The holidays are over and I found myself with a profound amount of random leftover food and ingredients I wanted to use up. I bought a gigantic loaf of ciabatta bread at La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles intending to use it as an accompaniment to artichoke dip. I did use it for artichoke dip…
Category: casseroles and baked dishes
{keto} Shepherds Pie
While I was in Wisconsin a few weeks back, I got sick (for the second year in a row) and my mom cooked up a storm. One night she had family over and made Stuffed Manicotti, which she refers to as String Cheese Lasagna, Spinach and Chicken Alfredo Lasagna and her famous Garlic Bread. I asked…
Donut Bread Pudding
A few years ago for my birthday my sister got me a delicious cookbook for Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts. One of the recipes that immediately caught my eye was for “bread” pudding made with donuts. I am a big fan of any kind of bread pudding, sweet or savory. My love for bread pudding can…
{mostly healthy} Chicken and Rice Casserole
One weekend when I went to Costco I bought a crazy amount of vegetables: a huge bin of mixed greens, two pounds of asparagus, two pounds of Brussels sprouts and two pounds of cauliflower rice. I’m not quite sure what I was thinking. It took me several weeks and this recipe to get through it…
Christmas Kielbasa Mac & Cheese
Every Christmas, and every Thanksgiving, too, I try a new mac and cheese recipe as a side. This Christmas Mac & Cheese was the main dish. We had a more elaborate menu planned with ribs and pumpkin praline pie, but I opted not to spend my entire day in the kitchen cooking and cleaning this…
Shepherds Pie {paleo}
I’m not sure why I settled on paleo a recipe for Shepherd’s pie because I generally do not care for Irish food and I’ve never made a traditional Shepherd’s pie. I’ve made what I would consider to be fun twists, like a Thanksgiving Day Shepherd’s Pie and Southwest Shepherd’s Pie but the regular variety never…
BBQ Chicken Casserole w/Sweet Potatoes {paleo}
I have this amazing recipe for paleo BBQ that I discovered a few weeks ago. You know it has to be good because I’m honestly not even a fan of BBQ sauce. Weird, right? Isn’t everyone a BBQ sauce lover? I am now that I found this tangy recipe for BBQ sauce. I would eat…
Scalloped Sweet Potatoes and Fontina Cheese {with Thyme}
When I stumbled upon this recipe on Better Homes and Gardens I knew I wanted it to grace my table on Thanksgiving. I love sweet potatoes. And I love fontina cheese. And I love the idea of a more savory flavored sweet potato because I tend to gravitate toward recipes that mitigate the natural sweetness…
Classic Sage and Sausage Dressing
Do you know the difference between dressing and stuffing? There’s very little. It depends on how you cook it but people use the term interchangeably unless you are in the South. Then apparently it’s “dressing” no matter how you cook it. Stuffing is dressing that’s “stuffed” into the turkey and cooked. Dressing is cooked in…
Four Cheese Strata {with bacon}
Part of what’s great about the holidays is kicking the day off with an indulgent breakfast you wouldn’t normally make any other time of the year. Sometimes I make something sweet, like these lemon sticky rolls I made one Christmas, but normally I gravitate toward some sort of cheesy-eggy dish (gouda corn pudding; sausage, bacon and…
Easy Biscuits and Gravy Bake
The first time I ever ate biscuits and gravy was in high school. It was the first time I’d ever really heard of or paid much attention to the dish and didn’t know it would eventually become a breakfast favorite of mine. One of my high school friends had been born in Texas; they…
Southwest Shepherd’s Pie
I have an overwhelmingly large amount of ground turkey in my home. I bought two pounds today on sale at Smart & Final along with a pound of ground turkey breakfast sausage. When I came home I discovered I have four more pounds of ground turkey in my freezer. So I set out to find…
Spinach and Rice Casserole {lower carb}
After the success I had a few weeks ago with making a broccoli rice cheese casserole substituting most of the rice for cauliflower rice, I decided to find additional casserole recipes to make “healthier” by adding cauliflower rice. There are probably not surprisingly a ton of options out there. I decided to try to go…
{lower carb} Broccoli Cheese Rice Casserole
I guess you could say I’m a little bit obsessed with cauliflower rice recently. I keep thinking of ways I can sneak it into dishes as a substitute for regular rice. So I got to thinking about the traditional broccoli cheese rice casserole dish my mom makes and the millions of variations of the dish…
{low-fat} Lasagna
I’ve become one of those people that I hate. One of those people I said I would never become. I’ve become someone who cooks low-fat meals (instead of full-fat). Sigh. What’s happened to me? Well, let’s make a list: age, weight gain, stress, high cholesterol and wrinkles. Yep. I have wrinkles around my eyes that…
{low-fat} Cheesy Tuna Casserole
Folks, I never thought I would be doing this. Honestly. When I started this blog I pledged (in the back of my mind) to only make good-tasting and (for the most part) completely unhealthy recipes. There was a time when I would take healthy recipes and make them unhealthy. (Recipe calls for low-fat milk? I’ll…
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…
Creamy Cheesy {Italian} Asparagus
Did you know there’s such thing as “Creamed Asparagus on Toast”? Really. There is. Google it. There are tons of recipes. I discovered the recipe (which seems like an odd combination if you ask me) when I was searching for a recipe for creamed asparagus. In fact even recipes that I thought might actually be…
Spaghetti and Meatball Stroganoff
The concept of having stroganoff in it with anything other than beef didn’t occur to me until rather recently when I began googling stroganoff and finding all the different options that existed. Years ago I had made Lamburger Stroganoff, at my sisters suggestion, when we had extra lamb after a holiday meal. I’d thought her…
Bacon Stroganoff
I searched high and low for a bacon stroganoff recipe on the internet. There aren’t that many recipes out there which surprises me because I think I’ve seen nearly every type of stroganoff you can imagine – even meatball! (Meatball Stroganoff should be my next try.) So I took my mom’s basic recipe for stroganoff…
