Morel and Asparagus Lasagna

Spring is the redeeming quality of Minnesota. Our typical winters seem to start in September and go on through May. Admittedly this last Winter was surprisingly mild, but Spring was still a welcome change. I love to see the trees budding and tulips flowering and crazy as it may seem, I look forward to the first time I get to mow the lawn again too!

Buttermilk and Chocolate Chip Waffles

I've got a special guest blogging for me today! It's my seven year old son Kayden. I asked him if he'd like to make dinner last night and then challenged him to do it all by himself. 

Oxtail Ragu and Fennel Pollen Pasta

Ready to experiment with some new ingredients today? One of my favorite things about cooking is discovering new things and challenging myself to make something that I might not normally try.

This week, the Virtual Potluck team is taking you on a Spice Adventure and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Donna from Cookistry has the roundup page where you can follow along with the whole team. We're working with Savory Spice Shop and each of us is focusing an a different area of the shop.

Savory Spice Shop is one of the most comprehensive spice stores online. They not only provide fantastic products but they also have a wealth of knowledge on where the spices come from and how to best use them to make some amazing food. I found so much useful information and loved just browsing through the store.

Coconut and Lemon Curd Cupcakes

I don't throw around the "best" designation around very much. I like too many foods and always like trying a new take on something so I hardly ever say that anything is the best of whatever category it may be in. I think too many people just say something is the best, or want people to believe that whatever they made was the best so the recipe now becomes "Best whatever whatever". However, I do admit to adding "best" as  as a search term when I'm looking for a new recipe online. Did I just contradict myself?

Shepherd's Pie

It's spring time and that means it's time to gear up for camping season and dutch oven cooking. I've always enjoyed using my dutch oven to cook over the coals while camping but I've never used cast iron for much of anything else until a year or so ago. I picked up some enameled cast iron pots and have really enjoyed cooking with them for everyday meals. I'm sure many of you are familiar with and extensively use cast iron skillets as well but I still haven't really branched out in that direction yet.

Herb Roasted Chicken

I was reading through some posts on Bon Appetit a few weeks ago and came across one of their posts that talked about the key skills that their interns have to show before getting hired. One of those skills was roasting a chicken. Could you pass a cooking test with your roasting skills?

Honestly, I've never oven roasted a whole chicken before. Lots of turkeys, and I've done rotisserie chicken on the grill but never in the oven. Well, I wasn't going to fail some test if someone from Bon Appetit ever showed up on my door step so I thought I better get moving.

Cooking The Market

One of our favorite date nights is to go volunteer at Kitchen In The Market, a local commercial kitchen and cooking school. When I was thinking of ideas to submit for a Foodbuzz 24x24 event, I immediately thought of taking a spin on one of their most popular cooking classes; Cooking the Market.

The idea behind the class is to create a meal based on whatever is currently available in the market, no matter what season it is. It's a fantastic class that always produces something different and fun to cook.

It has been a beautiful, early spring here for us Minnesotans but we're still not into the full on farmers markets quite yet. That doesn't mean that there's no local product available however. One of my goals in sharing this event with some of our friends was to show them the amazing products we have available right here in our local area, all year round as well as get them excited about the great food season to come!