family + food + feelings
Happy Sunday! Aka the second day of the second half of the year. I know. 
But! We have a few more days of long weekend (do you have tomorrow off? we do not.), hopefully some great cookouts coming tomorrow and Tuesday, and several more weeks of summer that definitely provide justification for killer-yummy food at gatherings.
Here are some of our summer favorites!
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Because summer! 
I’ve probably mentioned here before that Jay’s favorite sauce is barbecue. A cross between tang and sweet, but he’ll use the dark red bottled stuff in a pinch. I think that stuff is gross (always too sweet, never spicy), but I do like making my own sauces, especially in the summer.
This recipe is nothing earth-shattering, but dumping a bunch of stuff in a slow cooker and letting a sauce form while chicken cooks is a killer trick to have at the end of the school year when you’re so.close. to the finish line and it’s getting warm and no one has any motivation but also you still need to eat dinner, you know?
So here goes. Stuff gets dumped in with chicken, you go finish a project that your kid forgot about until just this instant, then you eat a BBQ chicken sandwich because you’ve earned it. Add a beer or 4 and call it a night.
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WITH ALMONDS AND CHICKEN WITH ALMONDS AND CHICKEN. 
Guys. I had the best problem ever this morning when I sat down to write this.
I had too many good recipes to write about that I could hardly decide.
What a great time to be alive, right? I feel like I’m in a quasi-groove of my new job and my old jobs and the blog and the baby and being gentle with myself for not being able to DO ALL THE THINGS, and it’s a good problem to have, having tons of yummy food to share. A bad problem is that WordPress took away the red squiggly line and now I don’t know when I spell things wrong? Can someone tell me how to turn that back on? Thanks.
And so this salad. It’s a total feel-good, easy-peasy, use-what-you-have, summer salad. The dressing MAKES it, and the rest of it is just leftovers, seriously. Any salad stuff you have, leftover pasta, leftover chicken, some almonds for crunch, and delectable dressing. The yogurt + dill is decidedly summer, which means you have a month or so left to make this and it not feel weird.
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Guys. Summer is almost over, can you believe it? 
Here’s the thing. Every year in, say, April, I’m all HERE IS WHAT WE ARE MAKING FOR SUMMER. I type it in my phone, I proclaim it loudly to anyone who will listen, I make notes and lists. And then summer gets here and goes SO fast, right? Even now that I’m an adult and work through the summer, when I see school supplies in Target I get all nostalgic and want to buy lots of fresh new things and I feel legitimately sad for the kids but also excited for them.
All that to say. “This summer we are making fried chicken like legit” has turned into “what about Labor Day?” And the same thing with this dip. I made it almost a month ago and am FINALLY showing it to you. We were going to our friends’ house to play in their pool, and I’m all about trading snacks for chlorinated water and a day of no chores. All freaking about it.
So I made this! …
I made spaghetti sauce and put vegetables in it. 
I’m sorry, it’s the truth. Total cop out, but DELICIOUS. Jay still kind of maintains a pescatarian kind of groove, and fish gets old, so we like to be totally meat-free a few nights a week, with me adding cottage cheese or a piece of chicken for some preggo protein.
So, this dish was born. It’s SUPER fresh, super easy, and you can make it the morning you’d like to have it or even the night before and it just gets better as it sits. I made this in advance for friends we had over for dinner, and it was great because all I had to do was boil pasta and heat up bread right before the meal.
Vegetables!
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