Kind of a Bust - Roasted Garlic and Butternut Squash Cassoulet

I'll start this by saying that not everything can knock your socks off. If everything is fantastic, then nothing is, so I guess it's important to have something pretty average every now and then to remind yourself what a truly delicious dish tastes like. Right??

Bean and squash cassoulet

Pretzel Rolls - a test drive

It seems like pretzel bread is everywhere these days - maybe it was always there and I never noticed, but I'm noticing a lot more pretzel-based foods lately. Not that that's a bad thing. A good soft pretzel is pretty amazing. So here I am, part of the pretzel bread craze due to my husband, who is from the Philadelphia area. Apparently, Philly is known for its pretzels. This was news to me when we started dating, and now I've just accepted it. A Philly pretzel seems to me to be just a soft pretzel in a squished pretzel shape, and not unlike the Katie's pretzels I ate through high school. One of the great uses of the Philly pretzel, I'm told, is to make pretzel dogs. And so we are. Or at least, we will be.

Philly pretzels (from nj.com)

A Mediterranean Vacation in the Middle of a Snowstorm

I don't know about you, but we have been getting A LOT of snow lately. We've been eating a lot of hearty, stick-to-your-ribs type winter dishes to cope, but Saturday we decided to go a different route. What better way to cure the winter blues than with a bright, flavorful dish from somewhere sunny and warm?

Tuna in spicy sauce, with brussels sprouts and potatoes.

From Russia, With Love

Matt and I have a bad case of Olympics fever, and the only cure is watching a lot of the Olympics. We currently are watching the ski-athlon (I think that's how it's spelled?), which we learned is a cross-country ski event. I guess there is more than one way to cross-country ski, and this event combines them both with competitors changing types partway through. Seems weird to me, but this is coming from a girl who can't even master one type of cross-country skiing.

Cooking up some blini - just like pancakes!

Vegetarian Stuffed Cabbage

I've always liked stuffed cabbage. That's not a particularly novel sentiment, I know, but it's always seemed like good winter comfort food for me. The stuffed cabbage I grew up with was a rice, tomato, and meat mixture in the cabbage, I think with some tomato sauce on the side. Now, I like tomatoes, rice, and cabbage as much as the next girl, but I've never been into meat. So I've always wanted to find a stuffed cabbage recipe that was delicious and meatless, and not just a veggie version of a meat dish. I guess you could always substitute lentils for the meat in the original recipe and call it a day, but I never did get around to that, and I kept a lookout for a recipe that was meant to be meatless.

Little pockets of stuffed cabbage goodness!

Comfort food - Miso Soup

The Cambridge Williamsons have been pretty sick the past few days (but are on the mend now!) and we've pretty much run the gamut of basic sick comfort foods - saltines, ginger ale, and soup. Lots of soup. It's interesting to me that what you want when you're sick is whatever your mom gave you when you were sick as a kid. For me, that's ramen soup, lemon-lime gatorade, and saltines. Matt's list is pretty similar, but he prefers red gatorade and miso soup. I'll admit that miso soup has never made my list of comfort foods, and that I would never make it on my own. But Matt loves it. We've made miso soup from mixes before (it's fine - but again, that assessment is not from a miso lover), but now that we're feeling better, we decided to go a little crazy and make miso soup from miso paste.

Miso paste.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  I'm going to try to be a better blogger this year, and I'm certainly not lacking for recipe inspiration. I was lucky enough to receive five cookbooks for Christmas this year (five!!!) - either I was a really good girl or Santa's tired of my go-to recipes! I've been keeping busy in the kitchen since we returned from our Christmas sojourn to New Jersey trying out new things, with mixed (but mostly good) success. The snowstorm the other day brought absolutely frigid temperatures, as well as a foot of snow and a few extra days off work to keep up the experimentation. Which brings us to today.

Set it and forget it!