{Originally published on What’s Cooking?}

This is Darrin’s (my bestest friend in the whole fat world) favorite breakfast. He fell in love with this simple, yet delicious breakfast since the very first time I made it for him. This breakfast consists of scrambled eggs with chorizo, avocado, queso fresco and corn tortillas (fresh hand made tortillas are the best).

Mexican chorizo is different than Spanish or Portuguese chorizo. There is a similar kind to those sausages called longaniza, but I haven’t seen it anywhere here in Ohio.

Originally published on Gild the Voodoolily.

Last weekend Scott and I went to the coast for the night. I had been having an uncharacteristic jones for the hubbub of Seaside and its bumper cars, corn dogs, caramel corn and salt water taffy, but we couldn’t find a room there and so settled for Astoria. A couple of hours of walking around Seaside and taking in the delicious smells of childhood was enough to sate me, and the crowds made me glad for our reservation in the sleepy history of Astoria.

Our hotel was adjacent to the marina, and if you wanted to spend ~$200/person and 12 hours on a cloudy sea you could partake of a charter fishing trip for tuna, salmon, halibut and/or dungeness crab. Even better, you could just walk down the pier and buy fresh albacore from a dude on his boat for only $1.50/lb. Having had some foresight, we had packed an empty cooler and bought an 18-lb schoolie from the guy.

“You want me to fillet it for you?”

“Nah, I think I can handle it,” I say smugly, having seen that one episode of Top Chef where the Quick Fire Challenge was to fillet fish.

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Originally published on Kalyn’s Kitchen

This time I’m writing about one of my very favorite summer vegetables, spagetti squash (also spelled spaghetti squash), so it’s luckily for me that WHB can be about any type of herb, vegetable, plant, or flower. I learned from Wikipedia that spagetti squash is also called vegetable spaghetti, vegetable marrow, noodle squash or squaghetti. Squash is something I’ll be eating a lot of over the next few months as my garden starts to produce it in copious amounts.

Squashes are divided into winter squash (which ripen late in the season, can be stored through the winter, have hard outer rinds, and must be eaten cooked) and summer squash (which can be eaten rind, seeds, and all, and which can be eaten raw.) I like every type of squash, but in my garden I mainly grow summer squash since the winter squashes produce huge vines and take a lot of space. Winter squash is something I’ll be buying from the Salt Lake Farmer’s Market later in the season.

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Originally published on The Leftover Queen

This is one of my go-to recipes, one of those early recipes I devised out of leftovers which has since then given me the title of “Leftover Queen”. I have been thinking a lot lately about my food philosophy, where it came from and how I have become the kind of cook that I am. I am a cook born out of passion combined with necessity. I learned from an early age from my grandparents and my mom that leftovers can be a wonderful thing. I come from a big Italian extended family and so we were always cooking for large groups of people, which meant that we usually cooked more than was necessary which ultimately left us with a lot of leftovers.

It was a tradition in my mom’s house that when the fridge was too overwrought with leftover containers that we would have what we called a smörgåsbord, which is actually a Swedish word meaning “sandwich table”, but has been translated into English vernacular to mean a buffet or variety of hot and cold dishes.

It was my favorite time of the week as I got to have little bites and tastes of all the foods I had enjoyed over the course of the last week, and it allowed to experiment with different flavor combinations – like mixing corn into mashed potatoes or combining various dishes together to create a completely new meal.

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