My Therapist Cooks

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pasta

Crock Pot Tortellini Chicken Soup

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One of our favorite all-the-time slow cooker soups, tortellini chicken soup! This is a super easy, all-in-one dish with pasta, chicken, and spinach. There's no searing, hardly any chopping, just one Crock Pot, a few hours of waiting, and dinner is done! This is not terrible at ALL with some homemade focaccia with pizza dough for dunking.

Hello and hi and here's dinner!

bowl of tortellini chicken soup

I absolutely can't believe it, but almost exactly one year ago my sister and brother in law came over and brought dinner, a slow cooker tortellini situation with chicken and tomatoes and cream. It was delicious.

We joked about how school would probably be cancelled starting that Monday (they're both teachers), joked about handwashing, joked about...everything.

About 36 hours later the entire world shut down and we didn't see each other for months.

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Eight Valentine's Day Pasta Recipes

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The best Valentine's Day date night starts with pasta! Here are my favorite Valentine's Day Pasta Recipes to make at home.

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

We technically celebrate our dating anniversary on V-day, but after a gazillion years together we....I have no idea...anymore. Mainly because I travel a lot this time of year (well, in a regular year, which this is not) and two times we had a newborn at Valentine's Day, 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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Best Spaghetti Meat Sauce Recipe

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My favorite slow cooked Sunday sauce recipe! This is a version of Sam the Cooking Guy's Bolognese recipe featuring tons of veggies, beef, and a few special ingredients. The recipe is super simple and simmers for a long time to develop a perfect Sunday gravy flavor and OMG the house smell. Best ever.

sunday gravy recipe

Hello and hi, let's finish this year with an uber bang. I've been talking with a lot of people recently about things that I make that never change, staples that I think are so handy for everyone to be able to make all the time. A good salad dressing, one kind of bread, that sort of thing.

This easy Bolognese sauce is a new-to-me recipe that I've been working on for a few months. I watched Sam the Cooking Guy make this Bolognese on YouTube, and I loved the method, ingredients, all of it. The key to the flavor in this Bolognese is that we use stock, wine, and milk to flavor and enrich the sauce so that it's super hearty without being creamy by the end.

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Lobster Pasta With Lemon Cream Sauce

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Channeling major Kate-Winslet-The-Holiday Christmas pasta recipe vibes with this super easy creamy lobster pasta recipe! I buy frozen lobster tails when I see them on sale and keep them in the freezer for extra special meals when we need cozy + comforting without spending a ton of time on dinner. I have a lobster mac and cheese recipe too for even more creamy dreamy lobster!

lobster with pasta recipes

Oh hey, December. Didn't see you there with all the Thanksgiving pandemic election fake news bs inundating my brain and screens.

But, December it is, and December means we need some festive meals. Right? Right. Let's get right into this lobster pasta cream sauce of joy situation.

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She Crab Mac and Cheese

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She Crab Mac and Cheese

Super delicious, dreamy mac and cheese that tastes just like she-crab soup but amped up with tons of cheese and pasta. She-crab mac and cheese is the mac and cheese we've all been waiting for! This is perfect for a cozy weekend, Valentine's Day, or even Christmas Eve.

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Creamed Spinach Mac and Cheese

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this recipe is sponsored by microplane. they're offering a discount code to readers (see below!) and there will be a giveaway on Instagram later this week. be sure to follow along and enter!

Here's our new super duper easy one-pot dinner for fall!

I have been SO excited to share this with you. Creamed Spinach Mac and Cheese. It's one of those really nice unicorn dishes that everyone likes, that has veggies in it, that is comforting but not so heavy that we can't eat it on a Tuesday, checks a lot of boxes.

Let's break it down: We are boiling some noodles, and we aren't messing around with a roux/white sauce. We're stirring some dairy stuff together super quickly because we're hungry. Fresh nutmeg grated with Microplane's Spice Mill adds tons of flavor with zero effort, and garlic + handfuls of greens round the whole thing out. The resulting creamy mac is practically perfect in every way.

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Spicy Sambal Pork Noodles

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spicy noodle bowls made with ramen noodles (or any pasta you like!) are the perfect mid-week alternative to spaghetti with meat sauce. this asian noodle bowl is the best!

What do you watch while you eat dinner?

Do not tell me that you talk to other people. I won't hear 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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Cheesy Chicken Spaghetti Casserole

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Super yummy chicken spaghetti casserole that is a perfect make ahead weeknight dinner! Creamy cheesy sauce, noodles, and veggies chopped up with tender chicken for an all-in-one casserole meal. Add an extra veggie with my favorite lemon kale salad, if you'd like!

Have you watched Ugly Delicious?

This is kind of that. It's the food we're supposed to turn our noses up at, food of a different era, the dirty little secret of food. It's a casserole with cream of mushroom AND cream of chicken soup, it's not particularly attractive, and it's utterly delicious.

I've made this off and on for the last ten or so years, usually pulling it out for family vacations or special events that call for easy comfort food. Specifically, I froze a batch of this when I was pregnant with both of my kids, and we had it on our first night home (the day they both were born) with each of them. So, to say that this casserole holds some meaning to me is an understatement.

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Buttery Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Spinach

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One of my favorite recipes with sweet potato gnocchi from Trader Joes (or wherever)! This super quick dinner recipe is perfect for any greens + gnocchi you have and comes together in just 20 minutes or so. Butter, sage, and garlic make a quick sauce, and dinner is on the table ready to be eaten in half an hour!

recipes with sweet potato gnocchi

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 and easy dinners that are actually GOOD, and this is definitely that. It's sweet potato gnocchi (I love the sweet potato gnocchi from Trader Joe's!) 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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30-Minute Beef Minestrone Recipe

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This minestrone recipe is done in just half an hour and features a perfect all-in-one combo of veggies, ground beef, and pasta. The broth is tomato-based, super savory, and almost all of these ingredients can be stored in your pantry or freezer for minestrone in a minute! Note: A loaf of no-knead bread never hurt a thing with this one.

Happy week of Halloween! We have to have a soup this week, right? I adore soup all the time for one very good reason: leftovers are the best of all the food groups. Anything fried gets mushy, bread-based stuff never reheats well, microwaved leftover veggies are satanic...you get it. Soup always works fresh or reheated, so in these little-kid years if I have time to cook extra on the weekends or early in the day I make soup and then am DONE for a meal later on, usually in the evening when everything has gone to hell, toddler-behaviorally-speaking. 

Last year our go-to soup was this sausage kale number, which is still probably one of my favorite things I make ever. This basic minestrone recipe is on the same playing field with the combination of veggies, meat, and noodles that work so well together. Green beans and beef to me are super delicious, and the base of the soup is tomatoes, stock, and garlic for extra flavor. You could absolutely make this vegetarian with beans instead of beef, or use both for an extra shot of protein. 

Let's soup! 

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Fall Sausage Ragout with Zoodles

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This fall sausage ragout has sweet potatoes and kale for a perfect fall dinner. I love it over zoodles, but you can use pasta or even polenta as a base for this yummy fall meat sauce!

Is it too long if there has to be commas in the title of the recipe? Don't answer that. 

HAPPY MONDAY. Did you sleep extra this weekend? We didn't, because the cutest little alarm clock wakes up at 7am and apparently it's bad form to let a 2 year old tend to herself in the morning, much as I think she'd prooooobably do ok with the task. We did, though, eat a ton of yummy food, hit up two parks, handle some laundry, and try a new bulgogi place, so weekend events definitely happened, if not much rest. 

The balance between work and getting ready for baby and trying to enjoy THIS life right now is a real struggle, as it is for every single human, and this dinner gives us the balance we can't always manage in our regular life. Zoodles for health and low carb. Sweet potatoes for...carbs. And a superfood! Sausage and parm for yum, kale for your bod. This sausage ragout is made pretty much like a regular marinara: meat then veggies then simmering, add extra salt and crushed red if you need more spice. I cook my zoodles for about 2 minutes right before we eat to wilt them just a little bit, but you can absolutely eat them raw for even more texture. 

PS raw zoodles last pretty well in the fridge, so if you have a bunch of zucchini you can spiralize them all at once and keep them in a container for easy access. I find that the spiralizer is like the food processor - it makes everything super quick and easy but getting it out feels like climbing Everest some days. Which is dumb, but true. So make a bunch at once and eat them all week!

Let's zoodle. 

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Weeknight Meatball Bolognese

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HI. 

How was your Labor Day? Our was GREAT minus a few things. 1. my back stopped functioning on Sunday morning so I'm on day three of super painful spasms and no I can't stop picking up my toddler and no I can't take medicine because of the fetus and no I refuse to stop wiping my ass or any other normal thing that hurts. Because everything hurts. 2. Beck peed on our bed last night because she giggled too hard so we had to wash the sheets at 8pm after a long weekend but also we got clean sheets out of it? There was also a criminal incident on our street in the middle of the night last night that yielded us sleeping about three hours total. 

OTHER THAN THAT. The holiday was great. We did some fun family things but mostly hung out just us, watched enough TV that it felt lazy but did some cleaning and organizing and walked a ton. I also made an entire Thanksgiving dinner which was suuuuuper delicious but weird because it's still 90 degrees here. But! It's done and the fall decorations are out, which I'm not mad about. 

It's during holiday weeks that I often find my self really craving things that don't taste like traditional American food, if that makes any sense at all. Asian flavors, Mexican flavors, and hell yes to Italian food all the time. This is that! It's on the weeknight train of things that are easy to make but is a teensy bit special because we're calling it bolognese instead of spaghetti. This was inspired in real life by two things: we came home from vacation with a half bag of frozen meatballs from my sister-in-law, and then we celebrated our anniversary at a fancy Italian place. I ordered bologese there and it had these big chunks of carrot that were cooked down in meat sauce and I LOVED them because veggies should be with pasta in the name of balance. So meatballs instead of meat sauce, extra carrots for your health. Everything simmers super quickly and you can definitely eat in under an hour OR make this on a weekend or random free afternoon and it'll keep great in the fridge for several days, so dinner can be done in the time it takes to cook pasta. 

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Quick 1-Skillet Lemon Pepper Spaghetti

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Quick like....20 minutes tops, no chopping of any kind unless you count zesting a lemon, which you could fully skip if you'd like. 

Because we need this. I have been so overwhelmed recently, not to mention that pregnancy just makes me need more carbs than usual. Not want. A salad could be covered with fried chicken and croutons and I'm all...need a hunk of buttered bread to go with that, please. We have a ton going on right now, and some of it is good, some bad, and mostly it's just a lot. Beck is starting school in a few weeks which is involving an inordinate number of activities including the blasted home visit, and I just want to have a vacation from life but obviously that isn't a thing and no this is not a cry for help. 

It's a cry for pasta that is done in 20 minutes and only messes up one skillet. I made my own coping skill! 

It's the skillet method that has been floating around the internet for awhile, and honestly I don't always love it for spaghetti because I like simmering sauce for a LONG time and the taste of freshly boiled pasta. This, though, simmers the noodles in stock (use vegetable stock for vegetarian), which creates a thick almost creamy sauce without any cream. Then we add lemon juice, zest, salt, pepper, butter, and parmesan. Easy on the parm for me because I wanted mine to be super lemony, but you can go nuts with toppings or other additions. Plain, though, this is so cozy and comforting. 

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Fresh Tomato Butter Sauce + Spaghetti Squash

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Raise your hand if you recently had surgery and ate all of the things while not moving for nearly a month!!!

Jay is raising his hand right now. We've had the weirdest few months - we were all three sick in increments so basically someone in the house was sick for over a month, then Jay traveled for work, then had surgery, and in that time frame we decided that CARBS AND DAIRY GOOD and KALE BAD. Which honestly emotionally was exactly what we needed, but still. Can't do that forever, sad aging bodies don't work well that way. Now, let me be super clear that I think Jay looks no different and he's maintained a super duper great outlook on health and food in 2018 so far, BUT, I definitely get that sometimes after a slump it feels great to eat especially lighter or healthier meals. For us, that means less/no red meat, fewer carbs, and smaller portions. We aren't cutting out anything exactly, but more fish + veggies + vegetarian options feels great to us right now. With cheese on top. 

So to continue our Whole30-is-over-but-white-carbs-aren't-great way of eating, spaghetti squash is back in the house with a fun vengeance, because we both love it. The idea for this fresh sauce came from Pinch of Yum, which I read all the time and adore, and serving it over spaghetti squash seemed like a no-brainer. The way to make this delicious is a teeny bit of butter in the sauce, parm on top, and LIBERAL use of salt and pepper. Unsalted anything isn't great, but an unsalted healthy-on-purpose meal is just the most sad. Salt for president! 

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Quick Pasta Primavera

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Talk about eating seasonally. The last salad I showed, this pasta, and a soup I have coming up have all the same flavor base ingredients, and we change up the dish based on our desires. Need lighter? Go for the salad. Dinner with friends? Pasta for sure. Late season cold? The soup's on its way, I promise. 

The flavors in question are garlic + green veggies + fresh herbs + lemon. In this case we add cheese and spaghetti for a super quick and flavorful pasta. There isn't a huge amount of sauce, just enough to coat the pasta and veggies and make everything nice and silky. 

I made this a few weeks ago for two of my best friends; we managed a kid- and husband-free dinner and it was SO much fun. We also accidentally talked until almost eleven which is way too tired for us at this stage in our lives (they're both pregnant), but I blame that on the pasta too. It lends itself to slow twirly bites between sarcasm and giggles and definitely begs for seconds. 

It's full of green veggies and is vegetarian, so seconds are practically mandatory. 

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Ramen Noodle Salad {vegan}

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I know it's supposed to rain and snow this weekend but it's practically Mid-April so we're just going with it, ok? It's time for springy food, cooler food, lighter food. 

This is that! Also featuring noodles. I wanted to make a lunch-type salad with a super savory soy-based dressing, tons of crunchy veggies, and noodles, full stop. I went vegetarian on this version but you could definitely add some leftover cooked chicken, and the veggies you use can be mixed up every time you make this based on what you have in the fridge and based on what your preferences are. 

I MAINLY wanted to make this because I ordered a whole heap of these ramen noodles on Amazon that came highly recommended AND THEY WERE SO GOOD with exactly one exception: they do not store well at all with no exception. I made this mid-day and it was so good, the noodles were the perfect texture, and by evening when we had this for dinner they were mushy and kind of dissolved in our mouths as we ate, not cute at all. So, while I DO recommend these noodles because that's just how certain noodles behave and the flavor was excellent, I'd say to make this right when you'd like to serve or use a noodle like spaghetti as a substitute which would be equally delicious. 

The dressing is the real star here, use any noodle you want, seriously. 

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Sausage Ragout with Zoodles

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For your Tuesday! For your Whole30! For your health!

This is probably the healthiest sausage dish I've ever made, and if that isn't the most delicious kind of irony I don't know what is. Jay's still plowing through Whole30, so we've been enjoying low-carb (and all of the other rules) dinners for a few weeks now. I made this this weekend, and we both really loved it - it's not a salad which just feels punishing after a long day when it's cold out, but also not mac and cheese or anything too heavy. The sausage + veg combo is the perfect mix of indulgent and healthy, and a plate of this will easily provide two or more servings of vegetables, which we all need more of no matter what kind of eating plan we're working with. 

The real reason I wanted to show you this asap, though, is the zoodles! Jay's mom got me a spiralizer attachment for my KitchenAid for Christmas, and it is very likely that this will end up being my favorite Christmas gift. Kitchen gifts are always a sure bet with me, for obvious reasons, but I was super surprised by this and thrilled with how easy it was to use and clean up after. It's the first attachment I have for my mixer, and now of course I want them all and have nowhere to keep them so....maybe just the spiralizer for now. 

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