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The Perfect Rustic Style Mashed Potatoes
Mashed potatoes. The quintessential comfort food. There isn’t anything that a bowl of smashed up taters drenched in melted butter and bursting forth with gravy can’t make better. Chopped off your thumb in a woodworking accident? Here, have some mashed potatoes. Boyfriend dumped you for your best friend? Psh- not to worry. Have some mashed potatoes–and you get extra gravy. Didn’t get the winning lottery ticket? Aww, stop buying lottery tickets and buy potatoes instead. Why? Because you can make mashed potatoes with potatoes and you can only make a book mark or a redneck toothpick with a lottery ticket. It’s a no brainer, really. I go in phases where I want…
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Old Fashioned Coconut Icebox Cookies
If you’re a fan of Dexter, you immediately thought about the Icebox Killer when you read the title of this recipe. Luckily for us all, no brightly colored, manicured nails or unassuming serial killers made their way into this recipe. Nope- just good old-fashioned yumminess. Oh, and gobs and oodles of coconut. It’s like a coconutty extravaganza y’all! Like lemons, I love coconuts. I think my top three dessert choices always have either lemon, coconut or a berry, such as raspberries or strawberries. When I saw this recipe, I knew I had to try it. I made a few changes, changed out some of the not-so-good ingredients (like vegetable shortening) for butter, and replaced…
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Easy Cheese and Sausage Egg Bake
It’s 84 degrees in our house. My den is in the finished room above the garage where I’m fairly certain the builders forgot to insulate, so it’s about 90 degrees in this room. My fingers are so warm they’re sticking to the keys on the keyboard and I can barely swipe my finger along the touchpad without it getting ‘stuck’. You gotta love first world problems. It’s too warm to work on the post I needed to finish up in the kitchen, so instead, I’m going to just update a post from my blogging archives. I originally shared this recipe under the title of Italian Sausage & Gruyère Baked Omelet. It’s a dish I make…
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Pan-Seared Pork Chops with a Shallot and Sherry Wine Pan Sauce
Pan seared pork chops with a shallot and sherry wine pan sauce may sound pretentious and fancy, but this dish is anything but. It’s just seriously delicious, down home, casual, quick cooking at its best. I had the grandkids all weekend, and by all weekend, I mean Friday through Sunday afternoon. TSM works all day long until late into the evening every Saturday for one of his part time jobs so I was on my own with Little Master C. and Little Miss B. I think we watched every DVD we own and I spent way too much time in the kitchen prepping food for our weekend meals. My plan was to rush…
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Asian Chicken Pasta Salad with Crispy Wontons
I grew up right in the heart of the Twin Cities. That’s in Minnesota, don’t-chya-know? Back in the day, before it was bought out by Macy’s, Dayton’s department store was a happening place to be. There was a restaurant located inside this Dayton’s (which eventually became Marshall Field’s), and on occasion when my sister and I would spend the weekend with my grandparents, we’d take the city bus to downtown St. Paul, and have lunch at Dayton’s restaurant. If we were really good, we got to go to the candy counter and pick out 1 or 2 suckers. They had the best suckers. They were rectangle shaped, and took forever to finish. Ahh, those…
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Cheesy Orzo with Broccoli
Earlier on in my blogging career I stumbled upon this side dish while wasting time trying to solve the toughest world problems by doing research online. Before the idea to start my blog was ever hatched in my special little mind, I used to follow quite a bit of non Real Food bloggers. No shame in that. A good recipe is a good recipe. Sometimes you just have to Real Foodify it, as I like to say. This recipe came from Iowa Girl Eats. She’s got a great little blog filled with some tasty recipes that are easy for me to adapt to our real food lifestyle. Many of her more current recipes…
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The Best Hot Weather Chilled Soup Recipe
Surprise! I don’t normally post on Tuesdays, but this week I have The Best Hot Weather Chilled Soup Recipe and I’m sharing it over on my friend Kristin’s blog. Kristin blogs over at Live Simply. I love her blog. When my blog grows up it wants to be just like her blog! So pretty!! I’ve mentioned before that this year I’m expanding my warm weather recipe collection so that TSM and I can still enjoy nourishing foods on the days when it’s too hot to want to cook at all or we’re just not hungry for something heavy. This soup is light, fresh, rich, colorful and best of all, it’s SO good.…
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30-Minute Mondays– Fettuccine Alfredo with Chicken and Broccoli
Wow! It’s already the first full week of May. This year is more than a third of the way over. Can you believe it? We had a small cold front move in last week which meant I was in the mood for comfort food. One of my all-time favorite dishes is Fettuccine Alfredo. I love a tasty white sauce. And if it has cheese in it, even better. This is a simple recipe that is full of flavor, tender chicken and beautiful green broccoli. This is one of only two or three ways that The Stud Muffin (TSM) will even eat broccoli. It’s the Will Wheaton to his Sheldon Cooper. This dish…
