Things have been a little hectic around here lately, as I understand is par for the course when someone in your household is preparing to defend his or her PhD dissertation. The good news? Mr. Cake Pants passed his defense and is now officially Dr. Cake Pants! In the days leading up to (and after) the big day, I’ve been busy supporting him the best way I know how: by cooking and baking all his ...
turkey
Chicken and Sweet Potato Tamale Pie
I hope I’m not alone in being completely taken by surprise at how quickly Thanksgiving arrived this year! Just over a week ago, the boyfriend and I were in Puerto Rico, and since it was my first real vacation in over five years (and certainly the first since starting grad school), I’d forgotten/not realized how many things there are to take care of both before and after a trip…and now all of a ...
Curried Broccoli Cheese Chicken Casserole
Later this month, many college freshmen will make their first trips back home for Thanksgiving, and I’m sure that they’ll be eager for some of their favorite home-cooked meals. While I never traveled home for Thanksgiving in college, I was lucky enough to swing by for a single night in the middle of my first term, since I was in the marching band and we were traveling to an away game near where my ...
Lighter Swedish Meatballs
Swedish meatballs were on my radar (and my plate) long before I ever set foot in an IKEA. My mom got the recipe from her sister-in-law, who has Scandinavian ancestry, and it has been a part of her cooking repertoire for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until I started living in an apartment and furnishing it with Klobos and Fjellses and Börjes, however, that I realized that my family does ...
BBQ Chipotle Turkey Meatballs
For some reason, I seem to have it in my head that foods like meatballs and meatloaf are particularly time and labor-intensive, and so I seldom make them. In reality, they’re pretty much the easiest thing you can do with ground meat, other than just cooking it up and tossing it into a sauce. In fact, the most involved step of making these BBQ chipotle turkey meatballs is cooking the ...
Hamburger Helper Copycat Pasta
This recipe came about not so much as an accident but as an act of frugality and conservation. A few years ago when I was moving to Michigan, I was trying to ensure that as little as possible went to waste, so after I had packed up everything I could for the movers to take and given away to friends whatever they could use, I was left with a rather random assortment of things and food items. ...
Cheesy Texas Hash
Texas hash made a fairly regular appearance at my family’s dinner table while I was growing up, but for some reason, it was never really my favorite. I liked each of the individual ingredients well enough (rice, tomatoes, onions, ground beef/turkey, and even green pepper, which I realized only recently a lot of people loathe), but it always ranked below other casseroles like macaroni and cheese or ...
Ginger Sesame Turkey Meatballs in Egg Flower Soup
I’ve never cared much for chicken noodle soup but can’t really explain why. I like chicken, I like noodles, I like chicken and rice soup just fine, but there’s something about chicken noodle soup that just doesn’t do it for me. This Chinese soup, however, I remember eating as a child and I’ve always loved it. It’s sometimes called egg flower soup, from the way the egg flowers throughout the soup ...
Southwestern Sloppy Joes on Cheddar Jalapeño Biscuits
Sloppy joes are one of the few foods I can think of that actually originated in the United States. Given that most foods we tend to consume here are not, in fact, native to the US (probably owing to the fact that we’re a nation of immigrants), you’d think we could come up with a more distinguished-sounding or unique name – I mean, it’s not like we’ve used up all the good names on the hoards of ...
Three-Cheese Turkey Lasagna with Broccoli
It recently came to my attention that I had never made homemade lasagna, which seemed like a major oversight on my part – I’ve made a Greek version of lasagna, called pastitsio, which involves tubular pasta (similar to ziti) rather than flat noodles and a layer of béchamel sauce, but never a traditional lasagna! New Year’s Eve this past year was as good a time as any for lasagna, I decided, since ...