The Best Roasted Potatoes (Emily’s Roasted Potatoes)
adapted from Emily Blunt via Ina Garten

Serves: 6-8
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Ingredients:
– Kosher Salt
– 3 lb. large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced 1 1/2 to 2 inches thick
– 1/2 cup vegetable oil

1) Preheat over to 425 degrees F.
2) Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Carefully add the potatoes, bring back to a boil, and then lower the heat to a simmer for 8-10 minutes, until they are just tender.
3) Drain the potatoes, place them back in the pot. With a lid on the pot, shake the potatoes vigorously for about 5 seconds. Carefully spoon the potatoes onto a baking rack set over a sheet pan in one layer, and allow them to cool and dry for about 5 minutes.
4) While the potatoes are cooling, pour the vegetable oil into a large roasted pan and place it in the oven, allowing the oil to heat for 5-7 minutes. Then carefully transfer the potatoes to the pan. Toss them lightly to coat each potato and spread them out in one layer.
5) Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees F. Roast the potatoes for 45 minutes to 1 hour, turning the potatoes occasionally with tongs so they brown evenly. When they are done they will be crisp on the outside and creamy on the inside.
6) Transfer the potatoes to a serving platter and sprinkle with salt.

Oatmeal Greek Yogurt Chocolate Chip Muffins

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Bake Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Makes 12 muffins

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups old fashioned oats
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 cup chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup Greek yogurt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions:

1. In a medium-sized bowl, combine oats and milk. Let soak for about 10-20 minutes, while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 12-cup muffin pan and set aside.
3. In a large bowl combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and chocolate chips. Whisk together.
4. In a medium-sized bowl, combine canola oil, brown sugar, eggs, yogurt, and vanilla. Mix well.
5. Add the wet ingredients and the oats that have soaked to the dry ingredients. Mix gently with a spatula just until all the ingredients are combined.
6. Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups (I find an ice cream scoop to be helpful). Bake for 15-18 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Let muffins cool in a pan for about 5 minutes, then remove them and place them on a wire rack to cool completely.

adapted from The Baker Mama

Greek Sheet Pan Chicken Dinner
from Damn Delicious

Prep Time: 20 minutes
Wait Time: 20 minutes
Bake Time: 30 minutes
Serves: 6-8

Ingredients:
1/4 cup olive oil (plus more for vegetables)
3 garlic cloves, minced
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon dried oregano
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
16 oz. baby red or yukon gold potatoes, cut into chunks
16 oz. green beans, trimmed

1. In a zip-top plastic bag, combine olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, red wine vinegar, oregano, salt, and pepper. Mix together, add the chicken, and let it marinate for 20 minutes to 1 hour (you can do this while you chop your vegetables).
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Lightly grease a rimmed baking sheet.
3. Place the potatoes and green beans in a single layer on the baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and toss to coat. Place the chicken on top of the vegetables, discarding the rest of the marinade.
4. Bake until the chicken is cooked through (has an internal temperature of 165 degrees F), about 25-30 minutes. Then broil for 2-3 minutes until the skin is golden brown.
5. Serve immediately.

BUT there is one thing I have missed, and that is being able to use my own website as my personal recipe box.

At some point since the end of my blog, the recipe plug-in I was using stopped being supported, and so recipes disappeared.

I also have started making a lot of new recipes I love, and it bothers me that I do not have them in one consolidated place on the internet. (Example: a few weeks ago I searched the internet for something I had made and loved and landed on the wrong recipe and almost didn’t realize it.)

So, I’m coming back in a way, although I will not in any way shape or form be blogging in the traditional sense. Even if no one else cares about this little site, my main goal is 100% selfish: to be able to use my recipe page as my personal cookbook.

SO here is what you can expect if you are a person who does happen to care:

1. I’m slowly going through my recipe page and streamlining: archiving recipes (aka putting them on a separate page that you can find at the top of the recipe page) that I don’t make anymore or haven’t made in so long I hardly remember how I feel about them.
2. Finding the recipes that had used the plug-in and adding the recipe back in so it is usable.
3. Occasionally adding new recipes that I have been making and loving. There will be no traditional blogging surrounding this (no pithy stories or thoughts, no photo shoot), but there will be recipes, and maybe a mention of something I love about it and a single picture that will likely be from Instagram. We’ll see how I’m feeling.

So, there you go. All of this will be slow-going and a long process I’m sure. I’m not committing a huge amount of time to it, just little pockets of time when I have the chance. But if you’re still here and have been wondering what has happened to my recipes (as I have gotten a few message about), hopefully this site will become more useful to you in the future, too.

Erin

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve felt pretty less than enthused about blogging lately.  Lots of posts and recipes have gotten half way there, and I just haven’t had the motivation to finish it up and click publish generally because I haven’t felt confident in the quality of what I had to post.  This site isn’t going anywhere (at least not anytime soon), but I certainly want it to be a bit different than it is.  Mostly, I want to get better about re-editing old recipes, clearing out old posts that no one needs to see or care about anymore, etc.

Just the other week a family member told me they made an old recipe on my site and I held my breath because it was one the few recipes I have posted that I almost immediately regretted.  I have not made the recipe since, and don’t particularly plan to make it again, so I was sure they were going to tell me they were not a fan.  Instead, they loved it, but since then I’ve gone back and hidden the post, because really, we don’t need it.  And while I’m glad they enjoyed it, it’s not the kind of recipe that represents the site well.

So that being said, if there is a recipe you love that you suddenly find has disappeared…please let me know.  I know how much I hate when things change or when things I depend on disappear (example: I really wish I could find another exact pair of the sweatpants I’m wearing right now that I have had for over 10 years), and I don’t want that to happen to you.  I’m trying to be really careful (i.e. slow) about the things I’m taking away, and most of the old recipes that disappear are only doing so because they are being replaced by new updated versions of the same recipe.

But I want the recipe archive to be a bit more streamlined, and full of recipes that I have tested and re-tested and which I make regularly anyway because I love them.

Like this pot roast with fennel and onions, which was originally made with cipollini onions, which I now no longer have the time for, especially since I am not a fan of onions in the first place.  But this still remain one of my favorite pot roasts and favorite winter dishes.  Although it’s 70 degrees outside this week…so winter?  Are we not having it?

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It’s so easy to just want to get past this year.  It has been a tough year for the world, and it seems to have been a tough year for a lot of people personally (including us).  So I’m trying to end it by looking at the good…and hoping for even better next year.

Also, I’m tempted to make even lists (5 or 10 of something), but I’m just going to go with my favorites…however many there are.

Favorite Memories of 2016:

• Beach trip with Gerrit’s family.  It was such a great a relaxing week and something I wish (and hope) we could do more regularly.
• The entire England/Scotland trip was worth remembering.  Even though there were aspects of taking that trip that contributed to our stress this year (see: selling/buying a house at the same time), it was an amazing experience.  Particular favorites were all of London, St. Andrew’s, standing on the pebble shores of Loch Ness, and driving through the Highlands.
• Finding a perfect (almost) house.  We moved this year and although I miss our old house often, it is amazing to me that we found what we consider to be an almost perfect new house.  After seeing so many duds, walking into the house we bought was amazing because it had almost everything we wanted (which we didn’t think was possible).
• Evelyn’s growth.  She has grown and learned so much and it is amazing to watch.  Everyday the new sentences coming out of her mouth just astound me.  She is so smart and so sweet and so funny.

Favorite Food I Made in 2016:

• Hazelnut Cake–one of my new go-to desserts.  It feels so fancy, but it not complicated at all to make.
• Chicken Ramen Stir Fry–this has gone on our regular weekly dinner rotation.
• Potato Frittata with Bacon, Scallions, and Feta–I made this for brunch, and have since decided I need to have more brunches in my life so that I can make this more often.  Or just make this for dinner.
• Califlower Pasta Sauce–a basic pasta sauce that we all love (one of Evelyn’s favorites).  And the leftovers go in my freezer (after being frozen in mini muffin tins) and give us go-to meals on busy nights/nights when cooking is just not going to happen.

Favorite Books I Read in 2016:

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel–this was hands down my absolute favorite book I read this year.  Beautifully written, beautiful plot structure.
• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert–I’m so grateful for Liz Gilbert and her thoughts on creativity.  Creativity is important for so many reasons, and it shouldn’t have pressure put on it.  This book reminds me to create because I love it, and not because of anything else.
• Eligible by Curtis Sittenfield–A re-telling of Pride and Prejudice that is so witty and smart and fun.
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi–I hesitate to put this on my favorites list, because it was such a tough read (there were times I didn’t want to pick it up because of the subject matter).  But it belongs here because it is fantastically done and I find myself still thinking about the stories of this book.
• The Story of  New Name by Elena Ferrante–the second book of the Neopolitan novels, and so far (I’m three in), my favorite.  Where the first and third once drag a bit in plot, this was one I didn’t want to put down, and the emotional insights and flowing writing style are still just as beautiful.
• All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr–yes, I finally got around to it.  And yes, it is fantastic.
• Commonwealth by Ann Patchett–I loved this quieter book about family relationships over several generations.

Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America by Diane Roberts

As a college football lover, this book has been on my list since it came out, and I thought fall would be the perfect time for it.  It really is a great book about football and all the issues surrounding it: gender, sexuality, abuse, money, etc.  The author is a professor at Florida State and a football lover, but she doesn’t hold anything back in criticizing the way college football operates.  I think this is a must read for football fans, but to be honest I now wish I had read it during the off season.  Watching football while reading this book was a bit too much.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman

I read Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first short story collection (Birds of a Lesser Paradise) several years ago and really enjoyed it.  And I was reminded of her again when I read “The Seige at Whale Cay” in last years Best American Short Stories collection.  This book felt completely different from her first, but it was still so good.  All of the stories are fictionalized imaginings of real life women, which I thought was such an interesting concept.  The one exception was a retelling of “The Lottery”, which was (along with “The Seige at Whale Cay”) one of my favorites of the book.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

This book of course has gotten all kinds of attention this fall, and it is all deserved.  Commonwealth tells the story of a family split apart by divorce and then put together by remarriage.  Much of it concerns the children of those divorces/remarriages, and it carries us from when they are small to when they are grown and watching their parents reach the ends of their lives.  This was a beautiful book and one that I savored every page and every word of.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein

I was never a girlie-girl when I was growing up, and the fact that I have a daughter of my own means that the princess culture of recent years is a bit concerning.  I so appreciated this book, which looks at the princess obsession of preschoolers and carries us through the pop star obsessions of tweens and social media of teenagers.  The book is perhaps a bit dated, but it doesn’t make it any less relevant.  The crux of the question is this: what are we marketing to our girls, and how does this make them view themselves?

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante

I am loving this series, although I fully admit this third book was not my favorite (that award goes to the second one).  It is a little slower plot wise and drug in some places.  However, I am very much looking forward to where the last book goes (which I plan on tackling sometime in the next few months).  But the beautiful prose and emotional insights that have made these books so great are still present here.

Gratitude by Oliver Sacks

This is a very short book of essays written by Oliver Sacks before he dies.  It is a sweet meditation on the gratitude of being alive and having lived a long life, and it is worth the quick read.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

This book has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for months after Gerrit read it last Spring.  And yet it just kept getting pushed to the bottom of my list.  But I’m thankful it did, because I read it at exactly the time I needed to this fall (which is to say, it was exactly what I needed to read after my miscarriage).  In the book Helen MacDonald loses her father, and in her grief she decides to train a goshawk, commonly thought by people who train birds of prey to be one of the most difficult.  It is part memoir on grief, part meditation on nature, part biography of T.H. White, and it is absolutely stunning.

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani and Maria Wicks

As the year wraps up I’m trying to read a few short books that have been on my list for awhile.  (I can’t stand the thought of being in the middle of a long book when the calendar page turns to the new year…because then what year do I say I read the book in? Yes, I’m aware I have issues.)  This is a young adult graphic novel about how Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas came into their fields studying chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, respectively.  This one is really well done, but I’ve decided I’m torn about non-fiction graphic novels; on one hand, they are a great for learning more about a subject without having to delve too deep, but on the other hand they often leave me wanting to know more.

The Getaway Car by Ann Patchett

I’m not done with this one yet, but it is a very short collection of Ann Patchett’s advice/memoir about writing.  I’ll just say this: if you are a writer, read this.  It belongs on the same shelf as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.  My only complaint is that it is a kindle only book, and I so wish I could have a paper copy of it.

Every year, the older I get, the more I appreciate Advent.  Every year I love the grief and the hope more, the reminders of joy, the candles, the sometimes somber hymns.  I loved Advent as a little girl because I loved sitting with my family and lighting the Advent candles, every week another one until we get to Christmas.  But as an adult Advent feels like a gift unto itself, something that teaches me something new every year, a continual unwrapping of meaning and symbolism.  And to be honest, it is not just a gift; it is something I desperately need.

The third week (this week) is always the hard one for me.  The rest are easy: hope (yes, always) peace (yes, we could use a lot of that) and love (love love love).  But joy is the hard one, because looking around it is so easy to question what there is to be joyful about.  I, like so many other people, am so worried about the world right now.  There is so much to grieve about and so much to be worried about.

And now is where I take the time to tell you how much I have appreciated the words of Sarah Bessey recently.  I’ve been reading through her Advent posts this year, and the joy one made something click for me.  And then her post entitled The Resistance has stuck with me for months (and there is a lot of overlap with the joy post).  Go read it, but the gist of it is this: by being joyful in things, in normal every day life things, we are not necessarily burying our heads in the sand but resisting darkness.

Joy.  Joy.  Joy. So much to be joyful for in these days.  Love.  Goodness.  How many people care about love and goodness.  Christmas traditions and Christmas carols.  Hot chocolate.  Candles.  Books.  Laughter.  Music.  Cookies.

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Objectively, life has been difficult lately.  We have joked that moving cursed us, but sometimes I feel there is actually something to that.  If our lives looked too good to be true back in the summer (beach trip!  UK trip!  new house!), don’t worry; the universe has come back for us.

Since we have moved we have had to buy a new dishwasher, a new dryer, and a new car.  The only one of those we were slightly expecting was the new car, but we had kind of hoped that Gerrit’s old beat up Jeep would last us until at least early spring.

Then Trump got elected president.  Then I had my miscarriage.

And here have been a gazillion other little things that have made life stressful…like opening the freezer to snow and ice on Friday morning, or having our router die a few weeks ago, or the cat ripping a hole in our duvet cover.  Since we have moved, I’m not sure there has been a single week in which something in our lives hasn’t broken.

All that to say, things have been a bit tough and I think it’s made it a bit harder to feel settled in this new lovely home.  Psychologically, it makes me miss our old house (because it seems we never had such a string of bad luck when we lived there).  But objectively I know that our old house would not bring happiness back.  We made the happiness, and we are making happiness here, too.  Eventually the bad luck season will be over (I’m hoping the miscarriage was the end of it) and things will be fine again.

I’m rambling a bit now, but the point I’m trying to get to is that in the midst of all of the upheaval and stress, I realized how uncomfortable I felt in my kitchen.  The truth is, I haven’t done as much cooking in our new kitchen as I would have liked.  Our fall schedule was weird, and it left me with menu plans that prioritized convenience over my love for food.

And last week I thought, I am sitting here in November and I haven’t even baked bread in my new kitchen.

Suddenly that seemed like such a necessary initiation for the kitchen, as if maybe a loaf of bread would unlock my discomfort and ease me back into things.

I’ve had this recipe bookmarked for a while now, but I had forgotten, when I had read it before, that it really is the most basic bread you could make because there is no kneading.  There is simply mixing, dumping dough into pans, rising, and baking.  And so while it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a loaf of bread, it seems appropriate considering life right now.  And it really is so easy (and delicious–I made the best toast with it the other night, and a plain slice with just butter is fantastic) that it could be made very practically on a daily basis.

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Last week, two days after the election (so talk about terrible timing emotionally), I found out I had had a miscarriage. I was 9, creeping up on 10, weeks pregnant.  It apparently happened around 7.5 weeks, or just a couple of days after my first doctor’s visit.

That same afternoon I went in to the hospital for a D&C.

I’m not going to say this hasn’t been tough.

While we knew by then it was coming, the few seconds of silence when we were supposed to hear a heartbeat on the ultrasound was a brutal gut punch.  The sympathy of everyone, while kind and appropriate and appreciated, has been what has made me cry the most (I could hardly stand to overhear our parents’ reactions on the phone when Gerrit told them).  And it has been another thing in a long list of things that have made the last few months tough for us.

Mostly though now, I am disappointed.  And sad.  I’m sad it happened and I’m disappointed to feel like we are back at square one after what had already been a somewhat long journey of trying to have a second kid.  It is a sobering reminder that I cannot control the age gap between our children.

The thing that has been good though, which Gerrit and I have talked over and over about during the last few days, is how grateful we feel.  It has been one of those things, which I have also experienced after the death of loved ones and which I can only attribute to the love of God in and around us, where the gratitude has overshadowed the grief (or at least made it much less felt).

I am so thankful that it happened when it did.  I know too many people who have had devastating late term miscarriages or lost children in early infancy, and if something was going to happen I’m so thankful it happened relatively early.  (BTW if you feel the call to donate to help a family adopt after late term miscarriages, this family is so deserving.)

I am so thankful for our ultrasound tech and OB.  They are simply the best and were the kindest most gentlest people during the whole process.

I am so thankful for my parents, who dropped what they were doing (thankfully it was a half day at school for my mom), and came over to sit with me between our doctor’s appointment and when we were due at the hospital.  And who kept Evelyn all afternoon and evening.

I am thankful, as weird as it may sound, for the inexplicable premonition I have had pretty much all along that something would go wrong with this pregnancy.  I was surprised at our first appointment that everything had looked fine, and I was not completely surprised at the visit last week that it didn’t.  It has perhaps made this just a bit easier.

I am so thankful I was able to have the procedure the same day.  I suppose some people need more time to grieve before the surgery, but I didn’t want to come home and dread it for longer than I needed, too.  I was ready to get it done with, and I’m glad we were able to.

I am so thankful for nurses.  They are the best.  I am always so confounded when people talk about bad hospital experiences because whenever I have been hospitalized I have felt nothing but completely safe and taken care of.

I am so thankful that so many people talk about miscarriages these days and it isn’t such a taboo subject.  It makes us all feel less alone, and I hope that by putting my story out there it will help someone else.

I am so thankful for the kind messages we have already received from the friends and family with whom we have shared the news.

I am so thankful for Evelyn.  Because, well, we have her.  And she is just joy.  Ok, sometimes she is a stubborn two-year-old pain, but mostly she is joy. ;)

I am so thankful for Gerrit, who has completely been my rock through this and taken such good care of me and helped me to rest and recover.

It’s been a rough week, and the emotions of grief are still hitting me at unexpected times (and I’m sure they will continue for a while).  But there’s a lot I’m thankful for, and I’m thankful that this list was longer than I expected when I started.

Love to all.