Sun Dried Tomato Pasta with Kale

Fennel, sage, and white wine are an A+ flavor combination in this sun dried tomato pasta. You'll love this hearty, comforting, and easy dish!

Happy December! Today we’re celebrating with this bright red & green sun dried tomato pasta. I have a confession to make. I’m really terrible at decorating for the holidays. Some years it happens, others it doesn’t… and then some years we end up with a Valentine’s Day tree because we lose track of time and the work of taking down decorations is far less fun than putting them up. So here’s my version of holiday greenery for you – sun dried tomato pasta! It’s, of course, edible, and the clean up is minimal. 🙂 Aside from boiling the pasta, this…

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Lemon Cookies

These yummy lemon cookies have delicious chewy middles, crisp edges, and a sweet citrus flavor. I love them with tea for an afternoon treat!

These lemon cookies are my new favorite treat! They have that bakery-perfect chewy middle with a lightly crisp edge and a lovely balance of light and bright citrus flavor. I’ll be making them on repeat throughout the holiday season, but honestly, these lemon cookies are so delicious that I would happily take one any day of the year. This lemon cookie recipe comes from my friend Melissa Coleman’s book The Minimalist Kitchen. You may know of her blog, The Faux Martha. If you don’t, go check it out – you’ll absolutely love her. She has wonderfully approachable mealtime recipes, highly…

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Wild Rice Soup

Craving something that's comforting, but healthy? Make this creamy wild rice soup! Autumn veggies and herbs pack it with rich, savory flavor.

The next time you have a day when all you want to do is pull on your biggest sweater and curl up on the couch, make this creamy wild rice soup. If you ask me, it’s the best kind of comfort food. It’s creamy and cozy, but it’s nourishing too. Colorful autumn veggies like carrots, celery, and mushrooms fleck its surface, and nutty wild rice and white beans make it nice and hearty. And as for that creamy broth? Well, there’s actually no heavy cream or dairy hiding inside it. Instead, it’s a wholesome, flavorful blend of white beans, cashews,…

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Roasted Delicata Squash & Creamy Blue Cheese Sauce

Delicata is my favorite winter squash, and this tangy/funky vegetarian side shows why. The squash is sweet, meaty, and, best of all, requires no peeling!

Happy Saturday! I’m popping in today to share one more fall squash recipe that would make for a tasty Thanksgiving side dish (or a tasty any-dinner side dish if you don’t celebrate T-giving!). This one is a little bit different for me because I haven’t been a big fan of blue cheese. That is, until a few weeks ago, when Jack and I shared a squash dish with blue cheese at the Publican (here in Chicago) that I was completely enamored with. The pairing of sweet roasted squash with tangy cabbage, pops of sweet currants, and a base of a…

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Kale & Olive Oil Vegan Mashed Potatoes

This rustic vegan mashed potatoes recipe is made with olive oil, rosemary, garlic, scallions, and kale. A delicious, easy vegetarian holiday side dish!

Thanksgiving is next week, but I’ve been eating mashed potatoes for a while now because blogging life means eating holiday recipes early! I first made these vegan mashed potatoes for a family dinner a few weeks ago. While I was in the kitchen mashing stuff in a bowl, my brother-in-law came over and asked, “What’s in the mashed potatoes?” I said, “Potatoes…” and he said, “No, I mean, what’s the ‘potato’…is it cauliflower…is it parsnips?” He knows me so well. It dawned on me how rarely I make actual potatoes, but we’re changing that today. This Thanksgiving our potatoes are…

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Creamy Vegan Butternut Squash Pudding

Creamy vegan butternut squash pudding is better than pumpkin pie and is 10 times easier! Just roast, blend & chill to make this wonderful pudding.

Skip pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving, and make butternut squash pudding instead! This yummy pudding is creamy and oh so pumpkin-like, but it’s made with fresh roasted squash. It’s super easy to make – just roast butternut squash, blend, and chill. Here’s how this one came about. A few weeks ago, I made these butternut sandwiches, and multiple tests of this butternut curry. By the end of that week, I had lots of squash parts leftover (particularly because those sandwiches required just the long plank pieces). My first thought, of course, was to make soup. My second thought was to ask…

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Pomegranate Salad with Cider Dressing

This gorgeous pomegranate salad is perfect for the holiday season! Filled with a cornucopia of colorful produce, it's a fresh, festive side dish.

This pomegranate salad recipe is the perfect way to add a little color to any fall or winter meal. As we approach Thanksgiving, I feel like foods become more and more brown. I know – we all love cheesy, bready things, but if I’ve found one calling in life (er.. in blog-life), it’s to find and bring forth the colorful foods of every season. Here, I pack as many as I can into one stunning salad. This pomegranate salad has apples and squash, onions and greens, carrots and kohlrabi, and pomegranates, of course! We flipping love pomegranates. They add vibrancy…

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Butternut Squash Pasta with Chili Oil, Feta & Mint

This delicious and zesty roasted butternut squash pasta is a quick, easy, 10-ingredient vegetarian weeknight dinner.

Happy post-Halloween! I hope you all had a fantastic holiday. Ours was… I guess you could say, a little low key. We worked late and then went to the bar at Whole Foods for drinks and dinner. Because these types of activities are actually really fun when you’re an old married couple like we are :). Another thing that’s fun for us – pasta! But not just any pasta – spicy butternut squash pasta! I’ve been on a butternut squash kick lately, see here and here. For this post, I had originally planed to make a more traditional fall pasta…

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Pumpkin French Toast

This pumpkin French toast is the perfect fall breakfast! Cinnamon fills it with warm, spiced flavor, and a drizzle of maple syrup takes it over the top.

This pumpkin French toast is the perfect fall breakfast! It’s crisp and golden brown on the outside, moist and tender in the middle, and packed with pumpkin flavor the whole way through. It’s super easy to make, so you could whip it up on a weekday, but I especially love it on the weekends, when I can sit back, relax, and savor it. Just like it does in baking recipes, pumpkin puree makes a great egg replacer in this recipe, creating a rich, custard-like mixture to coat the thick slices of bread. As a result, this pumpkin French toast is…

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Sweet Potato Chili Fries

I crave sweet potatoes and chili on cold days, so these fun chili fries are exactly what I want on fall and winter nights. Great for game day or parties!

Once fall hits, I always crave two things: roasted sweet potatoes and chili. So naturally, I had sweet potato chili on my mind, but what I really wanted were big, puffy roasted sweet potato wedges and their deliciously sweet and browned caramelized edges. And that’s when it occurred to me – Sweet Potato Chili Fries! Well… wedges, technically. It’s the best of both worlds, and these little individual servings, topped with a quick slaw and avocado, are so fun to eat! I started with my favorite veggie chili recipe, which happens to be very quick and easy to make. Since there…

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Oyster Mushroom Soup

This oyster mushroom soup is a healthy, healing recipe for cool evenings. It's brimming with flavor from lemongrass, miso & ginger!

One night a week, Jack goes to comedy class, which means it’s the night that I have all to myself. In lieu of doing anything productive, I usually eat toast for dinner in front of the computer and let myself go down a rabbit hole of Youtube videos. I watch what people eat in a day, I watch people who live in vans and make vegan food (#vanlife), I watch people who live in vans and make vegan food while raising young children, and I read the scroll of crazy judgy comments that come as a result of that lifestyle…

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A food blog with fresh, zesty recipes.
Photograph of Jeanine Donofrio and Jack Mathews in their kitchen

Hello, we're Jeanine and Jack.

We love to eat, travel, cook, and eat some more! We create & photograph vegetarian recipes from our home in Chicago, while our shiba pups eat the kale stems that fall on the kitchen floor.