NOM NATION

roast turkey

Currently prepping my first Thanksgiving turkey ever.

We’ll see how this goes…

goat cheese + zucchini pizza

Dudes, I’m sorry. I went away for two weeks and got fed a ton of ridiculous Monaco hotel food and haven’t cooked AT ALL. I know: life is super hard. Also my socks are wet today, because it’s raining. Also I would like some cheese with my whine; I could go for some Camembert (and did you know there is an ENTIRE Wikipedia page dedicated to French cheeses??).

Anyway, I told you this wasn’t going to be a Smitten Kitchen wankfest but I really do love this pizza as proven by the fact that I have made it like, three times. Which is a LOT for me. I like my recipes like I like my men, fast and only one time. And black. Wait, I think I told that joke wrong.

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summer orzo with bacon

You know how I said I was looking for easy, light dishes I could bring for lunch? This totally hit the spot. My sister left me big containers of orzo (and also a lot of phyllo dough; apparently we’re Greek now) when she went home to California, so I was looking for a way to cook it and came upon this recipe. I also had some bacon and spinach leftover in the refrigerator left over from a previous dinner I had made for friends, so I threw those in as well.

Basically what I’m trying to say is I put all my leftover crap in this pasta salad. And it turned out AWESOME.

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blackberry blueberry pie

A few weeks ago my cousin - who is just about to start college - came to visit, and we drove down to New York to visit some friends and eat a ton of food. On the way there we stopped at a small fruit stand, and since my friend Cathy and I have been on a diet all summer (and by we I really mean just Cathy, since I may or may not have eaten a frozen lasagna and three sugar cookies for dinner tonight) we opted for a basket of nectarines. My cousin, on the other hand, was really set on getting a pie. “Please??”

I told him to wait until we had lunch and see if he still wanted it, which he of course still did. So my little cousin bought an entire peach pie by himself. And then we put it on the roof of Cathy’s car and ate it.

Best. pie. ever.

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chicken and dumplings

I decided to start a food blog a few days ago, and ever since then everything I’ve made has pretty much gone to total crap. In particular, one asparagus and new potato salad I tried was too bland and underwhelming, composed of undercooked potatoes and flaccid asparagus. It also suffered from only one hard-boiled egg, since I dropped the other one straight in the garbage while I was peeling it.

These chicken and dumplings were no exception, although I’m sure it wasn’t the recipe’s fault as much as my own.. creativity with the ingredients. To start, I used boneless skinless chicken breasts since it was all I had, but saved some bones from a rotisserie chicken my roommate Gabe had been gnawing on the night before to add for flavor. Unfortunately, the protein and gelatin from the bones thickened the stew considerably, so if you decide to do this I would probably decrease or leave out the flour altogether. This also made the stew a lot saltier, so I would probably wait to season the stew at all until after the final simmer. (Or maybe it was all just Gabe’s spit that ruined it; it’s hard to say.)

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