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After going on and on about my love of cheese on Monday, I immediately turned around and made a vegan bread to have for breakfast.  All about balance, right? I feel like I’ve waited the appropriate amount of time to break out the pumpkin recipes, but I’ll be honest with you: I use pumpkin year round.  It’s a great swap for oil in baked goods and it tastes delicious.  I had some brown bananas, so I combined two of my favorite sweet bread ingredients and made one of the best healthy quick breads I’ve ever had. I based this recipe off of my Nutella Striped Banana Bread, so I knew it would be delicious before I even took it out of the oven.  What I didn’t realize, was that I...

Apparently, I eat a lot of cheese.  Can’t help it, it’s delicious.  Regular cheese, vegan cheese, cheese substitutes, I want it in my life and I want it often.  Unfortunately, no matter how much I love cheese, it never loves me back, so if I want my pants to fit, I have to make other wise choices when I use it.  My favorite way to lighten up a recipe?  Swap out anything I can for a vegetable. Traditionally when you make mac and cheese, you’d made some sort of sauce involving full fat milk (or even heavy cream), butter, and flour.   The first time, I used butternut squash, but when I saw orange cauliflower at the store, I knew it would work perfectly.  Homemade mac and cheese is never...

I’m not feeling well and had an all around bad day, so I’m going to get right to the point.  Remember the pesto from Wednesday?  This sandwich is one of the many delicious outcomes of that pesto. This recipe is verrrrrry simple and comes together quickly if you already have pesto on hand.  Sometimes, I use frozen bell pepper rings and make this recipe even quicker by avoiding cutting any veggies.  If you want a bulkier sandwich, you can hollow out the bread and add mushrooms, onions, and veggie (or regular) crumbled sausage.  Sky’s the limit. I used to make a sandwich very similar to this when I was in high school.  The idea was sparked from some sort of Weight Watcher recipe.  Ten years later, I can’t remember if...

In the spring, I bought a teeny, tiny basil plant and put it on my porch.  That poor plant has been neglected for 95% of the summer.  I’d water it maaaaaybe once a week when I would grab some fresh catnip for my kitties.  Despite the lack of love, my tiny basil plant has exploded into a crazy basil bush.  I can clear all but a few piddly leaves off, and it will be full again three days later.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’ve been up to my ears in basil and I’ve done nothing at all to deserve it. Because basil is such a delicious and precious herb, I try my best to do right by it (other than forgetting to water it!).  What’s the...

Oops! I totally meant to post this last Wednesday and actually have a post on Friday, too, but life happens, ya know?  I was in a wedding on Friday, which put the bachelorette party on Wednesday and the rehearsal on Thursday – couple that with the fact that I let pretty much everyone from out of town stay at my house, and you can see I had a stressful few days, despite having an extra long weekend.  So, forgive my absence? I promise it will only happen sometimes. Lately, Josh and I have been making a list of meaty foods I don’t remember ever having eaten.  Because I stopped eating meat at 11, I never got around to trying a lot of the more grown up foods.  Plus, it’s just...

I’ve probably mentioned this 4,000 times by now, but I am in love with barbeque sauce.  Yes. In love.  Barbeque sauce for me is like Nutella to every sane person in the world.  I will “joke” about how I could eat it as soup and aspire to one day actually make a barbeque sauce soup – if this is already a thing I’ve somehow never heard of, PLEASE TELL ME NOW kindly leave a link in the comments. Despite my love for tangy, smokey sauces, I had never actually made one on my own before, aside from “emergency sauces”.  Oh. Other people don’t need to cobble together a BBQ sauce for emergency situations?  That’s weird. Last week I decided I couldn’t stand it any longer – I just had to...

I’m a little late to the kale game.  Everyone has been raving about kale, specifically kale chips, for months (years?) and I’ve just been over here sitting on my couch, too busy not eating kale chips.  If you haven’t tried them yet, I’m not sure what it will take to convince you.  But let’s get real, everyone else in the world has already tried them. Once I decided to try them, the real issue was which of the 8 billion possible flavors I wanted to make.  Kale has a distinct flavor of its own that I love, so I didn’t want to choose something that would totally overpower it.  I settled on what used to be one of my favorite chip flavors – nacho cheese!  Bonus points: these are vegan!...

There must be something about getting older that makes each year seem shorter than the last.  I remember in elementary school that I felt like each year lasted longer than I could wrap my mind around, but now I hardly know what month it is.  This might be, in part, because I just realized my wall calendar at work was still showing July, ooops. I can’t stop time and I can’t stay young forever, but at least I can occasionally indulge in something my inner 7 year old would absolutely love: S’mores pancakes.  I made a couple healthier substitutions that the average child wouldn’t necessary be fond of, but I can assure you they’d never, ever know.  This pancakes taste positively amazing and might just be indulgent enough for a...

My eating habits tend to be pretty predictable, especially for breakfast.  Once I find something that’s easy and delicious, it will be my go to for weeks – especially if it’s something I can quickly grab and run out the door on weekdays.  All rules fly out the window on weekends, because I love making pancakes, or french toast, or biscuits… you get the idea.  But weekdays will always be dominated by whatever is easiest.  For a long time it was muffins, but recently we veered off into juicing at night (or Josh will wake up early) and I can just grab a mason jar full and walk out the door. But guys, sometimes I want solid foods in the morning.  And sometimes, I just really miss muffins.  If you...

There are things in life you think will never let you down and when they do, it’s so much more disappointing.  Unfortunately, this is me with any sort of technology 99% of the time.  You get something brand new and shiny and think “We’ll be BFFs until I’m sick of you and choose to replace you”, but they always turn on me first.  I’ve especially had terrible luck with phones – I drop them, kitties chew on them, I accidentally set them in a glass of wine.  Happens.  Right? But I was determined to never let it happen to me again and have kept my phone in pristine, beautiful condition. Until today.  Out of no where, my precious baby decided to go the way of a brick and just turned...