I have to admit, I kind of went off the rails this week. Just stay with me on this one, but I decided to try a flavor combination I’ve only had while snacking or attending a barbecue—except this time it was in cupcake form. Sometimes I find myself going down a Pinterest rabbit hole and find all kinds of strange […]

I’ve been craving getting to play around with fresh vegetables in my kitchen lately. It must be something about fall being right on the horizon that’s making me want to grasp the last bits of summer gardens. When I came into possession of a few zucchini this week, I was excited to try a very simple preparation for it that […]

All of my friends who are avid crafters seem to have drawers full of leftovers and remnants from their many projects—buttons, fabrics, partial bottles of glue, etc. That’s how my pantry looks most of the time. Partial boxes, bottles and containers of ingredients I purchased to try a new recipe litter the shelves. I was thankful for the recipe I […]

There quite possibly has never been as much pink in my life as there was this past weekend when my mom and I hosted a baby shower for my sister and brother-in-law. They’re expecting my niece in Novem­ber, and with my sister being much more of a girly girl than I have ever been, pink was the color of the […]

I have a bad habit of realizing on my way home that I have no plans for dinner, pulling into the grocery store parking lot, scrolling through my Pinterest pages for a good idea and heading inside to buy ingredients for a hastily planned meal. We tried meal plan­ning for awhile and discovered quickly that leading the lives of newspaper […]

One of the inevitable parts of summer, it seems, is getting stuck with an abundance of leftover hot dog or hamburger buns following a barbecue or get-together. I don’t know about you, but we often have just a few, sad buns hanging out in the pantry after we grill with friends, and more often than not, the mold gets to […]

We have some friends who always throw a great Christ­mas party, complete with a White Elephant gift exchange, lots of yummy snacks and tons of socializing.<p>This year, they’re going to be out of town when the party is normally scheduled, so rather than trying to encroach later into the busy holiday season, they decided to have it early—to round out […]

Every time I see Martha Stew­art squeezing something in a “clean, lint-free kitchen towel,” I consider that I will never be a fancy enough cook to ever need to use such a technique.<p>But then I was given a zucchini the size of my left arm.<p>Seriously. Maybe the biggest zucchini I’ve ever seen in my life.<p>So when I shredded my zucchini […]

I never thought that I liked Heath bars. As a kid, when my parents would let us choose a candy bar for a treat every once in awhile, the thought of picking a Heath bar never crossed my mind. It always looked kind of thin and sad and not like something I wanted to spend my one, precious chance getting […]

Black potatoes. I mean super black, completely black potatoes. That’s what I put on the table for dinner a few nights ago, and fortunately, they were delicious. I mentioned recently that I’ve been trying out preparing a bunch of meals at a time, freezing them and cooking them off in my crockpot, and this past week, it was time to […]