll be making these on Christmas morning and the next time we have overnight guests. We started by chopping up some bacon into bite size pieces. Continue reading →

Red Hot

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By Mike

Miss A carpools home from preschool with our neighbor, and in a development that should come as no surprise to regular blog readers, she’s been known to express her opinion about the music selection during the car ride. Her standard request demand is for the Red Hot Chili Peppers:


She apparently picked this up from Kristy unbeknownst to me. Regardless, we’re off to New Mexico, a state that knows something about chile peppers, for our stateside adventure this week.

In fact, chiles are the subject of The Official New Mexico State Question: Red or Green? The correct answer if you can’t decide is, appropriately enough for the season, “Christmas.”

Our pick for a New Mexico meal featured red chiles most prominently, though the ones we chose were mild. We went with Costillas de Sudoeste–Southwest Spareribs in a red chile sauce. Fear not, though–we made some green chile sauce to go alongside as well. Continue reading →

Bread Bowl in a Soup

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Tonight we’re wrapping up our little stint with Portuguese cuisine, but unlike our usual routine, we’re not going to end on dessert. I mean after all, what could really top our Pastéis de Nata?

Well, that and this house has been somewhat of an infirmary since the start of November. So we’re looking for something healthy, warming and down right comforting…soup. Soups also happen to be a main part of Portuguese meals, so tonight we chose a Portuguese bread soup called Açordas de Mariscos.

Miss A got a little relief from her fever for a few moments thanks to Advil, so she wanted to help break the bread into bite size pieces for us. 

Continue reading →

Spicin’ Things Up

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We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a great weekend. We’ve been busy eating leftovers, decorating for the holidays and even squeezing in a trip to the circus. We’ll get back to our stateside cooking adventures and Portugal later this week, but first we thought we’d share this awesome recipe for using up some leftover cranberry sauce and pumpkin puree.

Before we get to our recipe for this Spiced Cobbler, however, we wanted to quickly mention that our Pumpkin & Couscous Rocket Salad was featured over at FoodPornDaily this weekend. It was a wonderful surprise to discover today. I about fell off the couch when I found out. So now that we’re feeling all spicy…

We began our cobbler by chopping six pears. We peeled them this time. 

Then we gathered the leftover cranberry sauce (We recommend using homemade, but the canned variety will work.), the fresh cranberries, brown sugar and a bit of pumpkin pie spice. Continue reading →