Garlic Toast

What's a pasta dinner without garlic bread?  Not just any garlic bread but that wonderful buttery garlic toast you buy in long rolls at the grocery store.  I can't imagine any Italian meal without it, but with cooking for 1 and sharing a fridge and freezer with 2 more I also can't imagine where I'd keep the leftovers.  That's when I developed this quick and easy recipe for homemade garlic toast, and guess what?  You probably have all the ingredients in your kitchen right now.

Butter 'N Herb Pasta

This easy pasta dinner has become one of my go-to recipes when I come home late and have to cook.  It's relatively quick and filled with some of my favorite canned vegetables (green beans and mushrooms).  I adapted it from a recipe found on the back of the Pasta Sides package, mainly by crossing out the words "or" and "optional."

What am I doing? Where am I going?

In the beginning, there was flour and cocoa beans, but with a little of this and a pinch of that we got Pasta and Chocolate.  I've always been a recipe collector, on the bookshelf behind me there's a pink box and a manilla envelope both stuffed with recipes I've clipped from magazine's and ingredient boxes that I've wanted to try but never seemed to have the time.  Now that I've moved out of my parent's house and on my own though cooking has been more of a forefront of my life.  I cook or bake something almost everyday and I'm slowly beginning to make a dent in the pink box (except of course for the fact that I'm finding recipes faster than I can cook them).  I keep meaning to put these new recipes that I'm tweaking and loving in a new box for myself but so far they're just taking up another shelf of that bookshelf.  This blog is going to be a place for me to put those recipes, sort them, tweak them and share them with other people who might also be able to give me suggestions.

I also would like to put restaurant reviews up here.  My day job is a carpenter at Tennessee Repertory Theatre and every tech week we go out to lunch at restaurants in downtown Nashville.  There's some pretty splendid ones I'd like to share with people.