1st Dish of Christmas 2010 - Something Like Pecan Squares

I love to make family members homemade gifts at the holidays. My mom and her sisters are particularly easy because they love all kinds of sweets... chocolate, pecan, coconut etc. This year I wanted to make something like these pecan squares by Ina Garten. I started out with grand ideas of making everything in this recipe and quickly figured out I wanted to find a short-cut. I had an extra deep-dish pie shell in the freezer and decided to cut the recipe in half and substitute the pie shell for the crust portion of the recipe.

Everything came out great... my mom had a few leftover pecans to munch on and said the flavor was really good! What I ended up with looked like an overstuffed pecan pie but its the thought (and taste) that count right? Haha!

Kozmo just checking up on us!

Cabo San Lucas

Mike and I went on our honeymoon a few days after closing on the house... a very well deserved honeymoon I might mention. I was going through a serious lack of sleep due to the wildabeast and I slept SO much on our trip thankfully!

We went to a beautiful resort on a cliff-like side of Cabo San Lucas called Pueblo Bonito Sunset Beach. While the beach water wasn't swim friendly, it was quiet, sunny and incredibly relaxing!

Here are a few of our shots from our trip - You can see more on Mike's new facebook page (search for Michael Hardisty Photography) or check his blog in the next few weeks!

Bucatini All'Amatriciana with Spicy Meatballs

I made this Giada recipe for a change from jarred spaghetti sauce. (Marinara sauce is actually really easy.) I made regular meatballs using extra lean turkey meat. I have made these meatballs before and wasn't in love with them so I stuck to the simpler version (basically not going the extra step with forming the meatball around a piece of smoked mozzarella).

Mike likes a lot of sauce so this recipe didn't make enough actual sauce to cover the meatballs and pasta we had. I'd recommend an extra half to doubling the recipe for the amount of meatballs produced from a pound of meat and a pound of pasta.

One thing I love about this recipe is the fresh parsley in the meatballs!

You can also check out the pre-edited version of our kitchen. Look at all the extra space I have now!