I sit here tonight as Jessi is making me suffer through the movie Forks over Knives. I say suffer because I hate to see all the negative information about the foods that I truly love so, so much. If you're not familiar, it's a movie promoting a whole food, plant-based diet to prevent things like cancer and cardiovascular disease. I must say that it is pretty interesting, enlightening and the correlations are pretty damning for having animal-based foods in your diet. As I write this post, I can see the meat in my diet getting smaller. Not going to cut out all animal-based foods all-together, but I definitely think we should reign it back a lot and increase our plant-based food intake. If you've seen the movie let us know what you think and how and if your diet has changed. We'll see what happens because I, Michael, have always been a bonafide animal-product eater.

No real good way to segue into this recipe, but at least it's not a prime rib right? Everyone loves a good seafood pasta. The shrimp and pasta combo in this recipe was delicious. The spinach we served it upon was slightly strange, however (the original recipe said to just serve the pasta over raw spinach). If you make this, I would recommend cooking the spinach with the onions, etc as stated below. Definitely give it a try! Serves 4-ish. Roughly modified from Cooking Light.

Here we are with 2 hours till kickoff from the second NFL playoff game today. By now you're probably working-up quite the appetite from sitting so much and watching the boob-tube. Don't worry this is normal, remain calm. I am posting just what you need to eat. Not that you are going to pull yourself away to make this concoction, I just wanted to show you an example of what a great game-day snack looks like. This is the perfect bean dip in every way. Lots of cheese and it utilizes one of my favorite sausages, Chorizo. It takes about an hour to make, so maybe you can still whip it up in time. If not, perhaps you can convince someone else in the house to. The only thing you have to be careful of is not eating the whole thing in one sitting.

This dish is an all-around great one: it's tasty, healthy and quick. The flavor is great - it looks like it won't be liquidy enough, but it's the perfect consistency with just enough spice. Original recipe from Cooking Light, but we made some modifications. We threw in some extra shrimp because we like lots of shrimp. Our fresh garlic was slightly mushy, so we used pre-minced jarred garlic, which works fine too. Now that we are official gardeners, we had freshly picked basil to throw in. If you don't have any, just sub 1 tsp. dried. This one is definitely a keeper!

We served it with a salad and some bruschetta made of olive oil, chopped basil and tomatoes and port salut cheese = yum!

With the holidays come some great opportunities with friends and family. This means a lot of wining and dining (no pun intended here). It seems that with all these parties and get-togethers throughout the season you are required to bring some sort of white Santa, secret Santa, thank-you, you name it gift at every single one of them. Jessi and I typically lean on good ole vino for such occasions. Tonight we have a great suggestion for such an affair. It's a wonderful extra-dry chardonnay that finishes smooth and pairs wonderfully with all the cheese and fruit platters you'll be gobbling up. Acre's 2008 chardonnay hails from the Santa Barbra coastline and at price under $20 this one won't bust the Santa sack.

In my next house I'm gonna make sure it has one of those kick-ass outdoor rooms with couches and a whole range of outdoor cooking goodies to play with, rain or shine. When I cooked this tenderloin it started raining and I had to cook the thing under an umbrella. It kinda sucked. End result — totally worth it, this tenderloin is delicious. If you like things extra cheesy, I recommend adding another slice of cheese (go ahead and cheese it up, it's the holidays). I guarantee that if you like a Cuban sandwich you'll absolutely love this thing. Takes about an hour; serves 4. Roughly modified from Cooking Light.