Happy Chef Mama

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…