This is the absolute perfect summer pasta dish. It is light and completely vegetarian. You can eat a whole bowl of this pasta and still feel like you can get your swimsuit on and look amazing! 🙂   What is Spaghetti alla Checca? This is simple, but very flavorful vegetarian dish from Rome. This dish classically doesn’t have the burrata cheese in here. I add that because, I mean, why not? Isn’t everything better with burrata cheese?   Classic ingredients of Pasta alla Checca Pasta – I love spaghetti here, especially homemade spaghetti. I think it really keeps the lightness of this dish beautifully. You can use any pasta you prefer though. Tomatoes- Tomatoes…

This is a simple and straight forward recipe that we all love. This pasta is perfect with classic Bolognese sauce or even simple marinara sauce. My girls love this pasta with my classic marinara sauce and some fresh Parmesan cheese. Marinara Sauce These noodles also hold up really nicely with heavier sauces. They are perfect with pesto or bolognese sauce. This is a great dough for spaghetti, fettuccine, linguine or even to make lasagna noodle sheets for stuffing or rolling. The trick is to let it rest before rolling.   My favorite pasta maker I love the old fashioned hand crank pasta makers. I prefer them to the kitchen aid attachment, but in…

My hubs loves enchiladas and so I make them sometimes for him. I have never been a huge fan of traditional enchiladas. I have tried several different traditional sauces and I just always feel like they are okay. There is nothing really wrong with them, but I feel like they just are not like WOW, that is so good. I have tried traditional red sauces, traditional green sauces, spicy sauces. I have always just felt, ehh, about them. Then I had an idea to stop being so traditional about them. I was like, why not make them more me. Make them more something I would really enjoy too. So, I thought about what…

So, this is something you may not have heard of before. It is one of those amazing old timey recipes that has started making a come back, but not overly done. If you love ravioli, you will love gnudi. If you love gnocchi, you will love gnudi. It is sort of like a gnocchi and a ravioli had a love child. In Italian, gnudi literally means naked. What a ricotta gnudi is, is basically the ravioli without the pasta shell. It is “naked”. Yet, it is formed and boiled like little dumplings or the same as gnocchi. I don’t know which the girls liked more… saying gnudi or eating the gnudi! They thought…

I am a total suck for anything sweet and salty. So, there is no surprise that I absolutely love chicken and waffles. This dish is the essence of sweet and salty. It takes too of the most amazing bits; crispy, crunchy fried chicken and sweet, fluffy, syrupy waffles and smashes them together… making THE perfect bite! There are a few things that make over the top amazing chicken and waffles versus just great chicken and waffles. To me the addition of a little bit of heat makes a huge difference. As well as making sure you have really, really crispy chicken. Lastly, you need light, fluffy, slightly crisp on the outside waffles. How…

These pork chops are not only delicious, but simple. They are fancy enough for a dinner party and simple enough for any weeknight meal. These are best with bone in chops to keep them moist and juicy. They are started on the stove and finished in the oven just to cook through. You can most certainly enjoy pork pink, which most people do not realize. It is not like chicken, you can cook it to medium or medium well. This will ensure a juicy and flavorful chop  every time. However, if you are not comfortable with that, these chops can remain juicy even cooked all the way through. Chef’s Tips You will want…

For me, cream soups are some of my favorites. This one in particular takes me back to high school. We used to go to this mom and pop restaurant in town whenever we had early days or days off and get cream of chicken rice soup. It was so perfect and comforting. What makes this soup so silky? I use evaporated milk in this recipe versus heavy cream. I have made it and had it with heavy cream and it is still cream and delicious. Yet, the evaporated milk adds a certain silkiness that you cannot mimic. It also has a super clean mouth feel. How can you speed this up for a…

In the Fall especially I cannot get enough of some great Homemade soups. I have some other amazing soups on the blog, but these are all classic Italian soups. Three of them are similar in flavor profiles, but don’t let that fool you. They are similar in ingredients, but all very different in end result. The last one is completely different in flavor profile and ingredients. It is the only lusciously, creamy of the four and it finishes with a beautiful white truffle oil. Special Ingredients So, in three of these four recipes I use an ingredient that really sets these soups a part. It will add depth of flavor and a salty,…