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Creamy Avocado Pesto Pasta Salad with Roasted Vegetables

This creamy pasta salad recipe skips the mayonnaise for a lush sauce made with almond milk and avocado to make an easy grilled vegetable pasta salad you’ll happily eat guilt-free.

This recipe is brought to you by Blue Diamond Almond Breeze

One thing’s for sure: It’s rare I meet a pasta salad I don’t like. I may not have loved them all, but I do seem to have a high tolerance of acceptability for even the most marginalized salad bar pasta salad-types.

But that’s the main reason I choose to make my own pasta salads at home. They’re fresher, they taste better, and I can add a twist of healthy and still reap all the flavor and even the creamy factor I crave with this one in the fridge that’s ready to eat any time of the day.

How to Make a Creamy Pasta Salad That’s Healthier Too

Pasta and macaroni salads made with traditional creamy dressings are fine for my occasional potluck splurges. But when I’m looking for a creamy pasta salad I can jot down in my Nourished Planner for my weekly meal prep or share with friends who are more health-conscious about the foods they eat, this creamy sauced mash-up of almond milk and avocado totally does all the right stuff.

Just like I do for the rest of my menu planning, adding more colors of the rainbow to my pasta salad is a simple way to make it more nourishing too. Plus, it just makes it so dang pretty too!continue to the recipe… about Creamy Avocado Pesto Pasta Salad with Roasted Vegetables

Winter Green Salad with Orange Honey Mustard Vinaigrette

This fresh and healthy winter salad recipe with spinach, romaine, mushrooms, apple, and almonds features the best citrusy honey mustard dressing.

‘Tis the season to embrace balance.

It’s the time to do the dance and fancy footwork when toeing the line between giving into each and every one of your holiday mouth cravings (hello to Mom’s homemade fudge) and listening to your head—and often times your bloated belly—and take a side step to the lighter side of everything bright, fresh and joyful that winter’s produce forks over.

Literally.

It bears repeating that salads should never, ever be bastioned to only spring and summer eats. Let the cucumbers and tomatoes wait for their day in the sun because winter is the time to really play with our produce.

This salad is one of my everyday favorites. In fact, it was one of my normal weekday lunches that after I put it together made me thing, “Geez, that’s a great salad. I should make that for the blog sometime.”

Duh.

Why I think that the way I eat on a simple, everyday level isn’t blog worthy astounds me sometimes. Because good food doesn’t have to be fancy, or ironic or always Pinterest perfect. Nope, not at your house or here at mine, either.

continue to the recipe… about Winter Green Salad with Orange Honey Mustard Vinaigrette

Easy Lemon Orzo Faux Risotto

Say it ain’t faux! Yes it is! Faux ri-soh-tto to be exact.

I’m a big believer in real stuff. Real butter. Check. Real friends. They’re the only kind. Real flowers instead of fake? Always.

So why go faux with risotto?

1. In my humble cooking opinion, using orzo makes this recipe a whole lot less temperamental to cook. Traditional risotto takes a lot of hand holding—and constant stirring—to ensure success. Orzo is a bit more forgiving.

2. This orzo is organic AND whole wheat — healthy carbs rejoice!

3. I make it often because it cooks up in just 30 minutes and can be served as a main dish, or served as a side. It’s flexible like that. And one of my pantry staples.

Here’s why…

continue to the recipe… about Easy Lemon Orzo Faux Risotto

Korean Pulled Pork Sandwiches with Caramel Apple Crumble

Presented by Spike TV’s Frankenfood. Premiers Sunday, June 22 at 10/9c.

Why subsist in the normal when you can revel in the outrageous? It’s what puts the spice in life. And sometimes it makes us scratch our heads and say, “Really? Would those flavors really taste good together???”

I know you’ve noticed it, too. Culinary creations that border on the line of incredible. Sometimes even a tad bizarre. Where mash-ups of menu favorites go head-to-head, meet and then marry to become unexpected culinary masterpieces.

That’s what Frankenfood is all about.

I have a personal relationship with this culinary creature that’s been introduced to the world as Frankenfood. It all started with my husband’s, ahem, “creative ways” in the kitchen.

continue to the recipe… about Korean Pulled Pork Sandwiches with Caramel Apple Crumble

Balsamic and Honey Chicken Skewers and Introducing Hatchery

It’s time. It’s time to put the slow-cooker in the basement and scrub up the grill. It’s time to break out the tongs and sing M-A-R-I-N-A-D-E in falsetto. People, it’s officially summer. People, it’s time to grill.

I should preface this post with the fact that: The grill is never a one man show.

There’s a lot more than you think that goes into a great grilled meal. There’s the grill > That’s key.

The griller > He’s the secret ingredient. And to any ingredient > there’s always a secret.

And the inspiration for my Balsamic and Honey Chicken Skewers recipe > it was delivered to my door.

continue to the recipe… about Balsamic and Honey Chicken Skewers and Introducing Hatchery

Swirled Mascarpone Brownies with Hazelnuts

Me and my mom. The love of chocolate runs in our DNA.

Maybe she passed her love of the cacao to me through her umbilical cord. Or maybe she transferred her chocolate loving cravings to me with each chocolate shake we’d get at Arctic Circle with a side of burgers and fries.

Either way, when it comes to dessert, chocolate is our first bite of choice. And it’s just one reason we’re both partial to super rich, fudgey, chocolate loaded brownies.

It all comes down to flavor. While some think the best flavor come from big amounts of big ingredients, it’s really the little guys who coax out the intensity of the flavors behind the scenes. Small wonder, huh?

While chocolate and mascarpone are the big names in this brownie recipe, but the nuance that binds them together is one star ingredient: vanilla.

continue to the recipe… about Swirled Mascarpone Brownies with Hazelnuts

Why I Cook: For the Love of It

Every couple has a story of what brought them together. An introduction, an event or a shared passion. But what keeps two people together…well…for us, there’s always room for two in the kitchen.

I’ve always been a food lover. As a kid I was more apt to pull a block of cheddar cheese and a bottle of mustard out of the refrigerator to top on Triscuits for my after school treat than go hungry until dinner. I entered cooking contests in 4-H, happily took cooking classes in junior high and was known for my sandwich making prowess by my pals in high school. While my college roommates were eating nachos from 7-11 for dinner I was steaming broccoli for Chicken Divan, of which they happily shared in the spoils.

As a waitress through high school and college and then again after graduation and in between figuring out what my “big career” would look like, I learned even more about how to cook from watching real chefs work their magic. How to make drawn butter, what in the heck mise en place meant and how to explain the not so subtle differences between Dover sole and Scottish salmon.

But more importantly, the restaurant is where I met my husband.

continue to the recipe… about Why I Cook: For the Love of It

Escape with Ghirardelli Intense Dark: How to Host a Chocolate Tasting Party

It’s been a long, snowbound winter, and while the new rush of spring has officially arrived—along with blooming daffodils and bright colored shorts and cute strappy flip flops begging me to buy…Buy…BUY!—I’m still hanging onto the last few weeks of family and friend time in the snowy wonder of my beloved Utah mountains.

Spring skiing. It is the best. THE BEST I tell you. It’s the perfect escape from winter, an affirmation of the thaw ahead. Warm sun kissing my cheeks, the smell of burgers on the outside grills mid-mountain and slushy snow to guide my skis through. For some reason spring skiing always seems so much more freeing, like you don’t have as much to prove by getting better, skiing harder and weathering the storms. Which is why I savor these last few outings with Smudge and our friends.

Watching Smudge and her BFF *E* ski together is such a crazy experience. These two little girlies met in pre-school and became inseparable—they were one another’s first playdate, went to their first concert together and are always at the top of one another’s sleepover list.

Thank goodness Smudge has such good intuition, because *E*’s parents quickly became some of our best friends too, maybe because we share way too many coincidences in our life timeline to ignore that our friendship was meant to be. Michi and Adam—or A-Game as we like to call him—are the type who are always quick to the rescue and pretty much game for anything, especially when it comes to giving *E* as much life has to offer as possible. You can see why we’re friends, I mean, who WOULDN’T want to be friends with people like that?

For the past two years we’ve all gotten season ski passes so the girls can get outside and take advantage of living among some of the greatest snow on earth. It was pretty much a given Smudge would be a skiier since G Dawg and I grew up on skis. Smudge and *E* were both born in Los Angeles and we’re all convinced they will be pretty disgruntled when they realize they could have grown up as beach bunnies, rollerblading up and down the Venice Boardwalk instead of making snow angels. Ah, but we will do our best convincing that growing up a snow bunny will definitely have its merits. Hello, who doesn’t want to be Lindsey Vonn in the winter and Gabby Reese in the summer?

But until they decide they need to hang up their ski boots for boogie boards, we’re all about documenting and encouraging them to have fun. A-game is always at the ready with his camera, videotaping each event and documenting the memories we are apt to create. G-Dawg has the patience of a saint, teaching the girls how to move from “french fries” to slaloms with a bunch of snow ball fights in between. I’m just there to corral the cats.

Now Michi on the other hand, she’s the heart and soul of the group, the organizer, the one that makes things happen no matter how hairbrained a scheme it may sound to others. She’s all in, and I can’t wait for her newest conquest of acquiring an Airstream trailer comes to fruition. She has dreams of camping, whilst I have visions of parking it in the ski lot, pulling out the barbeque and camping out for happy hour after the day’s runs are done.

continue to the recipe… about Escape with Ghirardelli Intense Dark: How to Host a Chocolate Tasting Party

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