// noodles

This recipe makes a FABULOUS spaghetti and meatballs, but here is the beauty part...all in one skillet. And, because everything is cooking up together, the spaghetti soaks up a lot of the gorgeous sauce and meatball flavor, so instead of one sitting on top of the other, all three components are beautifully, harmoniously, delectably, delightfully intermingled. Sounds too good to be true, right? But I am here to tell you, it can be done. 

I wanted to make something quick, easy and healthy for dinner last night. I found this recipe in my Real Simple mag earlier in the week and decided to try it. It's super inexpensive and so easy to make. Toss your tomatoes, bake and toss! The finished product is light and fresh tasting, and the olive oil gives the dish a creamy feel. I didn't have all the herbs listed in the ingredients, I just used some left over basil and thyme and it worked wonderfully. Enjoy!

The pork turned out amazing-tender and flavorful. The rest needed help. The cinnamon took over the broth which was already too concentrated and needed to be watered down before serving. Also, I would want to refrigerate the broth before serving so I could skim off the excess fat. Overall, just okay. I'll keep looking for a better asian soup recipe.

This recipe is from a brand new book called Southern Living 1001 Ways to Cook Southern, actually I really shouldn't call this just a cookbook, it's a massive 928 page reference guide to some of the best recipes Southern states.

There's something magical about the combination of pasta, eggs, Parmesan, and cured pork. The flavor base is the salty, fatty pork (in this case prosciutto), noodle-y pasta makes it filling, and a creamy sauce is created with eggs, lemon zest, and Parmesan (the eggs getting sufficiently cooked by the heat of the hot pasta). In the case of this dish, I was looking to use up some of the gloriously yellow patty-pan summer squash from our garden (yes I know the title says "zucchini", you can use any summer squash for this recipe), as well as some of the garden basil which is still thriving. So good!

That’s one of my fave things to make!I’ve used beef ribs which are available in most grocery stores. They make good eating too. I like making it in the winter as I can leave the whole pot outside on the deck and skim off the congealed fat.

I try to add greens in our diet at least 3 times a week. We all know how important it is to include greens don’t we? But eating same old spinach every time is boring indeed – well at least its for me – so I try to try different greens each time, like rotate it say from spinach, to mustard greens, bok choy, so on and so forth.

If the heat of the summer is getting to you, this is a lovely spicy pasta salad for a hot day. One recent morning, on a day when the mercury eventually hit 105°F, I made this vermicelli pasta early in the morning and then let it marinate all morning in the fridge. By lunch time, it was a snap to quickly pull together.