Holidays

Crispy Garlic Butter Smashed Potatoes

July 23, 2019 by Lindsay 3 Comments

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.

...

Easy Slice and Bake Sugar Cookies

December 20, 2018 by Lindsay 3 Comments

Five days until Christmas! I'm not usually a huge baker, but this year I'm allll about it. Dying to make a massive cookie plate with 87 items, that sort of thing. I've made a few new recipes in the last two weeks just to "check" aka have cookies all month, and this is one of the recipes that I'm absolutely making again this week.

It's regular sugar cookies. Advertised as chewy, super easy to make, and a really perfect plain incarnation of a sugar cookie, in the best possible way. I think that fancy cookies have a place, but at Christmas I want things that taste regular, if that makes any sense at all.

I found this recipe on Add a Pinch, and used the dough as a base for the cookies. The recipe calls for rolling the dough into balls then baking that way (like snickerdoodles!), but I rolled the dough into logs instead, then sliced them over the course of a few days when I wanted fresh cookies. It worked perfectly and was easier than rolling the cookies individually into balls, although the result of that method looks a little bit fancier.

...

Garlic Crusted Pork Roast

December 17, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

This super easy roasted pork loin is completely fool proof and has a garlic and herb butter crust that makes the most delicious pan drippings. Try this for a holiday dinner or medium-fancy weekend dinner idea!

Here's our 2018 Holiday Meal!

No but seriously. I'm going to make this roasted pork loin once a week until February.

How was your weekend? Our was....well, let's just say that I'm really excited for the holidays but also am feeling the exhaustion and the feelings and the busy-ness and WHY ARE YOU PUKING ON ME AGAIN, BABY, in a very hard way. The week before Christmas feels like packing for vacation to me...once we get it done and onto the main event everything will be fiiiiiine.

...

French Onion Fillo Bites

December 11, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Omg Baby It's Cold Outside and also the controversy about that song. Currently not ok and also historically fine because that's how people used to be/talk/sing, I think. I've noticed that people have a really hard time with two emotions coexisting, probably will be a theme of mine in 2019, talking about that more.

So how are you? We had an awesome-but rainy birthday weekend for Beck, and then the snow wrecked havoc on our little city because we aren't really equipped to manage it. Lots of people lost power for over 24 hours and we are on day three of no internet, which is NOT IDEAL for 1. TV watching and 2. working from home, which we both do. But we are managing, thanks to severely reduced expectations and mobile hotspots.

Tonight, though, we are GOING TO SEE HAMILTON. And also it is going to be 50 degrees and we are going to have a fabulous dinner beforehand. I have been looking forward to this night for so very long, and I've already heard great things about the tour we're seeing. It feels like an awesome time of year to get to see such a special show - chilly and decorated downtown and everything feeling so very festive. Festive like these! French Onion Fillo Bites, and get off me about how to spell it. There are three (maybe more) spellings used interchangeably on the internet and the box of pastry cups I used say Fillo, so that's what we're going with. These are super simple and involve a wildly delicious caramelized onion filling topped with sharp cheese. That is stuffed into premade pastry cups (that I love using this time of year) and baked, and everything gets ooey gooey and just makes the most delicious one-bite snack. I love these for parties or as a starter to a fancier meal, and honestly keeping some of the onion mixture around to spread on crostini wouldn't be a terrible idea at all. ...

Leftover Mashed Potato Cakes + Apple Syrup

November 20, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

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.

...

Leftover Cranberry Turkey Salad

November 19, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

YUM YUM YUM.

I've said it a gazillion times, but turkey is definitely not my favorite part of Thanksgiving. Appetizers and casseroles and wine are. Clearly.

I think that's because turkey can be underwhelming, or dry, and it DEFINITELY doesn't hold up as well in terms of leftovers like, say, some kind of buttery cheesy casserole does. Leftover turkey can be chewy and tough and just bland, but I'm NOT here to celebrate food waste, ever. So we had to do something wonderful with leftover turkey.

Add mayo, obviously was the answer. This turkey salad is so different from roast turkey from Thanksgiving day, and the addition of cranberries livens up the flavor for such a fun different twist. This would be so yummy for a brunch sometime this weekend, or on crackers/with greens for lunch or a snack. Plus: it's pink!...

2018 Thanksgiving Menu

November 14, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

OMG OMG OMG.

In a real world we probably can't have all of these things for one meal. Or shouldn't, at the very least. ButIwanttosobadseriously.

...

5-Minute Broiled Asparagus {vegan}

November 13, 2018 by Lindsay 3 Comments

What do you do for your Thanksgiving re: green things or health considerations?

Some people are all balance every day and some are more just casseroles is fine, thanks. We fall somewhere in the middle with a lot of "we do this every year" and me trying to shove new things into the mix. One thing that is normal for us is that my dad always does a "plain" green veg. Something free of bacon or cheese or condensed xx of yy soup, and it works so well with some of the heavier flavors we have on Thanksgiving.

This is that! A super simple, mostly pure veg. Lemon juice and olive oil and salt go so well with asparagus, and you can broil this right at the end of your meal prep right after you carve the turkey - seriously last minute stuff, even after the casseroles are reheated. The result is a charred lemon flavor that adds a ton to the asparagus without overpowering it, and the health benefits of, you know, anything green.

...

5-Ingredient Baked Smashed Potatoes

November 12, 2018 by Lindsay 3 Comments

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. ...

Bruleed and Curried Carrots

November 7, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Continuing our Thanksgiving prep! Enter...a newish way to eat veggies with lots of butter in them. I like carrots in almost all forms, but they can definitely feel like an afterthought or boring vegetable. We roast them at home a ton with olive oil, salt, and dried dill - that's probably my favorite way to eat them.

My family never did carrots at holidays, but I think the boiled-in-sugar version is common, or at least was in the 80's, in many families. I think carrots (I always picture them at cafeterias like this) boiled in butter and sugar are delicious, and that was kind of the impetus for this recipe. We boil the carrots in stock, butter, and spices, then broil them with some coarse sugar for a fake brulee effect. The end result is tender, flavorful, and so warming from the spices.

...

Baked Rice With Mushrooms

November 5, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

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.

...

Perfect Roast Turkey Breast + Gravy

November 1, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

The best Thanksgiving alternative, I love just cooking a roasted turkey breast bone in for perfect Thanksgiving nostalgia in about half the time. This recipe includes my favorite easy homemade gravy recipe that comes out perfectly every time. Roast turkey breast is the best!

HAPPY NOVEMBER. How. Is. It. Here.

Since Thanksgiving is just three weeks away (how.is.it.here.), we have to start prepping our menu ASAP! Our plans are pretty up in the air this year due to newborn status (basically, if anyone has so much as a sniffle we aren't going), but our tentative plan is to have a day with Jay's family and a day with mine and the rest of the weekend for Jay to parent HARD because he has to travel for work the following Monday. At five seconds postpartum, almost identical to when Beck was born.

Luckily I'm super tough and not ever overwhelmed or weepy so I'll be fiiiine. Translation: Beck loves movies and we have lots of family in town.

...

Whole Roasted Cauliflower in Butter

October 15, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I've started joking with my family when they're like mmmm love those potatoes, and I'm all, you mean the butter with a little potato? Yeah, it's local.

I use local butter and buy it in two pound logs and that makes it healthy, and environmentally friendly, and community-conscious, and an all-around good choice. Showing you this recipe is doubly relevant today because we watched the "Fat" episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat last night and HOLY COW HOW INSPIRING. The show itself is phenom, the setting is gorgeous, we learned a ton (I think I safely speak for Jay when I say that we, as a couple, like learning about food in all the ways all the time), and I came away with about ten new ideas for holiday cooking specifically. Highly recommend you watch it this week all the way through so we can discuss.

So, given the fat theme, it makes perfect sense that we roast our cauliflower in butter. Good butter, enough butter so that you know it's there, butter butter butter. The concept here is super easy: some raw ingredients (literally salt, fat, acid) in and on a whole cauliflower, some liquid and cherry tomatoes to bring everything together, roasty toasty, and fresh herbs to finish. We served this a few weeks ago with some chicken and veggies, but honestly I could eat half of this cauliflower with a hunk of bread and call it dinner. I use chicken stock here because we aren't vegetarian, but veggie stock would be wonderful for a truly vegetarian option.

...

Pimento Cheese Squash Casserole

July 9, 2018 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Oh hell yes.

Hi! How was your weekend? We had a great one, including being at home with Beck all day Saturday and not leaving the house. We did yard work, hung some remnants back on the walls from the construction on our house, watched TWO movies, and cooked a boat-load, which was fun but also a benefit to eating out on the weekends means the kitchen isn't so ridiculously dirty all of the time. Cue me spending Monday undoing our all-at-home weekend.

So this casserole. This time of year we seem to find ourselves with tons of squash and zucchini, all of the time. My grandparents grow it, it is super cheap at the farmer's market, cooks quickly, lasts for awhile in the fridge, reason after reason to keep it around at all times. Mostly we saute it with onions and salt and pepper for a quick dinner veg, but sometimes, especially when we have a ton of it, we need to go old-school and decadent, you know? This is that. It's definitely a vegetable and definitely vegetarian, but other than that I'm not going to scream at you about health benefits.

This casserole is made on the stovetop and includes almost all of the seasonings from my favorite pimento cheese and traditional squash casserole. Ritz crackers are a must for topping, and you can bake the casserole for a few minutes and eat it immediately or keep it in the fridge for a few days and heat it up for dinner one night this week. Make-ahead friendly!

...

Classic Deviled Eggs

July 2, 2018 by Lindsay 2 Comments

These deviled eggs with relish have filling made right in the food processor for the lightest, fluffiest deviled egg filling ever. I like to make the filling in advance and pipe it in right before serving to avoid any mess.

Happy July!

True life, I don't like eggs all that much. It's a texture thing, and the overwhelming smell is just...not enough to negate the idea of a cheap+sustainable+healthy protein. BUT, because everyone else likes eggs, and I know how good they are for us, I really want to like them.

So, imagine my sadclown surprise when my magazine editor assigned me deviled eggs for our July feature. It was surprising because mainly I choose my own topics, but I'm always asking for direction because I'm eager to please and insecure.

...

Chocolate Chess Pie

December 13, 2017 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Tis the season to make a pie so delicious you may or may not consume 2 pieces in twelve hours just to be sure it was that good.

It was, promise.

Ok so this pie. Vague origin story. I actually didn't know what a chocolate chess pie WAS, but this local grocery/bakery that we frequent makes them around the holidays and they always looked really enticing in pretty bakery boxes. Then I ended up with a few extra pie crusts after Thanksgiving (my apple pies didn't require a top crust because I didn't have as many apples as I thought, long story), and I knew I needed a new Christmas pie. Enter: Chocolate Chess.

The first step was to determine what that actually was, which is an important step in learning to cook something. Ha. I learned that this is a flourless pie (the filling, not the pie crust), super chocolate-y, almost pudding-like on the inside, with a sugar crust on the outside that forms naturally during the baking process. ...

Marinated Mushrooms (vegan!)

December 4, 2017 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Hi! How has it been December for several days already? Someone please help me better understand the passage of time.

It's fine though, because barreling toward Christmas at this crazy pace means we get to keep making party food and ignore regular meals, right? I do have a few of those coming up for you, but peppered in with snacks and drinks and desserts. These mushrooms in particular will always and forever remind me of Christmas, even though my family never had them. I think this is a total throwback recipe, 80's or 90's or something - did you eat these as a kid? My next door neighbors in Japan made these for almost every holiday, and I LOVED them. I think they used Italian dressing and canned mushrooms, no shame in that game, and the chewy mushroom in the tangy vinaigrette was just my favorite thing ever.

I'm all about anything tangy or pickled, and I think these are such a great addition to a holiday party. They're so light and bright and a perfect complement to the heavier dishes that we have this time of year. They take literally 15 minutes to make and can hang out in the fridge for several days, so the ease-factor is huge here too given how crazy busy we are this time of year.

...

Bourbon Apple Cider Spritzer

November 30, 2017 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Honestly I have no clue what this should be called, but it's topped with club soda so....fizz? Spritzer. Sounds light, and Glory knows we need some light around this time of year.

To be fair, I'm not sure a cocktail that involves bourbon and apple cider is reaallllyyy light, but the fizz definitely is. So.

Here's our annual cocktail! I realize that sounds lame, but we are way more beer/wine/vodka tonic types of people not fancy cocktails ever, full stop. BUT, there's something about the holidays that makes it super fun to mix up something festive, you know? My drink of choice when I do decide to get fancy is a dirty vodka martini with as much blue cheese as possible stuffed into olives. Jay thinks it is horrendous, I think he is wrong.

This taste nothing like salty vodka infused with stinky cheese, promise. It was recommended by my friend Kim, who is very smart and cool and a wonderful person and mother. Her husband drinks bourbon straight and this was the answer to "we have a lot of bourbon and I only like bourbon a little bit." She shared it with me, we made it for you, you get it. The testing of this recipe involved Jay saying "I don't know, it's just not quite strong enough" and me going "RIGHT, its' the first drink of the night." It was comical, and at the end of the night we were fiiiiiine on strength of cocktail. ...

Chicken Cordon Bleu Meatballs

November 27, 2017 by Lindsay 2 Comments

I'm skipping that thing where we pretend to be on a diet for the first three weeks of December to punish ourselves for Thanksgiving. There are a few reasons for this, the first being that I think punishment for food-related behaviors leads to more unhealthy behaviors, and on and on. BUT MAINLY, our post-Thanksgiving lives are chock-full of celebrations, and no one wants a salad for their birthday. Jay's birthday was yesterday and Beck's is in less than two weeks, so here's the first of many holiday party foods.

They're balls with ham and cheese and chicken.

They were, as all good ideas on this blog are, Jay's idea, and they were a fantastic one. I love the nostalgic flavors of chicken cordon bleu, crispy exterior, gooey interior, but the process is pretty arduous and a meatball is just so friendly and celebratory, right? For the sake of the holidays, you can totally make these in advance, bake them, then reheat them in the oven until the cheese melts again so all the mess + raw meat nonsense can happen well in advance of your event.

The ingredients are simple, and I'm so glad I'm showing these to you TODAY because they are a perfect use-up for Thanksgiving ham, if you have any of that lying around. I made a few things with leftover ham this weekend and all were just as delicious as eating ham on its own.

Cheers to my wonderful husband and the start of what I hope is the most celebratory of seasons for you! No punishment or self-loathing allowed.

...

Healthy Sweet Potato Casserole (In the Microwave!)

November 14, 2017 by Lindsay 2 Comments

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!

...

Holidays

Footer

Archives