My Therapist Cooks

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Five Pasta Dishes to Make for Valentine's Day

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Five delicious easy pasta recipes that are perfect for cooking on Valentine's Day! Date night in, even for one, is the 2020 vibe I can't get enough of.

Are you celebrating Valentine's Day this week? Weekend? Ever? Never?

We technically celebrate our dating anniversary on V-day, but after 9 years together we....I have no idea...anymore. Mainly because I travel a lot this time of year and last year we had a newborn and, while I'm cool with a dating anniversary and a wedding anniversary as an excuse to hang out, it's definitely nothing mandatory for us anymore.

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Bacon Cheddar Skillet Pizza with Caramelized Onions

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You know that when you make pizza in a cast iron skillet it's done in 10 minutes, right? 

Bacon Cheddar Pizza from funnyloveblog.com

That means you can be EATING PIZZA in ten minutes. 

Beck's favorite food HANDS DOWN is pizza. When we are talking restaurants is always what she "suggests" (shouts for), what she'll gobble up the fastest, and what she'll do almost anything for, behavior-wise. Yes, we bribe with food. I'm cool with it.

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Creamy Mushroom Parmesan Pasta

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Dinner! 

Honestly can it just always be pasta? Last week Jay was out of town and I had some leftover noodles from another dinner, then I made this easy creamy mushroom pasta, AND we had some leftover pizza. So save for some wilting lettuce that I ate for the earth and this pasta, I didn't cook at all and ate carb-heavy nearly every meal. It was the best, and this week we've eaten lots of extra veggies already, so lay off me. 

This pasta, for sure, is SO worth it. We're talking huge flavor with just a few ingredients, thickened milk or half and half instead of heavy cream, and vegetarian with a healthy hit of parmesan for flavor and protein.

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Buttery Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Spinach

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Obviously healthy enough for what we're trying to do this January.

One thing I've been trying really hard to do since having Will is find a balance between 1. complicated meals that I love to make but take forever and trash the kitchen and 2. takeout. I know that seems dumb, but I'm never the one to look for "super quick and easy weeknight meals!" I don't mind eating at 9pm, I love cooking, and it mostly works for me.

Until, of course, it doesn't. Will has been taking a longer stretch of sleep (like...two hours, don't get too excited) in the late evenings, so if we eat at nine and go to bed around 11pm I'm missing a lot of that good sleep. Then homeboy wakes up sometimes every hour at night, I'm exhausted and forgetful and irritable and honestly the fun crazy dinners are mostly not worth that.

So the quest is to find quick dinners that are actually GOOD, and this is definitely that. It's sweet potato gnocchi that boils in four minutes, during which time we saute some spinach with so.much.garlic. aka my favorite way to eat spinach. Then the gnocchi gets a brown butter + sage bath because we've earned it, and dinner is ready in FIFTEEN MINUTES, tastes like something from a fancy restaurant. You need this in your life, trust me.

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Spicy Sausage Vodka Sauce

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HIHI how was your Christmas, or holiday, or break, or week, or weekend?

We had....all of those things. This was the first year that I can remember having all of our sisters in town from both of our families. We had family outing after family outing, happy hour(s), dinners out, gift exchanges, and a great deal of time spent discussing WHY Will insists on spitting up so much, and how on earth he's gaining any weight. It's a mystery, and a very gross one. I've never done so much laundry in my life.

Jay is mercifully, blissfully off the rest of this week, and I'm caught between wanting to 1. organize everything and let him hang out with the kids, 2. do absolutely nothing, and 3. send them all away so I can actually catch up on work for once in my life. I'm THINKING that there has to be a balance between those three things, but likely I'll spend a ton of time thinking about it and not a ton of time accomplishing the things I really need to be doing.

What I will be doing, though, is cooking. I love cooking on holiday weeks, two or three meals per day and some snacks, trashing the kitchen, listening to music, all of it. This vodka sauce is one of my favorite weekend/holiday meals, and it's perfect for this time of year - maybe even for New Year's Eve if you're staying in! It takes a bit of time because the sauce gets roasted in the oven, but the steps are simple and the results are SO worth it. We have spicy sausage, tangy vodka and tomatoes. Extra garlic, absolutely. After the sauce roasts we pink it up with heavy cream and toss it with pasta or zoodles if you're starting your New Year's resolutions early! Honestly the sauce is so good I could eat it plain.

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