Cottage Pie

What's the difference between Cottage Pie and Shepherd's Pie? The former uses ground beef while the latter uses ground lamb. Otherwise, same thing. Meat, vegetables, gravy, mashed potatoes... ultimate comfort food!

Spinach and Artichoke Lasagna

A while back I wanted lasagna, but I didn't own any ground beef or tomatoes or anything else to make traditional lasagna. I did, however, have a bunch of stuff I originally intended to use for a variation on a Greek pie. Well, what the heck... I like white lasagna, so let's see what happens! As it turns out, it was fabulous, and it freezes really well as a bonus.

Hamburger Stroganoff

You know those foods from your youth that are the ultimate in comfort food? This is one of mine. The amount of ground beef used to vary depending on how much money we had, and sometimes there was more pasta than others, but the taste was always the same. Pure comfort.

Stuffed French Bread Breakfast

And for my next trick... the blog post to accompany my 1000th recipe post on Facebook!

I used to make this all the time, back when I was younger and a little wilder. My sister used to host this weekend at her cabin where a bunch of us would get together for a good time, and I usually made something for breakfast. Stuffed French Bread Breakfast made an appearance more than once, since it's simple, tasty, and easy to eat with your hands around a bonfire.

Shrimp Chowder

In keeping with the cooler weather, here's another warm, tasty, surprisingly easy batch of comfort food. It's even relatively inexpensive! I'd been trying to find a recipe for shrimp chowder that had everything I wanted and failing miserably, so I decided to write my own. I think it's pretty darn tasty!

White Chicken Chili

The weather turned cold early around here, and has me thinking about comfort food. Chili is pretty high on my list of cold weather go-to meals, so I was thinking I should make some white chicken chili. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I'd taken the pictures and finally written the recipe last December, but never wrote the blog post or even so much as posted the picture and recipe on Facebook. No time like the present, I guess!

Cornish Hens with Quinoa Stuffing

This blog post is a long time coming, but it's worth the wait. Last Christmas (see, I know... stop being lazy and blog already) I was looking for something different to do for dinner. I'd recently started working with quinoa after resisting for a very long time, and much to my delight it turns out we like it. Plus, I found a source for it where it doesn't cost its weight in gold (I'm looking at you, Trader Joe's!), so I kind of went overboard for a bit. You'll have that.

This was based on a recipe for stuffed chicken I had in my files, probably from either Cooking Light or Weight Watchers, that used rice.

Snickerdoodles

Of all the cookies of my childhood, Snickerdoodles are easily in my top three favourite. They're easy, they're tasty, and they keep for just about ever in the freezer. I can't swear to it, but it's entirely possible my profile picture is from a Snickerdoodle day. It was either that or peanut butter, since I was only allowed to help make those two when I was that little.

One tradition from my childhood that I still keep is visible in the picture above. See the gap where there should be another cookie? It was in my mouth while I took the picture. It's practically a law that I have to eat one when it's so hot from the oven it burns my tongue!

Four Cheese Macaroni and Cheese with Bacon

Sometimes you simply need to have comfort food, regardless of whether or not it's even remotely healthy for you. There are a lot of sites out there offering recipes for comfort food that has been "healthified", and bless their hearts for trying, but when I need comfort, I need comfort. Damn the nutrition, full steam ahead. You know?

That's what this is. I'd had a really bad day, I was hungry, there was a bunch of cheese in the refrigerator, and I ran with it.