Favorite pan fried potato chips are so easy to make yourself at home! These are a great lunch side dish or an offering for a summertime potluck. Just one russet potato makes enough to serve four people, and this recipe is done in an under an hour. I like Greek yogurt onion dip with these.
Let's make chips!
Because our lunches need a yummy side dish every day, right?
...My favorite baby potatoes recipe ever! Steamed baby potatoes are the easiest way to cook baby potatoes on the stovetop with just a few ingredients. I use baby yellow potatoes for this, but any small potato you enjoy works great! These are particularly delicious made into a meal with cast iron skillet salmon and a lemon kale salad.
Say hello to our new favorite GF side dish! Tiny baby potatoes, simmered and steamed and lightly crispy from butter + salt, tossed in any herbs you have, just super duper simple happiness all around.
These baby potatoes are simple and quick to make - I serve them all the time and just change the herbs I use so they go with whatever I'm serving them with!
...What is Potatoes Romanoff? Only the best twice baked potato casserole recipe in the world! Envision: leftover baked potatoes, fused with cheese, butter, sour cream, and seasonings. I love this for a super easy Thanksgiving side dish that can be made ahead, but it's also delicious as a meal prep side dish served with my favorite marinated grilled chicken for dinner!
Great news!
We are staving off election and pandemic jitters with carbs and dairy.
What can I say except, you're welcome? (listening to a lot of Moana recently, Will's choice)
...This copycat Cracker Barrel hashbrown casserole is the perfect cheesy, tangy, creamy hashbrown casserole from the popular chain restaurant! This can be made in advance and baked in the morning for brunch, or eaten as a side dish all week long! Pro Tip: This is really really really good with Cajun Glazed Bacon on the side!
Oh, hey.
How are you doing on restaurant food? Back in restaurants? Outside? Inside? More takeout than you've ever imagined? Missing everything like whoa?
...Mark Bittman's no-knead bread (easy dutch oven bread) is the easiest, most foolproof path to artisan-style bread at home with just 4 ingredients and a little time. No special equipment, no kneading, this is the best homemade bread ever!
Mark Bittman does it again! I have been waiting and waiting to show you this.
Much like my favorite pancakes that we make at least weekly, this homemade no-knead bread recipe was a real game-changer for me.
It of course started in quarantine, as so many carb endeavors have, but I waited a few months to write about it because I wanted to be sure it worked every.single.time.
...aka my BIL Ben being all "omg but seriously what the f~ck is in this."
It's butter. And sausage. And REALLY good bread, just enough seasoning, and we find that really good sausage stuffing does not have to be really hard to make. In fact, this may be one of the easiest Thanksgiving side dishes to make and quite possibly the best stuffing ever.
I've seen stuffing with TONS of ingredients, sometimes so many that the stuffing becomes a meal in and of itself. I think those recipes are fun and interesting, but for Thanksgiving I'm really into basic recipes so that one thing on the dish isn't completely overwhelming to the rest of the plate.
Enter, this classic and easy sausage stuffing recipe. It's got really yummy flavors but just nine ingredients, stuff that is readily available, and can be made well in advance (a few days before your big meal certainly), baked, and reheated right before you eat.
The resulting sausage stuffing is super flavorful, tender with some crispy bits, salty and savory from the sausage and spices.
...IT'S HERE IT'S HERE IT'S HERE.
The first Thanksgiving recipe of 2019!
I'm psyched. Thanksgiving recipes are so much fun to brainstorm, and we had the best time a few months ago coming up with some really delicious new recipes for you!
Up first: Jiffy Corn Pudding. It's made in a jif....ha...don't leave me. There are LOTS of things that are called corn pudding and corn casserole, and this version is as follows: cornbread mix to save us some time, corn because vegetables, spices for flavor, pepper jack cheese, sour cream AND heavy cream because it's Thanksgiving, crackers on top for crunch.
...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.
...Here's all we need to finish out the summer (or get ready for tailgating!).
Loaded Baked Potato Salad with all the creamy dreamy stuff dreams are made of.
...Don't leave me. It feels good. Embrace it. The garlic butter, that is.
Hello and welcome to your new favorite side dish! These smashed potatoes are YUMMY, a word that honestly should be used to describe as many of your foods as possible. You only live once, potatoes are a vegetable, and garlic butter is the savory icing on the potato cake that we all need to use whenever we possibly can.
I wrote on Instagram yesterday how much I love this Southern-style cabbage for a quick weeknight side dish. These garlic butter potatoes, I'd argue, go perfectly with said cabbage, add some fish and chicken and here we go not sorry about two side dishes that use butter, know what I mean? These Crispy Garlic Smashed Potatoes are simple to make in just a few steps and the end result is a fluffy-on-the-inside, crispy-on-the-outside cross between mashed potatoes and french fries that is REALLY yummy. Trust.
...Continuing our leftover plan for the week! I feel like sometimes there are LOTS of leftovers of certain casseroles, especially heavier things. Maybe it's just our family, but if you make an 8-person casserole or side dish BUT there are 97 side dishes and people only eat a few spoonfuls of each thing....leftovers. 
Like mashed potatoes! That we are going to fry into patties and top with stewed apples, latke-style. If these are inauthentic enough, feel free to re-purpose the idea for Hanukkah. Here's the recipe that I used for this batch of potato cakes. 
Since Beck has gotten big enough to care we usually do a breakfast all together one or two days per week - usually on weekends when Jay is with us, but also sometimes Mondays call for pancakes made with all white flour and extra butter, and I'm not above that at all. I'm REALLY hoping to score some leftover mashed potatoes this week to make these on Saturday. They're super easy to make and you could definitely form them the night before and fry them right before breakfast, maybe throw some bacon in a skillet just for good measure.
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Ok so we agree that the weather firmly dictates what we desire to eat, right? 
Because today it is pouring rain and freezing and dark AND it's my first day alone with both kids, and is it too early to plan on making myself mashed potatoes for lunch? Or ordering a burger that costs $5 to be delivered for a 50% upcharge?
I'm not above it, is my point. Send funny memes.
Onward, though, in our Thanksgiving planning! We have about ten days to go, and these potatoes should a thousand percent be on your menu. They have very few ingredients and are ridiculously delicious thanks to a few tricks. The first trick is to boil the potatoes whole. This takes a bit (ok, a lot) longer, but the flavor of the potatoes stays IN them instead of floating out into the water, and the resulting texture is closer to a smashed baked potato, which I adore. The second "trick" is...a lot of butter and salt. I don't know a different way to say that, but butter and salt make potatoes taste amazing, so we use a lot of it here.
For make-ahead purposes, these could be made easily on Monday or Tuesday of next week, and then baked right before you eat on Thursday. Starchy sides hold up so well in the fridge, and I love them for that reason - anything I can make in its entirety before the day of the big meal is a huge win. ...
Favorite baked rice that is one of the easiest casseroles to make! All the ingredients to into a baking dish (my favorite Staub, always!) and bake to a perfectly light, fluffy, mushroom rice casserole with onions that caramelize themselves in the broth and seasonings. YUM.
Hey, gluten free Thanksgiving side dish! With it being so early this year, I'm pushing hard to be sure we get all the recipes in this week and next for planning purposes, and then we have recipes to use up all the leftovers, YUM.
First, though, thank you for all the sweet words about Will! At 3 days postpartum I am totally healed and acclimated to having two children, and everyone is sleeping wonderfully, and the time change was obviously no issue for anyone.
...
I couldn't wait. As promised, after we watched the first episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat (why are the episodes not in the order of the words in the title?), all I could think about was making focaccia. Ok maybe more all I could think about was eating focaccia, because the filming of the episode was so lovely and the language used with the imagery was just so compelling, I NEEDED to experience salty, oily-in-a-good-way bread ASAP.
The obvious hiccup being that I 1. don't bake and 2. have literally never made anything with yeast. Ever. And if we're being honest, 37 weeks pregnant with a messy house and full-time toddler and part-time job is really not the time to get all LET'S TRY NEW THINGS. Having a second child is new enough. Eating bread was the goal. Luckily, I had a package of pizza dough in the fridge that had all but tripled in size in the few days it had been in my fridge. Tripled! I bought it on a whim thinking that I'd make pizza for Beck as a treat, but I hadn't done so yet or told her about it, so I took to the interwebs to see if other people make focaccia with pizza dough.
THEY DO.
...WELP, no one knows a dang thing about where Hurricane Florence will go, but nowwwww they're saying the storm might end up over us at some point. This means...well, who knows. We're pretty far inland, so even major storms coming our way have a good amount of time to slow down once they hit the coast. We get some wind and lots of rain and the occasional short-lived power outage, but overall nothing catastrophic in several years from a hurricane. 
BUT STILL. We absolutely should reward our bravery for making it through this storm with fried potatoes to go with our fried chicken, right? Because hunkering down means nothing if it isn't calorie laden, especially if you're pregnant and mostly sober. Give me my calories in other ways. For the baby!
Even if you don't use carbs as rewards for getting through tough events, you could just...make these because they are delicious. The method was inspired by Molly Yeh's new Food Network show (which I love! have watched every episode! can't wait for more!), and is nice and simple for a weeknight dinner or breakfast/brunch situation, which we definitely need more of as the days get slightly cooler. The potatoes are boiled and then roasted with tons of spices, and the boiling can definitely be done in advance. Then, before eating, roast the potatoes and done! Crispy, buttery potatoes with tons of flavor that go well with just about anything.
...
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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Because everything should have corn and tomatoes in it right now, you know? It's true. 
Today! Monday, ugh, sorry. Another summer week! Yay, awesome! The first day of school???? for some, how. HOW. And, the week of our anniversary! It's on Friday, and it's been 5 years. A milestone! We are going to paint a room to celebrate and Jay might upgrade his phone because it doesn't stay charged for more than a few hours. Big stuffs.
Another big stuff is this risotto, for real. It's so perfect for this time of year, cozy from the creamy rice and fresh with corn and tomatoes that are still so good. It works in warm or cool weather, and if you've never made risotto the secret is to stir between sips of wine so...you can definitely do it. Risotto gets a bad rap for being hard to make, and it does take some time, but can still be done in 45 minutes and isn't hard at all. Perfect for an anniversary dinner or a weeknight where you have a few extra minutes to cook.
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I, shall we say, stewed (heh) over what to call this. First, it's delicious. Second, it's vegetarian. Third, though, it's basically some risotto and some mushrooms thrown together to make a meal OR to go with a larger meal with some meat or another veggie side dish. 
So I almost posted them separately, but they go so well together that I wanted to present them to you as a complete meal, which they totally are.
Unless you make them separately and serve them at different times, which also works great. You see the problem.
I first had this idea after reading this similar recipe from Love and Olive Oil, and I couldn't get it out of my mind. I adore mushrooms and Jay hates them, it's one of the very few things that we difer on. There are plenty of foods that one of us prefers over the other, but a whole dinner of rice and mushrooms for someone who is mainly low-carb and hates fungus was just not happening. So, I made this for lunch for myself and then ate it again that night for dinner. Jay had some mushrooms and a little rice and I added steak and sauteed spinach for him. Everyone was happy, but I could honestly eat an entire plate just like this.
It's so simple: very basic risotto with mascarpone added right at the end; use veggie stock to make this vegetarian. The mushrooms are vegetarian as they are; a mix of fresh and dried mushrooms for a variety of textures and flavors. Onion, butter, and tomato paste make a super rich flavor combination, and the mushrooms sear then stew while you stir the risotto together. This is SO good.
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This super easy healthy Thanksgiving side dish is made in the microwave with just a few ingredients! The citrus + ginger in this healthy sweet potato casserole SHINES, and anything off the stovetop and out of the oven is a win for big holiday meals. We love this as a side dish for garlicky roast pork as well!
...I type as I'm going back and forth with two different families about Thanksgiving menus, aka MY SUPER BOWL.
I love meal planning so much, it's just the best.
THESE, also, are just the best, I present to you, Grandmother's Sweet Potatoes (healthy sweet potato casserole). My grandmother was a lifelong reader, and very often would send me recipes or clippings of food articles she found that she thought would interest me (they all did, I adore reading about food). I think that's how this recipe came to be; she found a version of it in the newspaper or in a magazine, then my dad started making it once he took on Thanksgiving for our family.
We have these lightened up sweet potatoes every Christmas and Thanksgiving, and I've already made them once this year for a Friendsgiving! They are SO good, and really different from anything else sweet potato you've had before, I can almost promise.
First and foremost, this entire recipe can be made in the microwave, which is huge when it comes to fighting for oven space before big meals. We've finished these in the oven or microwave, and I swear you can't tell the difference one way or another. The sweet potatoes are also initially baked in the microwave, which saves time and doesn't heat up the whole dang house. THEN, the potatoes are mashed with lemon juice and orange juice and just a teensy hint of salt, sugar, and butter. The mixture goes into a baking dish, is nuked or baked a little more, and the lightest, brightest sweet potatoes ever are ready for your Thanksgiving table.
Reviews last weekend included "I was not expecting to like these at all but I did!" So, there. Glowing? Glowing!
...I had an incredibly hard time spelling that title. 
Ok so great news. It's Eclipse Day! You're maybe taking part of the day off work. You maybe have some fun plans. You maybe...have some produce from this weekend that needs a plan?
We are full up on tomatoes around here; my grandparents grow a ton and we have them fresh, we have them canned (hail young grandparents with time on their hands), we have VATS of salsa. I'ts not a bad problem to have at all, and I've been loving having fresh tomatoes in some form every day.
I've seen galettes all over the interwebz for years now, and while I don't do a ton of pastry I do like the idea of a veg-filled free-form pie oozing with garlic and cheese. I mean. Because of course. So this was the year! I made this simple pie crust in the food processor and used half of it (meaning there can be something else made with pie crust in my life soon), stuffed it to the brim with tomatoes, garlic, and BURRATA. You could 100% use fresh mozzarella or any other shredded cheese you like, but the creaminess from the burrata was wonderful with the flaky crust and bright tomato flavor.
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