Spring has blossomed! And brought with it the 1-year anniversary of Smells Like Brownies, wow! In honor of Spring and my very favorite seasonal vegetable, asparagus, I’m making a super simple pasta dish in which asparagus steals the show. This meal only takes as long to prepare as it does to boil your pasta. It’s […]
Guess what? I joined a club. The Secret Recipe Club! Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Basically how this works (er…a fanciful version of how this works, anyway) is that every month, every blogger in the club draws a different blog out of a hat and then makes a recipe from that blog. It’s like finding a […]
I went to the College of William and Mary. And in Colonial (er…Revolutionary?) Williamsburg, there is a magical place called The Cheese Shop. Among students, The Cheese Shop was famous for one thing: its sandwiches, slathered with house dressing. Most of us sampled it for the first time during freshman orientation, when our guides instructed […]
Curried Butternut Squash Soup
Last Christmas, my husband’s family all gathered in California to spend a week together. It was that week of bizarre weather when it drizzled almost nonstop…and every native Californian freaked out and half the roads closed (as a Virginian, I found this reaction about as silly as how Richmonders behave if there’s a possibility of […]
Holy moly, it’s almost Thanksgiving! Let’s talk side dishes. As a vegetarian, I obviously skip the turkey and the giblet gravy, so my Thanksgiving plate is entirely dependent on the abundance of meat-free sides at the table (which is fine with me…more room for pie!). But I have to admit that Thanksgiving has never been […]
My husband loves mushrooms. Possibly the only vegetable in the whole world about which he feels enthusiastic. Unfortunately for both of us, he likes them cooked (and drenched in some kind of sauce) where I prefer them raw on salads. I’ve been working to edit my tastes, and occasionally I find a dish that really […]
Have you ever peeled and deveined your own shrimp? I have. And you can bet your bottom dollar I’m not going to be doing that again any time soon… The moral of my 45-minute long saga is to refrain from buying shrimp unless the butcher/seafood guy already did the hard parts for you. That being […]
My birthday was last week. It was a little weird, because this was the first year ever that I didn’t endlessly tell everyone I spoke to that the big day was coming as I whipped myself into a tizzy of excitement. Instead, it snuck up on me. But I still made cupcakes! It was my […]
What’s your favorite ice cream shop? Mine is Maggie Moos…though lately the evil Coldstone has been trying to push them out of business. 🙁 I don’t know what people see in Coldstone; Maggie Moos has more creative flavors (or maybe I just mean fewer fruit-dependent flavors), and the ice cream is creamier. But whether you […]
Have you ever noticed that by the time you get halfway through a plate of alfredo, you don’t like it anymore? That will not happen with this sauce, my very slightly healthier spin on an old classic. Though I would be lying completely if I told you that the chief downside of alfredo sauce (er…the […]