Breakfast To Go

Recipe Review: My go to Breakfast Sandwich recipe. Perfect to reheat and eat on the fly!

I am not a morning person. I never have been and I'm pretty sure that I never will be. I've gotten a little better over the years, but will basically do anything I can to get those extra 5 minutes of sleep. It typically takes me a full hour before I actually "wake up" and can wrap my groggy brain around a concept like breakfast. What this means is that most days I end up eating my breakfast at work. There's a Starbucks approximately 75ft from my desk, (which believe me- makes controlling my caffeine addiction challenging) so that's a nice back up, but I try to bring my breakfasts with me. Every week or so I prep a batch of breakfast sandwiches, that can either be refrigerated or frozen, so I can just grab them on my way out the door.

Spinach & Pesto Chicken Rollatini

Recipe Review: Chicken, Pesto and Spinach- whats not to like? Looks fancy but its not- Can be prepped early and thrown in the oven later, 

I get so tired of just marinating and grilling chicken. It's quick and easy to make, but I get burnt out on chicken really fast that way. So I was looking for a new way to make chicken to jazz things up. Last fall I made asparagus stuffed chicken and really enjoyed the way the pesto tasted on the baked chicken. Some googling (and perhaps some olive garden ads) led me to the idea of doing a chicken "rollatini". Basically its a way to make stuffed chicken where you pound the chicken really thin and then roll it up with the stuffing inside. If done right when sliced you will have pretty little chicken pinwheels. I thought this would be good to make ahead and just pop in the oven, and it was!

Cranberry Swirl Cheesecake

Recipe Review: Cheesecake was a hit with the boyfriend's family at Christmas! 

Obviously I couldn't show up empty handed on Christmas when meeting Kevin's family for the first time. There was a cranberry swirl cheesecake on the holiday edition of Cooking light that looked festive so I thought that would work well, especially since I'd have to make it ahead and it would need to travel an hour and a half in the car.

I used the cheesecake recipe from Joy of Baking and the swirl recipe from Cooking Light (while cooking light is one of my favorite recipe sources I strongly believe that certain things- like cheesecake- shouldn't be 'lightened')




boo bad lighting :-(

Roasted Vegetables & Pineapple Stuffing

I like vegetables. Lots. Yummmm. Thanksgiving dishes tend to be pretty carb-y and starchy so I wanted to make sure we had some veggies to munch on too. Also I could do all my prep ahead of time, which was very essential this thanksgiving. I doubled this and made this for both of the thanksgiving's that I attended so I got two times to try different spices to come up with the right combo to blog about!

I knew I wanted to use butternut squash and Brussels sprouts as my base vegetables, and decided to throw in baby carrots, onions, cauliflower, and parsnips. (Mostly I just wanted to be fancy and say that I used parsnips in a recipe) What exactly is a parsnip? Wikipedia tells us that:

The parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is a root vegetable related to the carrot. Parsnips resemble carrots, but are paler than most carrots and have a sweeter flavor, especially when cooked.

(I may allegedly be including this because when I was at the grocery store I thought I was purchasing turnips but they turned out to be parsnips)

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Recipe Review: Tried and True best Pumpkin Cheesecake you will ever eat. Go make this right now.

For the past few years I've been making pumpkin cheesecake for Halloween/Thanksgiving. (Basically I'll make a pumpkin recipe whenever I can get away with it. I hate how society forces us to only eat pumpkin in the fall. I've been stockpiling canned pumpkin this year so I can use it whenever. Take that seasons!) In general everyone loves cheesecake, and whenever it gets cut into and people realize that its a pumpkin cheesecake, they flip. Its actually pretty easy to make, and can be made up to a week in advance.



mine looked just like this- minus the pecans on top- I swear, I was just in a hurry and didn't get to take pictures


The recipe that I use is from Joy of Baking its very detailed and walks you though all the steps along the way. (The degree of details might make it look a little overwhelming at first, but trust me its not)