Oh, hey! I hope you are doing wonderfully and not going anywhere but to happy places in your mind or like maybe the back yard.
I know, I know. It’s a lot right now.
…Make Your Own Ham For Easter!
pork
Spicy Sambal Pork Noodles
spicy noodle bowls made with ramen noodles (or any pasta you like!) are the perfect mid-week alternative to spaghetti with meat sauce. this asian noodle bowl is the best!
What do you watch while you eat dinner?
Do not tell me that you talk to other people. I won’t hear it.
…Spicy Sausage Vodka Sauce
HIHI how was your Christmas, or holiday, or break, or week, or weekend?
We had….all of those things. This was the first year that I can remember having all of our sisters in town from both of our families. We had family outing after family outing, happy hour(s), dinners out, gift exchanges, and a great deal of time spent discussing WHY Will insists on spitting up so much, and how on earth he’s gaining any weight. It’s a mystery, and a very gross one. I’ve never done so much laundry in my life.
Jay is mercifully, blissfully off the rest of this week, and I’m caught between wanting to 1. organize everything and let him hang out with the kids, 2. do absolutely nothing, and 3. send them all away so I can actually catch up on work for once in my life. I’m THINKING that there has to be a balance between those three things, but likely I’ll spend a ton of time thinking about it and not a ton of time accomplishing the things I really need to be doing.
What I will be doing, though, is cooking. I love cooking on holiday weeks, two or three meals per day and some snacks, trashing the kitchen, listening to music, all of it. This vodka sauce is one of my favorite weekend/holiday meals, and it’s perfect for this time of year – maybe even for New Year’s Eve if you’re staying in! It takes a bit of time because the sauce gets roasted in the oven, but the steps are simple and the results are SO worth it. We have spicy sausage, tangy vodka and tomatoes. Extra garlic, absolutely. After the sauce roasts we pink it up with heavy cream and toss it with pasta or zoodles if you’re starting your New Year’s resolutions early! Honestly the sauce is so good I could eat it plain.
…Garlic Crusted Pork Roast
Here’s our 2018 Holiday Meal! 
No but seriously. I’m going to make this roasted pork loin once a week until February.
How was your weekend? Our was….well, let’s just say that I’m really excited for the holidays but also am feeling the exhaustion and the feelings and the busy-ness and WHY ARE YOU PUKING ON ME AGAIN, in a very hard way. The week before Christmas feels like packing for vacation to me…once we get it done and onto the main event everything will be fiiiiiine.
In our planning, though, is this! I’m thisclose to convincing my dad that we should have this pork loin with gravy for our Christmas dinner. It is super easy to make but feels fancy because of the crust, which is really just garlic, mustard herbs, and some easy flavors. There is salt and sugar in the crust, and trust me on the amounts – you need that much to flavor the entire roast, and the crunch from the sugar and salt is just SO good. There’s no sauce to mess with either, the pan drippings from this are all we need. Simplify your life, people.
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Sausage Wild Rice Soup
It’s FREEZING here. 
No, but really. Multiple nights under 30 degrees F this week = the natives are LOSING it. We live in South Carolina, after all. The south. Warm. Stuffy. No fall. Lots of summer. Sweat. Humidity. You get it.
So when it’s this cold (and, yes, I know some of you have way colder lives than this, I understand how different climates work), and dark at 4pm, and we’re decorating for Christmas between snuggling with our newborn and battling our toddler, we totally completely absolutely for sure need a perfect soup to get us through the winter.
This is definitely that. It’s similar in flavor to the sausage rice casserole from Jay’s youth, but with a broth base and just a little bit of cream and cornstarch to thicken things up. We use real wild rice for that chewy whole grain texture, and the added bonus of simmering the soup for long enough to cook the rice (about an hour) is that the house smells GREAT while this is cooking. I use local sausage, but you can use any kind you like or even ground chicken to keep this super light.
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