For Father's Day this year, I decided to make my husband one of his absolute favorite dishes: carnitas! However, I also wanted to spend the day celebrating how awesome of a dad my husband is, and not just be stuck in the kitchen all day, so I decided to use a slow cooker recipe. The beauty of a slow cooker is that it can turn the toughest and cheapest of meats into the juiciest, tenderest of meats. The blog Gimme Some Oven has a fantastic recipe that I used as a base, only altering some of the seasonings to fit my own needs. The result? Perfect carnitas that only tasted like I spent the day in the kitchen making them!
Our family just returned from a fabulous beach trip; the last family trip with just the three of us. Next time, our number will be four! As wonderful as the vacation was, I'm feeling exhausted this week from all the excitement. I've been too tired to make it to the grocery store, which means our kitchen is depressingly empty. Fortunately, I sometimes view an empty fridge as a fun challenge, and become motivated to try to create a new recipe using only what I have on hand.
As followers of my blog know, I love desserts. I simply cannot have dinner without dessert; it would be like going to bed without a pillow, or taking a bath without bubbles. You could do it, but why would you ever want to? My need for dessert is a tricky one, because I also strive to eat as healthy as possible. Desserts are generally not known for being the most nutritious of meals (and sorry, fruit just doesn't cut it as dessert for me). So I'm always on the lookout for healthier versions of traditional desserts. The health food scene has been abuzz lately with talk about Black Bean Brownies, but some of the feedback on them hasn't been great, so I had put off making them. After all, I don't want my desserts to actually taste healthy. However, after going five months with an aversion to chocolate (thanks, pregnancy!), I decided to celebrate my return to the wonderful world of chocolate by trying my hand at making a "doesn't-taste-healthy-black-bean-brownie".
Despite being 21 weeks pregnant, I'm still running 4 to 5 times a week. It's certainly not easy, but I generally feel pretty good after a run, and therefore am pretty motivated to keep it up. However, the other day when I was getting ready to lace up my sneakers, I was stuck by a different sort of motivation: I needed to bake and eat sugar cookies.
