A few years ago I asked my mom to buy me a dehydrator so I could make homemade beef jerky. Sadly the dehydrator sat on a shelf for too long before I began tackling the long process of dehydrating foods. But once I started using it I became a bit obsessed with it, specifically obsessed…
Category: appetizers and snacks
Italian Green Salad
I was planning on making my cousin Stuffed Manicotti and my Mom’s Garlic Bread one night for dinner dreaming about what sort of gorgeous dessert I could serve us when she suggested we make a salad or some sort of vegetable dish with our dinner. Buzz kill! There went my thought of the perfect dessert…
Homemade Tortilla Chips
I don’t know that it ever occurred to me to make home made tortilla chips until yesterday when I realized I had this huge bowl of salsa I needed to eat and nothing to eat it with. OK so I did have some beef and pork and tortillas and other fixins’ to make tacos. But…
Baked Sheet Pan “Street Fries”
While my friend was visiting over my birthday weekend we stopped at a local Mexican restaurant for some tacos. We ended up getting the worst Brussels sprouts we had ever eaten (not cooked enough?!) and we each had a taco. Also on the appetizer menu were “street fries” that sounded suspiciously like fries covered in…
Breakfast Nachos
Frequently Daily my friend Bethany and I share with each other (via text) what we eat. One day she shared with me her breakfast which was essentially a list of foods she had eaten for breakfast and I responded: Did you eat nachos for breakfast? She did. She ate nachos for breakfast. And as soon as…
Candied Almonds
In general, I have a hard time eating a small amount of nuts. Anyone with me on this one? And so I try not to do anything fancy with my nuts too often because, when I do, I find it even harder than normal to stop eating them. However, I had purchased a package of…
Fried Cheese Curds
On my recent trip home I got to eat one really good meal (my mom’s spaghetti) before I was felled with the flu. It was on the second day that I started to get sick. I figured I was getting sick because I started coughing randomly and couldn’t really taste food. Still we went out…
Kabocha Squash Pita Chips {paleo, GF}
I’ve been somewhat intrigued by paleo naan and flatbread recipes I’ve seen on Pinterest recently. I was especially fond of a recipe I found for a flatbread recipe that used winter squash in it. Any time I can sneak vegetables into a recipe that wouldn’t otherwise be made of vegetables, I’m down with that. I…
Roasted Garlic and Brie Pull-Apart Bread
A few weeks ago I bought some Brie cheese to re-make a pie I made a few years ago. For some random reason, I bought two triangles of cheese and only needed one for the pie. So when my Thanksgiving day meal planning was in its dawn, I contemplated what type of appetizer I could…
The Easiest Buttermilk Biscuits {in the history of all time}
A few years ago my friend and her then-husband figured out that if you make cookie dough, roll the dough into balls and then freeze the balls of dough, you can make and eat fresh baked cookies every night. And they did. And she gained weight from it. Her words; not mine. I didn’t notice….
Chocolate Peanut Butter Puffed Rice Bars
A couple months ago I bought a bag of puffed rice, I’m presuming because I likened it to brown rice cereal AKA (brown rice) rice krispies and intended to use it to make some sort of granola bar recipe. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Time passes and the bag of puffed rice sits on its perch in my…
Cauliflower Fritters
Every time I buy cauliflower (or rather cauliflower rice these days) I get grandiose thoughts of doing something cool with it and then sort of forget that the cauliflower is even in my refrigerator. I guess I must not find cauliflower all that exciting when you get right down to it or I wouldn’t procrastinate…
Mom’s Hot Taco Dip
I grew up in the Midwest where summers were long, hot and humid. Barbecues and outdoor parties were frequent. People (legally) set off their own fireworks. The huge Fourth of July fireworks celebration occurred over the lake front on the night of July 3rd at a massive outdoor music festival and everyone was hung over…
Southwest Chicken Pizza Rolls {low -carb}
I used to be a bit judgmental about people who ate low-carb. I thought they were weird. Sad. Obsessive. Crazy. Crazy because who doesn’t want to stuff themselves full of carbs??? But now that I eat mostly low carb I get it. You lose weight when you turn to a low-carb lifestyle. Your stomach feels…
Bread Bowl Brie Onion Dip
In between Thanksgiving breakfast and dinner, I knew I needed something for my dad and I to munch on. I have a cascade of “appetizer” recipes located in my appetizer file I keep. That’s right. I keep an appetizer file. I keep a “bread” file and a “pizza” file and a “cake” file and a…
Smoked Salmon Dip
One of my friends has a house on an island in Alaska. Her family convenes there every summer (at the least) and they fly back to the Pacific Northwest with as much fish as they can carry. Just kidding. I think they have the fish shipped back. When I lived in Portland, she was nice…
Healthy Baked Chicken Fingers
I have to say that after creating my superfood-spiked morning oatmeal I have begun feeling inspired to create other meals using said superfoods. One of the biggest challenges I seem to face when trying to overhaul my normal diet (of hot chocolate, cookies and cake) is that I cannot seem to get enough fiber into…
Cheesy Garlic Rolls
I was challenged to recreate these awesome garlic rolls that are a must when ordering pizza delivery from a local pizza joint, Broadway Pizza. OK. After having a conversation with a coworker about how great they are I basically challenged myself to make them. The rolls really are best if you eat them at the…
Homemade Jerky
I can’t say I ever imagined I would make my own beef (or turkey) jerky. However, now that I’ve made it, I never want to eat store-bought jerky again. Consider this: you can make your own nitrate-free jerky without a dehydrator with very little effort. I took some of this stuff in to work for…
Quick Feta and Lemon Dip
This recipe comes from Paul Lowe’s cookbook Sweet Paul Eat & Make. I’ve stumbled upon it (courtesy of my grandma) at relish magazine and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I love it for its simplicity and ease. I first ate feta cheese when I was 30 years old and my boyfriend at the time served it on…
