A couple of weeks ago when I showed the strawberry lemonade and strawberry lime cheesecake bars I meant to show the rest of the dinner that week, too! But I got sidetracked, so slacker that I am is showing you now.
(PS – Today’s the last day to enter to win tickets for the Taste of Hillcrest this weekend!!! Enter and stuff!)

I used the same rub I’ve created in the past to smoke a pork butt and a rack of St. …

A couple of weeks ago I saw this recipe floating around on Facebook about a one pot pasta meal – you put the noodles and EVERYTHING together in one pot and cook it and VIOLA – instant dinner. No having to make a separate sauce or cooking the noodles in another pot and all that jazz. I saved the recipe because I was curious to try it out and see how it went. I was a little skeptical that this …

With the rest of that 2lbs. box of strawberries I decided to make dessert this weekend – Strawberry Lime Cheesecake Bars.

The original recipe I based this on called for lemon – but I wanted to use limes from our tree since we had those in abundance. I’m also trying out various key lime recipes to see what’s the best before our trip to Tampa/Key West this month (woo).

First thing I did was to make the strawberry compote for the middle …

This past weekend I did a whole slew of home cooking – I made smoked ribs and smoked pork butt (so I could have leftovers), green bean salad, black rice (truly, it was black – the cooking liquid turned purple), dessert and this delicious strawberry lemonade. Jake and I have been working on eating at home more and doing more home cooking to save up extra funds for our trip to Florida at the end of April. With it’s sort-of …

Last night was the first night I had a real meal for dinner since last Thursday. After a few nights of eating bread, or saltines and plain rice, I was actually hungry for a real meal and set about gathering the ingredients to make one. Shrimp was on my mind for some reason and I headed over to H Mart and found asparagus on sale for $.99 cents a lb (wooo), shrimp on sale and grits just seemed to pop …

I discovered how to make my own from-scratch fluffy homemade pancakes in the last year or so. I used to always make them from a box mix until it dawned on me one day that I could do it from scratch, and ever since that mind blowing revelation I’ve shunned boxed pancake mix. It’s so easy to make pancakes from scratch and they taste about a thousand times better, too.
One Sunday morning I decided to get all fancy up in …

Peanut butter is probably one of my most favorite things in life. Peanut butter + chocolate is one of those killer combinations that is so very hard to resist as well. If you want me to be in your favor, give me peanut butter and I’ll be in your corner. Enter a new, local product that’s hit the shelves around town recently called Pacific Beach Peanut Butter.

The peanut butter spread (which is a “spread” because “peanut butter” must contain 90% …

Happy Valentine’s Day! I had plans in my head to do more Valentine’s recipes/posts… but that didn’t exactly work out. Last night I made Jake some special treats for today (which I will post about later because I don’t want him to see what I made) and with the leftover cookie dough I made these:

Mini heart sandwich cookies! They are sugar cookies with lemon cream filling. They are pretty tiny and just the right bite for a little something sweet.
I …