Rather than fighting the crowds for Vday, we decided to make a 'fancy' meal at home. Since we pretty much never cook with crab, we thought this would be a good one to try. We originally found the recipe in our Gourmet cookbook, but based on lots of recommendations on the online version, we made quite a bit of changes. It ended up being delicious! It tastes very light (despite the butter), fresh and still filling. We served it with a salad and some homemade onion oregano bread and it sure beat eating out. =)

Don't forget to save 3 tbsp of the pasta water like I did (and pretty much always do). We ended up throwing in a bit of extra vermouth and butter to make up for it.

Michael spotted these tasty chops over on Food Gawker. The original recipe comes from A Cast Iron Foodie. Growing up, I was an insanely picky eater and used to always hate pork chops. My most dreaded meal was actually pork chops, limas and perogies. I still can't stand those gooey perogies, but pork chops and limas are delish. We sucked it up and bought some organic chops for this recipe and I definitely think it was worth it. You'll see a note below about corn starch in the ingredients list. We thought the sauce was so good, but it was really hard to keep it on the pork b/c it was so thin. We ended up just sopping it up with bread. The second night for leftovers, we added a bit of corn starch into the sauce while heating it to thicken it up. I'd definitely recommend doing this because the sauce is too tasty not to enjoy!

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!