Rice with Mushrooms and Onions

This side dish is basically cheating it’s so easy.  Cook some rice (I use a rice cooker because it’s easier than easy, but an old fashioned pot is totes fine) and while there’s about 10 minutes left, sauté mushrooms and onions in butter with salt and pepper.  Or if you’re using a rice cooker, it…

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Pesto and Sausage Bake

When you think of baked ziti, it’s always marinara and mozz.  You’d be amazed at what a difference switching to pesto can make.  It’s still the same process of opening up a jar of store-bought sauce…the only difference is the sauce being green instead of red. Cook up 1/2 a box of ziti (this recipe…

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Snickity Snack: Endive Dippers

After my curried yogurt with beet and sweet potato chip post, I decided there was a hole in my food blogging.  I post big dishes all the time but I rarely ever write about snacks.  We all indulge in ‘tween the meal munching but there’s usually little variation.  I, myself, am partial to white cheddar Pirate’s…

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Tortellini with Goat Cheese Sauce

I had been snacking on my latest cheese purchase, a goat cheese rolled in smoked paprika (I think) but decided I wanted to do something more with it than put it on crackers.  The paprika gave it such a unique smoky flavor (one I don’t associate with the tang of goat cheese) that I thought…

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Crème Fraîche Pasta

The first time I had crème fraîche was while I was living in France.  Actually, that’s the only time I have ever had it because they don’t really make it here in the US.  Sure, restaurants dollop some cream over berries and say it’s crème fraîche, but it’s not the same.  In France, the texture…

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Jalapeño Sausage Pasta

I bought some jalapeño chicken sausage with the intention of making some sort of jambalaya inspired rice dish. Intentions are great, but when you get home late with no time to buy any of the other necessary ingredients, intentions mean absolutely nothing. I opened up my fridge to see if there was anything I could…

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Alpine Grilled Cheese

Experimenting with grilled cheese is fun.  I’m a purist so I don’t believe you can add more than one non-cheese ingredient and still call it a grilled cheese.  However, that doesn’t mean you can’t play around with different cheese varieties.  This time, I wanted a cow’s milk Alpine cheese and went with Appenzeller Kaserei Tufertsch.…

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Autumn Harvest Salad

One if my great new cheese discoveries is dunbarton blue. It’s a blue cheese with cheddar as the base. The texture is more like cheddar so it doesn’t crumble the way you may be accustomed to. Even the people I was with who don’t like blue cheese liked this one. I had to have more…

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Scallops and Herb Butter Pasta

My brother is a great eater.  If you go to a restaurant with him, he’ll order the most out-there item on the menu.  Vegetables pose no threat to him and strange food combinations are exciting rather than gross.  But that wasn’t always the case.  Growing up, my brother’s diet consisted of three items: chicken fingers,…

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Salad with Pomegranate Seeds, Fennel, Gorgonzola, and Avocado

I wanted to use some very Fall flavors in the salad at Friday’s dinner party and that meant pomegranate and fennel.  This is an incredibly easy salad to put together.  Simply dump the lettuce into a bowl and top with chopped avocado, crumbled gorgonzola, shaved fennel (a mandolin comes in handy here), and pomegranate seeds.…

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