date night dinner – In Good Taste

Weeknight Date Night Dinner [Recipe: Bacon Caesar Salad]

Maris Callahan — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 06:42:02 +0000

Stouffer’s Lasagna with Meat & Sauce, traditional lasagna noodles layered with an herb seasoned tomato and meat sauce and three kinds of cheese, is perfect to serve for weeknight date night dinner or for a quick after-work dinner when you’re craving hearty comfort food. Pair with a big, loaded cheese and bacon caesar salad and crusty baguette to round out your meal. Here’s the thing: I think I’ve ruined my boyfriend for life. I’ve made a lot of meals for us from scratch: chicken, shrimp and spicy sausage gumbo, jambalaya, loaded nachos with all the bells and whistles and a few batches of cake nor candy brownies have seen the inside of my oven, too. Oh, but that isn’t how I’ve ruined him. I ruined him because after spending a day at Stouffer’s Open Kitchen (psst…can you find me in their video?) with Chef Holly in July, we’ve eaten a lot of Stouffer’s lasagna. And now, I’m pretty sure he’s going to forever prefer it to my homemade version. And you know what? Because there is absolutely no cleanup required to produce a meal that is gooey, cheesy, savory and packed with delicious carbs — and also, plenty of protein and calcium, I think I do too. Oh, […]

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Easy Rigatoni with Spicy Tomato Cream Sauce

Maris Callahan — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 17:20:23 +0000

When in need to make a quick and elegant dinner for guests, this creamy, spicy rigatoni paired with VOVETI prosecco is perfect for everyday pairing or chic entertaining with friends. When was freelancing five years ago, I took a part time waitressing job at a casual French restaurant to bring in some income while I worked on building up my client base. Though all of the servers received a pretty comprehensive wine training, we were by no means master sommeliers. In training, we learned a lot about which wine varieties pair best with different flavors, but that if we didn’t know the answer to a guest’s question about wine, there was one statement we could always resort to: sparkling wine pairs with everything. Even though my career in food service lasted so long you could have blinked and missed it, I learned an important lesson: certain wines really do pair well with anything on your plate and VOVETI, a high quality, craft prosecco made in small batches (only 15,000 cases are produced annually) is one of those wines. VOVETI is a collaborative effort between the Collavini family and the Ferrer family; each family brings 4 generations of sparkling wine expertise to the table. As with most […]

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Salmon with Garden Pesto and Lemon, Basil & Parmesan Orzo

Maris Callahan — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 06:00:40 +0000

Lemon Basil & Parmesan Orzo creamy and satisfying, the perfect complement to Bumble Bee SuperFresh® Salmon with Garden Pesto. No matter how much you love cooking, when you work full-time outside of home, and even sometimes when you work full-time inside of home, it’s next to impossible to come home and cook a gourmet meal entirely from scratch. Bumble Bee SuperFresh® products are my new favorite solutions for weeknight dinners –particularly if you’re looking for an easy entertaining solution or a special date night dinner. A little bit about these awesome new products: Bumble Bee SuperFresh® is a complete line of naturally-seasoned, restaurant quality, prepared seafood solutions for the home. It really and truly raises the bar for what seafood lovers can expect from frozen food. The first thing you’ll notice when you open the bag or box is that Bumble Bee SuperFresh® smells amazing (and tastes amazing, but we’ll talk more about that later). No fishy smells here. Because you prepare Bumble Bee SuperFresh® straight from the freezer, there isn’t any smell associated with thawing fish. And our frozen protein has stayed that way from harvest to your oven unlike most of the “fresh” fish you find at the seafood counter. That […]

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Easiest Ever Rigatoni Vodka

Maris Callahan — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 18:01:21 +0000

When you want a creamy and comforting dinner, pasta is always a go-to. It’s understandable that you’d get sick of the same standby marinara sauce or simple pesto sauce, since those are delicious but a bit of a bore. That’s when you should look to your freezer, or bar cart, or wherever it is you stash your booze, and look to vodka sauce to add flavor to your worknight dinner. Vodka sauce is an Italian sauce made from a smooth tomato sauce, vodka, typical Italian herbs and heavy cream, which gives the sauce a distinctive pink color. Adding vodka to the sauce is said to help bring out the other flavors in the sauce, but it’s up for debate whether the addition of vodka is actually needed. Whether or not you use it, you’ll find this dish simultaneously rich and creamy with a sharp, bright flavor from the tomatoes and crushed red pepper. Vodka sauce is perfect cold weather comfort food, because you can whip up in under a half an hour and as a result, serve it just as easily for a night on the couch as you can for a dinner party. Garnish the rigatoni with vodka sauce with extra parmesan cheese and basil, […]

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Easy Chicken Cacciatore

Maris Callahan — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 04:21:56 +0000

One of the tricks to being a good cook is knowing when not to overdo it. Several years ago I was cooking dinner for a then-boyfriend and decided that I wanted to make some sort of fancy seafood situation. I spent about an hour wandering around the grocery store before I settled on sautéed scallops and a simple risotto. Let me just say that neither of those ideas were simple. What would have been simple? Easy Chicken Cacciatore. While the end result of this meal was delicious, scallops are delicate and it isn’t easy to cook them perfectly without your undivided attention. It also isn’t easy to cook risotto when you’d rather be doing other things, like charming a new male suitor with your effortlessly amazing cooking skills. The better choice would be to skip the dishes that require nonstop hands-on supervision and opt for a “set it and forget it” meal that still offers elegance and sophistication to your dinner table. Chicken Cacciatore cooks low and slow, so you can prepare your sauce and let it simmer to perfection — while you can enjoy a glass of wine with your dinner guest and pretend you barely had to lift a […]

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