It's no secret how much we love pesto in this household, so when I saw a recipe for arugula pesto from Baked Bree, I was pretty excited to try a new variation with arugula and walnuts as the pesto base. I used the recipe I found as a guideline because I much prefer to just dump ingredients into the food processor and taste until my concoction...

I have been obsessed with the idea of this macaroni and cheese since the moment I saw it on Two Peas and Their Pod. First it incorporates avocado into the cheese sauce. Avocado + Cheese = Amazing! Second, it takes comfort food like mac 'n' cheese and makes it a little healthier, courtesy of the nutrition of the avocado and the fact that you are...

We went on a mini spree of recipes with bechamel sauce. I made a large batch of (relatively healthy) bechamel and we used it for several days to make a variety of different recipes, the first of which was this Italian-inspired crab and ricotta manicotti. I stumbled upon this recipe and kept it as a tab on my browser for days. Scratch that weeks....

Holy cow was the dish spicy! I really liked the idea of Italian and Mexican fusion from this shrimp fajita pasta we used as inspiration with our own extra spicy homemade enchilada sauce based off this recipe, but hyper spiced up with extra cumin, ancho chili powder, and adobo. We might have spiced our enchilada sauce a little too much. The...

Dustin and I have discovered our Italian gene. We made homemade pasta with our new pasta maker (another wedding gift!) for the first time, and it came out perfectly! We were bracing ourselves for disaster after our gnocchi fail, but we needn't worry because this pasta was delicious. Unfortunately, making pasta at home is not an every night kind...

This recipe for creamy goat cheese mac and cheese has been in my recipe queue for months, but I've been toying around with exactly how I wanted to make it. Do I want to follow the recipe exactly or do I want to try to healthify it? Goat cheese is actually a relatively healthy cheese and is so creamy that I knew it would make a fantastic cheese...

The day we arrived in Seattle on our visit last spring, we stopped at an Italian restaurant called Barolo right by our hotel downtown. I had this fabulous creamy pasta with smoked salmon off of a prix fixe lunch promotional menu. It was my first taste of the Northwest, and I still think of this pasta to this day. I wanted to develop a more...

This pasta is so light and fresh tasting. I found this recipe on foodgawker from Ezra Poundcake for a Lemon Linguine but used cappellini pasta instead since that is what we had on hand. It would be the perfect lunch to enjoy on a summer afternoon, but since we won't have that kind of weather here for awhile, it made for a nice pre-Spring burst...

When Erin got back from her trip to Texas, I wanted to cook her up a great special meal just like I did last time. It'd been awhile since we'd had any yummy creamy pasta sauce, so I decided to try something that sounds delectable, vodka sauce. The first step in making vodka sauce is to make a marinara sauce. Begin by getting 1 large can of whole...

I would venture to say this spinach lasagna rivals any meat lasagna in terms of pure tastiness. It reminds me of spinach dip in lasagna form with a lovely creamy texture. I truly think the secret to awesome lasagna is no boil lasagna noodles. If you can find them at the grocery store (which you can't always), why wouldn't you use them? They...