All Posts By Jennifer

Some meals feel like a season.This one? It’s late fall in the Midwest. Wind shaking the trees. A sky that can’t decide if it’s done with summer. The kind of day where you pull on a sweatshirt that still smells like laundry soap, light a candle, and hope dinner somehow makes everything a little better. This beef & noodles recipe — my husband’s all-time favorite — brings all of that into one slow-cooked pot of pure comfort. Every time I make it, something clicks into place. Like, “Okay. We’re good now.” And not just because it’s easy and foolproof (though …

It sounds fancier than it is. Promise. Okay, so… this chicken. The first time I had it, I was sitting at a wooden table in a little apartment in France, trying not to completely embarrass myself over a second helping. It was my friend Camille’s recipe—except she didn’t actually follow a recipe. She just sort of… did her thing. A little of this, a splash of that. You know the type. Anyway, it was one of those meals that makes you feel warm in your chest. Not spicy warm—just homey. Cozy. Like someone knew exactly what kind of day you …

You know that quiet moment when everyone’s gathered in the living room, laughing about something probably only half-funny, and the smell from the kitchen wraps around the whole house like a soft blanket? That’s what this dish does. We’ve taken to calling it The Christmas Showstopper. No joke — it’s been the centerpiece of three family gatherings this week alone, and it hasn’t let us down once. I’ve got cousins texting me for the recipe like it’s some guarded secret (spoiler: it’s not), and my dad—who “doesn’t like pork”—went back for thirds. The magic? It’s all in the maple Dijon …

I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I just wanted something warm. Something that didn’t need me to babysit it. Something that felt like a hug without requiring me to assemble actual lasagna (because nope, not today). So I threw some things into the slow cooker—beef, tomatoes, a handful of broken lasagna noodles I had left in a half-torn box—and crossed my fingers. By dinnertime? It smelled like my house had turned into an Italian grandma’s kitchen. My teenage son walked in and said, “What is that? It smells really good.” And listen, he doesn’t even look up for pizza. That …

A.k.a. the soup I could eat every day and never get tired of. I’ll be honest — this chowder is less of a recipe and more of a love story. There’s just something about it. It’s not flashy or “fancy” food. No hard-to-find ingredients. No twenty-step process. Just warm, creamy, bacon-y goodness that tastes like you’ve been cooking all day — even if you barely touched the stove. I’ve made this chowder so many times I could probably do it in my sleep. (And I’m not convinced I haven’t.) It started as one of those “what can I throw in …

Every year it starts the same way. You walk into a grocery store sometime in December and boom — pine-scented candles, tangled fairy lights, that slightly aggressive holiday playlist on loop. Somewhere near the frozen turkeys, you suddenly remember: Oh right… I’m cooking this year. There’s comfort in tradition, sure. Turkey. Ham. Chicken. The holy trio of holiday predictability. They’ve earned their place at the table. No shade. But also… haven’t we all eaten the same plate a dozen times already? Sometimes you want a little spark. A little curveball. Something that makes people pause mid-conversation and say, “Wait — …