This Sunday dinner was my first attempt at cooking a leg of lamb. With the helpful advice of my friend Tracy I made a delicious herb marinade. I started with the leftover mint from the chilaquiles and chopped it finely. To this I added dried basil and rosemary and 6 chopped cloves of garlic, salt [...]

Lured by the promise of sushi in the shapes of flowers, bunnies, and bears, my husband and I were transfixed when this toy was shown on a random blip about the Tokyo Toy Show. We immediately sought it out online and bought one.
Sure, it’s probably not going to be anywhere as easy to make bear [...]

There was something about the Chilaquiles Verdes (think Mexican lasagna) recipe I saw on Daisy Cooks that inspired me to try it from scratch before I attempt to design some shortcuts around it. And believe me, from the fresh salsa verde to frying my own tortillas, this was a labor and time-intensive dish. There are [...]

Perhaps my favorite part of shortcut cooking is calling a dish something more impressive than what it actually is. But Velveeta cheese sauce just doesn’t have the same ring to it as Jalapeño Cream Sauce.
This meal was thrown together on a whim. My husband craved Velveeta chili dip the previous night, leaving us with a [...]

CONFESSION: I hate prepping tofu. I’m a huge tofu fan but extremely picky about density and texture. That’s why, whenever we visit Mitsuwa, our favorite Asian grocer, we load up on their fried tofu. Mitsuwa has large slabs of already fried extra firm tofu with vegetables embedded in it that take all the work out [...]

An easy recipe for shortcut Chicken Pad Thai using a prepared sauce.

How to make delicious little balls of cholesterol… seriously, YUM.

Usually I can’t say enough good things about Patak’s Indian Sauce blends, but while their new Butter Chicken sauce provided an awesome base for what turned out to be Shrimp Vindaloo, it was surprisingly and disappointingly bland. By adding some Penzey’s Garam Masala and Vindaloo I turned this into a really fantastic Vindaloo sauce.
The recipe [...]

Yes-indeedy, this is absolutely what you think this is, and exactly what it shouldn’t be. It’s a MEATCAKE!!! Featuring three tiers of meatloaf with mashed potato icing and glazed with a delicious ketchup glaze, I was inspired by the awesome recipe by Black Widow Bakery.  It’s late, so I’ll be posting my own step-by-steps and [...]

Who says udon noodles belong in soup? Delicious udon noodles, salty and sticky, are also a great base for a stir fry when rice gets a little boring (or will take too long to make).
For this stir fry I started with some chicken that was sealed in a FoodSaver bag with some Mrs. Dash Spicy [...]

I never would have thought of using tunafish in tacos. But when Rick Bayless made some on his show, I knew I had to try it. I had some Sweet & Spicy tuna packets (Aldi’s generic competitor to the StarKist brand) that, to be honest, I was kind of terrified of, and they’d been living [...]

Artichokes are a giant pain in the ass. This did not come as a surprise. I mean, look at them. Even from the outside they look intimidating, and once you find out about their fluffy “choke”, it’s even scarier. But darn if they’re not pretty and delicious. So when they were 40¢ apiece at the [...]