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.
…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.
…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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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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HAPPY OCTOBER WE MADE IT. 
To the fourth quarter, to the months that have a shot at being cold (mid-80s here all this week in case you were wondering), and mayyyyyybe to the month that our son is born! My family has decided, very scientifically, that it makes sense for this child to be born on the 26th. Their reasoning is that my dad and Jay have 26th birthdays (different months, but it counts). This actually works really well for me too for a few reasons. First, October 26 is my last day of work, so having the baby sooner would be a pain for my boss and not great for my clients that week. I’ll also be 38 weeks and one day pregnant at that point so it’ll be safe to deliver AND I’ll be allowed to deliver at the birth center – if this kid comes out before 37 weeks they kick us to the hospital. Finally, I don’t want the baby to be born on Halloween which I realize is dumb and doesn’t matter but I’ve found that if I focus on dumb wishes instead of…please don’t have anything major or life-threatening wrong with you…I sleep better at night.
So, all this to say, the baby will definitely not be born on October 26, but wouldn’t that be fun?
Let’s move on and talk about dinner instead. This is our Oktoberfest dinner! It doesn’t include beer because tbh I can’t be bothered to buy beer since I’m not drinking beer at the moment. Any sips of booze I do enjoy are wine, so extra trips to buy dark beer that I don’t really like when I can’t drink it is just…not happening. Next month. This meal, though, definitely would go well with a seasonal beer that you enjoy, or a sparkling apple cider if you aren’t a drinker. It has the most delicious pan-fried pork with apples and cabbage that absolutely taste like the season but can be made year-round. We’re loving local apples right now, but since they’re being cooked use any apple you like. Caraway seeds give a distinctly German flavor, and crispy pork + sweet and sour cabbage with spicy mustard on the side just doesn’t get much better, you know? I can’t get enough.
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