Lime And Coconut Green Smoothie

 It’s been cold and damp outside  for a long time now.

Our backyard is in a perpetual state of wetness. The earth is cold and crumbly. The rain stopped a while back, but the mud just hasn’t recovered.

I’m painfully aware of the state of my backyard because I have a puppy and a white carpet.

Perhaps it was after this morning’s shenanigans where my muddy dog came tearing past me into the house, running laps and dodging my attempted side tackles, leaving a trail of her dirty feet like a horrifying dance-step diagram, that I really started longing for warmer and drier days.  She is currently on time out. She seems pleased with herself as usual.

It was at 8:30 this morning, on my hands and knees, cleaning up a trail of muddy paw prints, I started fantasizing about luxuriating out in the sunshine and sipping on mojitos and  piña coladas. […]

Lentil Soup With Lemon Yogurt Cream

As long as I can remember I have been a fan of lentil soup.

When I was younger I would heat up a can of Progresso, cook pasta shells in it, and then proceed to dump at least a quarter-bottle of grated Parmesan into the mix. This is not an exaggeration. You know how the bottle has two settings? One of them is the sensible trio of holes that will simply dust your food with a socially acceptable amount of cheese, the other is one gaping hole that is intended for quick and sudden evacuation for large amounts of cheese. I used the gaping hole side. This dish is what my Italian father dubbed “Pasta Fazool.” It was simple and tasty and I am sure that our Great Italian Grandmother is rolling over in her grave somewhere at the thought of us using canned soup and buckets of pre-grated Parm.

For a long time this satisfied me. Opening up cans, dumping the contents, saturating the finished product with buckets of gritty cheese. This got me through most of college… along with a suspicious amount of turkey sandwiches and vodka. Then, one year I got bit by the soup bug. I am sure this was during the first year that I started teaching. I was constantly sick. I started making soup from scratch and it was a revelation. I experimented with everything from chicken noodle, beef stew, chicken and rice, spicy sausage soup with spinach and of course lentil. […]

Killer Cabbage Juice | Juice Of The Week

I got ballsy.

I juiced a cabbage.

If you had told me last year that I would be juicing pretty much anything and everything, I would have told you to back off and stop making weird predictions. Also, out of all the things you could predict with your psychic gift, you should give me something juicier than becoming a juicer. Maybe tell me that I am coming into a fortune, or that I will have really great hair for all of 2013. Tell me that my dog will be perfectly trained and stop trying to gorge herself on the cat-box  Tell me that Pajama Jeans are now finally in fashion for reals and I should really just woman-up and buy them. I would welcome any of these predictions. […]

Rainbow Veggie Juice | Juice Of The Week

I started this morning with a cookie in my hand.

How does that happen?

You wake up, you put on some work out gear, and you go to head out the door. When I bent down to tie up my sneakers I realized that I was halfway through a cookie. What? Where did that come from?

How are these cookies even still on my counter? I asked my husband to take them to work (turns out he filled up the biggest Tupperware he could find and left the rest).

Creepy, unconscious phantom cookie-eating. It happens.  It’s spooky. It’s also kind of delicious, I won’t lie to you.

These cookies I speak of are pretty amazing and will be making an appearance here very soon.  But still. The first thing I did this morning besides push a 14 pound cat off of my stomach, grumble and throw on some stretch pants was shove a cookie in my face.  I can do better.  So, I did.  After I finished that cookie. […]