Valkyrie Outfit

My husband likes to go to the Ren Faire. I am okay with the Ren Faire, but it exhausts my introverted heart. To help me enjoy the Faire more, hubs makes me an outfit each year. One year, he made himself a Viking outfit, and me a Valkyrie outfit.

Thanksgiving - Lunch

In addition to making a quicker, less labor-intensive breakfast for Thanksgiving 2012, we also prioritized making a quicker, less labor-intensive lunch. Of course, as in prior years, we heavily featured cheese and wine.

Savory Chocolate Bread

Food just goes well with my family. Not only do we all love to cook -- and eat -- but we also are all driven to share our food finds with each other. Nothing makes a meal taste as good as sharing it with someone you love. My sister has especially good taste in artisan foods, and likes to treat us to delicacies they make in small shops in her city. So, when sis brings fancy food down to us, we gobble it right up. One food gift was a beautiful loaf of savory chocolate cherry bread. Unsurprisingly, it didn't last. While I temporarily forgot about it in the bustle of living and working, eventually, an obsessive hunt across the internet for exciting bread recipes yielded a recipe for savory chocolate bread. The game was on.

Thanksgiving - Breakfast

By now you all know that my family knows how to rock out Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving 2011 was exhausting -- my sister and I were on our feet all day. We cooked so much for Thanksgiving breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert last year that we didn't get any time just to spend with our family. This year, we wanted to spend more time with our family, and consequently went for much, much easier recipes. Let's begin this Thanksgiving review with our fast and delicious breakfast, cooked entirely by my sister while I took the role of sous-chef.

Blueberry Milk

Like any good kid, I loved chocolate milk when I was younger. In high school, the farm right down the road began carrying other flavored milks, including strawberry and orange cream. Orange cream rapidly became the love of my young life -- I never imagined that flavored milks could be so adventurous! While I have not been able to find orange cream milk for years, much to my dismay, I recently ran into a beautiful recipe at gimme some oven for blueberry milk.

Guinness Bread

Happy New Year! I hope you all have a happy, healthy, and productive 2013. Me, I'm trying to get back into good habits. I won't say that I'm making resolutions -- the guilt when I fail would crush me -- but the end of the holiday season is as good a time as any to work harder on eating healthy, getting some exercise, and posting to the blog.

As you all know by now, I am an absolute egg fiend. A day without eggs is a day without sunshine; a breakfast without an egg will ensure that I am hungry again in an hour. Sometimes, when I have time to chop and shred in the morning, I grab whatever veggies and cheese we have in the fridge and we start the day off with a veggie-egg-and-cheese scramble. However, many days have early meetings, and early meetings combined with a reasonably long commute mean I need to whip up something fast.

While my husband is walking the dogs and making me coffee (bliss!), I'll quickly grab some eggs and some bread and make the classic eggs in a basket. When I'm feeling even more rushed (or lazier, let's be honest), I just toast some bread in a pan and top with an egg over easy. Now, I've had lots of different types of bread with over easy eggs, or with eggs in a basket. But hands down, the best bread for a hearty bread-and-egg breakfast is this Guinness Bread.

Sweet Corn and Bourbon Ice Cream.

When I was growing up, I had a serious sweet tooth. My parents were convinced that I would give myself diabetes. If it was sweet, I loved it. Cookies, cakes, candies, and of course, ice cream. It took until I got to college to get rid of that sweet tooth. While my college was awesome in many ways, the food was uninspiring and the ice cream -- soft serve, mostly -- sub-par. The desserts were likewise somewhat bland. So I fell out of my love affair with all things sweet and never quite got back into it. The nail on my sweet-tooth coffin was the discovery of weird, bizarre, unique ice creams. Sweet corn, creme fraiche, olive oil -- delicious! I rarely eat "regular" ice cream anymore (honey-lavender was the last non-homemade flavor I had), but I will occasionally whip up a batch of something strange and exciting at home. If you too are a fan of unusual ice cream flavors, I strongly recommend that you invest in Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home.

Watermelon Spritzers

Obviously this is an out-of-season post -- when summer comes around next year, I strongly recommend trying out these watermelon spritzers.

Homemade Tortillas

As you know, for several months we did not buy baked goods; I made them all instead. But, there are only so many loaves of bread you can make before starting to get bored. In my quest to find a different starch to bake, I ran into a recipe for what looked like delicious homemade tortillas.

Pizza bread

As a child, visits to my great grandmom always involved a stop-over at a local bakery. We would pick out a coconut cake for her, sweets for my sister and I, and most importantly -- pizza rolls. I lived for those pizza rolls. They were amazing. You could heat them up and eat them for a quick lunch or eat them cold, either way, they were amazing! So, when I saw a recipe for a cheesy pizza bread, I knew I had to try it and reclaim some of those memories.