BEST Prime Rib Rub

My family doesn’t have a certain meal we eat every Christmas, but often enough, it’s prime rib. Otherwise known as a standing rib roast, it can be intimidating for a home cook to execute.

So let’s just start at the beginning. The first step to achieve a beautifully seasoned prime rib that will leave your guests impressed is a really great Prime Rib Rub.

A rub made with simple ingredients like rosemary, thyme, garlic and shallots creates a deeply flavorful and crispy crust on the meat, making it a memorable meal every single time.

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This Burrata Peach Salad is the perfect balance of flavor.

Since I’m not the world’s biggest fan of peaches eaten on their own or in sweet dishes, my goal this summer was to make the best savory peach dish ever.

This Burrata Peach Salad lives up to those expectations and more.

While many peach burrata salads also include tomatoes or avocado for filler, or prosciutto, this one needs no filler or meat at all.

The co-stars of this show are lots of juicy grilled peaches and luscious burrata cheese.

The supporting players are a flurry of fresh herbs, pine nuts, and a sweet-savory dressing made with honey and shallots.

The special guest star is some rustic pesto croutons which you’ll want to gobble up before they even make it onto the salad.

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One thing about my cooking philosophy is that I don’t buy salad dressing. I MAKE salad dressing. It’s one of the very easiest ways to feel like a chef at home, with surprisingly little effort on your part.

Homemade salad dressings like miso dressing and just about any other variety you can imagine are almost always healthier than store bought, as you control what goes into them.

And they are 100% ALWAYS more fresh and delicious.

I’m actually surprised that I haven’t already shared my basic recipe for a citrus vinaigrette salad dressing until now. It’s one that I’ve been making for years to drizzle over my summer beet salad recipe.

And since I want to make this website all about sharing well-loved dishes without fussy ingredients (like fettuccine bolognese and lemon butter shrimp pasta), here we are. Please enjoy my favorite-ever citrus vinaigrette recipe.

I especially love mixed greens tossed with this citrus salad dressing alongside cottage cheese lasagna, lamb lollipops or pasta with salmon. The acidity from the dressing is such a nice counterpoint to the heavier flavors in a hearty entree.

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The irony of being a food blogger who makes a VERY small real-life Thanksgiving dinner has always amused me.

But for the holiday, I’m usually cooking for just four adults and one kid. It makes Thanksgiving dinner a very low-stress meal to host, because cooking for five doesn’t require shuffling dozens of pans and casserole dishes into the oven (or multiple ovens, which we don’t have!).

On the the other hand, it also makes it impractical to prepare a HUGE feast – there’d just be way too many leftovers to deal with (even after making my leftover mashed potatoes recipe and cranberry sauce muffins the next day), and food waste bums me out.

So, in real life, I stick to just the basics, which is usually a small Cajun turkey or turkey with maple bourbon glaze, mashed potatoes with homemade gravy, cranberry sauce, my husband’s grandma’s old fashioned dressing, and green beans or maple glazed Brussels sprouts.

But this blog is where I kind of live out my Thanksgiving FEAST fantasies (and test and eat them in the weeks BEFORE the holiday).

In my dreams, I envision a table loaded with a dozen side dishes, like Thanksgiving salad and roasted acorn squash slices and every other vegetable imaginable. Oh, and Thanksgiving Rice! Let’s talk about this Thanksgiving Rice recipe.

“Made this for Thanksgiving this year. Absolutely delicious. So easy to bake in the oven. Was perfect at 50 minutes.”

—Cindy

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While the heartbreak of the pandemic has closed several of my favorite restaurants, others luckily remain open. But even some of those that have been able to hang on are still operating with a limited menu due to staffing issues.

Our local Cajun and Creole restaurant is an example of this. They used to have a very delicious Cajun shrimp pasta on the menu, but these days only focus on po’ boy sandwiches.

So, since I’m always looking for ways to add to my library of salmon recipes, I decided to try my hand at Cajun Salmon Pasta at home.

Just like my creamy salmon pasta and pesto salmon, this seafood dish is a breeze to prepare on a weeknight, but will make you feel like you’re enjoying a special restaurant meal!

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I only got serious about vegetable gardening a few summers ago, but it’s quickly become one of my favorite hobbies.

I don’t have a huge garden, but it’s amazing what it can yield each year, just from a few packs of seeds.

So far this year, I’ve enjoyed snap peas (usually served with my bourbon salmon recipe) and a ton of salad greens, which I generally just toss with citrus salad dressing for a simple side dish.

Later in July and into August, we can start incorporating grill zucchini and lots of homegrown tomatoes into our meals. And I’ll also be pulling up some carrots for honey roasted carrots and balsamic roasted carrots.

I mostly grow smaller grape and cherry tomato varieties (perfect for beet and tomato salad), and we usually end up with a HUGE harvest, because I grow more tomatoes than we probably need.

Blistered tomatoes are an easy and delicious way to prepare grape and cherry tomatoes. Just like roasted grapes, they can be eaten on their own or incorporated into a variety of dishes.

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Salads for specific holidays are becoming something of a theme around here. It all started with my Thanksgiving salad, which Google liked enough to put it at the top of it’s search results, meaning lots and lots of people make this salad each year for their holiday dinner, and that makes me so happy.

From there, I expanded into Thanksgiving fruit salad, which was also popular. And then I tried my hand at Christmas salad and Christmas fruit salad.

So, it makes sense that today I’m back with, you guessed it – Easter Salad (I did Easter fruit salad also, of course). Serve this with ham with pineapple sauce and mashed potatoes with heavy whipping cream with homemade gravy for my idea of a perfect Easter feast.

Although, just like all of my holiday salads, it certainly isn’t meant to ONLY be enjoyed on that specific holiday.

Like my fried goat cheese salad, think of this more like a Spring salad idea that you can enjoy any time you want this season. It’d also be right at home on a Mother’s Day brunch menu, alongside bacon in oven and vegetarian quiche.

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I was recently walking around Ann Arbor, Michigan, doing some reminiscing about my college years. Specifically, about restaurants I went to with my then-boyfriend, now husband.

It seemed that from the very beginning, we were comfortable eating whatever we wanted in front of each other. At one favorite place, we would both get ribs.

At another, we regularly order an appetizer that was nothing more than a few heads of roasted garlic that you’d scoop out and spread on toasted bread. I guess if we both had garlic breath, we couldn’t smell each other!

Another dish I often remember Jeff ordering back then was chicken fettuccine alfredo. Hey, he had the appetite and the metabolism of a 19-year-old boy! I did and still do prefer rigatoni meat sauce or fettuccine bolognese.

Today, I’ve updated college Jeff’s favorite dish by swapping out the chicken for salmon, and adding broccoli.

Like my popular salmon recipes, like creamy salmon pasta and pesto salmon, this salmon alfredo pasta is a great way to introduce non-fish lovers to the joys of salmon. My 2-year-old chowed this down!

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It’s kind of a big day around here, because this is the first Instant Pot recipe I’ve shared on this blog! I actually bought an Instant Pot this past spring, because a client requested some freelance recipe development using one.

I borrowed an Instant Pot cookbook from the library and made a bunch of recipes to learn how to use the appliance (including Instant Pot short ribs and Instant Pot sweet and sour chicken), then completed the freelance project.

Then, I kind of tucked the pot in my office and forgot about it all summer.

Until now, because this Instant Pot Butternut Squash Soup with Goat Cheese is on the scene! While I love a long simmered crockpot soup and Old Fashioned Ham and Bean Soup on my stovetop, the depth of flavor of a pressured cooked soup just can’t be beat.

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Any tomato haters out there? I’d be surprised if there were any reading here, since so many of my recipes include tomatoes. But in real life, I know a surprising amount of people who don’t like tomatoes.

Look, I get it: those sad lifeless slices of pink tomato that come on fast food sandwiches are horrible. But there is NOTHING like a fresh, local, juicy, farmer’s market tomato.

(more…)

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