If there’s one thing I’ve made abundantly clear with this blog, it is that I have a very deep appreciation for foods with bad reputations.  Thus, it should be a given that hamburgers hold a very special place in my heart, but to tell the truth, I’ve never really equated burgers with junk food.  That’s probably because I was raised on handmade, from-scratch burgers that my parents prepared.  (Naturally, we ate at fast-food restaurants like most other families, but I was a diehard chicken nugget fan, so my non-homemade burger intake was remarkably low.)  There was just something inherently comforting…

It’s Friday!  Were you aware?  Until this week, Friday has been my one consistent day off.  Today is a day off, too, but I have a giant to-do list staring me in the face… wanna see it?  Well, I was going to show it to you, mainly to show off my pretty stationery and my impeccable handwriting, but it turns out the photo revealed less about those things and more about how badly I need to clean up my desk.  You don’t need to see that. For this busy Friday, I’m going to share a quick and easy recipe, and…

  At first glance, this post probably looks super healthy.  It’s full of colorful, fresh veggies and  green, leafy herbs.  I just had a farm-fresh, vitamin-packed party, didn’t I?  Well, yes… and no.  Fresh salsa is extremely good for you.  But what you can’t see in these pictures is the mass of fatty, fatty goodness that my friend Joe and I made to go along with the salsa. Joe and I have been cooking buddies for pretty much as long as we’ve been friends.  This started out in our kitchenless dorm back in Alabama; every once in a while, we’d…

                          I talk a lot on this blog about jobs– looking for jobs, losing jobs, maybe not being so crazy about jobs.  But let’s talk for a moment about quitting jobs. “Quit” is such a bad word; it still conjures up images of softball games from my nonathletic childhood.  But in terms of work, it seems so much worse.  I can just hear all these judgmental voices in my head saying, “Oh, so you’re just going to quit a job in the middle of a bum economy?  And for…

I’ve probably given the impression on this blog that I eat a lot of shrimp.  True, this is only the third time I’ve presented them, but given how small my blog is, and how much of it is focused on sweets, that’s still a lot of shrimp.  The truth is that shrimp are a treat—a “sometime food,” if you will—but I love them so much that on the occasions when I do make them, I just feel like I have to blog about them. [Sidenote: I’m not in any hurry at all to have kids, but I fully expect watching…

I’ve had plenty of practice lately with turning life’s lemons into lemonade.  Don’t worry, I’m not about to talk about jobs or money—I’m going to talk about freeze-dried bananas. As I might have mentioned before, I have a weak spot for less-than-healthy snacks.  Banana chips have been at the top of my favorite unhealthy food list for a while.  Granted, there are many worse things than banana chips, but they are fried and full of oil, and while that’s never stopped me before, there’s also nothing wrong with looking for a healthier alternative.  So when I spotted freeze-dried banana chips…