The Youngrens | San Diego Photographers

Can you tell that I am DYING for summer to get here with this recipe? Maybe if we all start cooking summer dishes, we can will it to come. Like stretching our united kitchen power. We can all sit outside in our patio furniture with coats and scarves, warming ourselves next to the barbecue while passing the potato salad and snapping at anyone that dares mention going back inside. There’s been a few hints of sunny summer days here in San Diego and I feel like one of those wide-eyed cats with my face squished up against the window watching…

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As winter slowly fades into spring, we have just a few more warm and hearty dishes to feature here on Recipe Sunday, and this one totally takes the cake for the fanciest potato side dish I’ve ever seen – sweet potatoes rubbed with cumin, baked to crispy, then topped with a lightly fried sage leaf. I feel like the cumin is a little tuxedo jacket and the sage is a fancy tie for this delightful crowd-pleasing side dish that will hold it’s own next any fancy-schmancy steak – or may I suggest a braised short rib pot pie?? We made…

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If you’ve been reading Recipe Sunday for any length of time, I’m all about easy deliciousness. The simpler and tastier the dish can be, the more I can convince the world that I’m a kitchen goddess and NOT a fumbling madwoman. Watch out world. She’s got a pepper grinder and is not afraid to overuse it. Crockpots, dutch ovens, flavorful meats, and fresh herbs have become my crucial sidekicks – I just can’t live without them anymore. And this side dish that I uncovered from my stack of Better Homes and Gardens magazines has been proven itself over and over…

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Good grief – our brand new dutch oven is AMAZING. Over the past week, everything I’ve made has come out like a dreeeeeeeeam. There’s been layers of flavors that I never knew existed (“was that cinnamon in the chicken thighs??”). Today I made a butternut squash soup from a JAR, and decided to throw in leftover pork loin, old sweet potatoes, a few cans of chicken stock, and dried seasonings, and it tasted like manna from heaven. I almost hate the thing because it makes our food taste so good. I think it’s taunting me… ”You could never be this good in…

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There is no other food that defines comfort food like a pot pie. In fact, a pot pie is to the dinner world as a cinnamon roll is to the pastry world – hot, sticky, creamy, gooey, and simply comfor-licious. That’s right. It’s so good I made up a new word and that doesn’t happen everyday. Only every other day. So when I found this fancy gourmet Dutch oven take on the age old pot pie concept, I couldn’t resist borrowing my friends fancy cookware to fancy-up dinnertime. The gooey innards of this recipe are short ribs with cipollini onions and…

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The best thing about food is it’s ability to take you back. I mean waaaaaay back. I mean back to your grocery shopping around the kitchen with your mini-toy shopping cart and your Cabbage Patch doll days. Those were the days when the kitchen counters felt a mile high, and I could only reach Mom’s baking stuff in the bottom cabinets – namely the shortening, the flour, and the hand mixer. So I would sneak whatever I could find into my shopping cart, and then go upstairs to my mini-kitchen play set to mix flour and water to make a dough for…

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