Have you ever been so close to having your greatest dream come true? For me, that dream is being a mom.

I’d seen Ghia in the stories of a few influencers I follow, and their packaging and product description stood out to me. I was excited to try it, but because it’s kind of pricey, I waited. Then, I saw it on Shark Tank, and was shocked when they didn’t get a deal! Finally, when we came to the realization that we wanted to cut down further on our already very moderate consumption of alcohol, I decided to order it.

I had a spritz with dinner every night of our honeymoon, and when we came home, I immediately bought the ingredients to make them for my parents. (As well as crusty bread, and shredded Parmesan cheese to serve with olive oil like they do at Harvest on Fort Pond.)

Since then, I’ve made probably a hundred, and have tried a few different types of spritz, all which hold a special place in my heart, but none as special as the original Aperol Spritz.

This entry is dedicated to the Spritz.

My mom’s chicken soup has been my favorite meal my entire life. She learned to make it from her mom. I love it so much that I even wrote my college essay about how I used to make it with my mom as a kid. I have no idea why I didn’t write about being homeschooled my whole life, or a near death experience, but thankfully I got into college anyway.

I thought the idea of having a wedding registry was outdated. I thought it was really weird and awkward to basically make a wishlist and share it out with the expectation that you wanted people to buy things off of it. After many conversations with relatives and friends about how excited they were to help us start our new lives together, especially since we would be moving into our first apartment together, I gave in and made one. Now that many of my friends have wedding registries of their own, I am a registry convert and see the value of having a list of things that my loved ones actually WANT and will use, and that I can easily gift to them. I’ll even go one step further - I wish that I could just have a registry for life, and that everyone in my life just had public wishlists. Gift giving is not my love language, but I’m trying to get better, and registries have made that easy for me.

This week’s new recipe of the week is Chick Pea Soup with Rice from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Until this past year, I never realized how varied “Italian” food is from region to region. So much so that I’ve heard that people from Italy scoff at the idea of defining it all with one broad, simple title. I’ve had an interest in learning more about how Italian food varies in each region, which is why I was so excited to receive this cookbook for my birthday last year. It’s time to learn more about the food of my grandparents’ homeland.

For my first entry of the new year, I wanted to share one of my favorite morning rituals and breakfasts - tea, and steel cut oats. I am a tea person through and through, but didn’t have a proper tea pot, so I asked for one for Christmas. It couldn’t be more perfect with its little blue flowers all over it. Even though I don’t use it every time I make tea (which is a lot), it makes those occasions that I do a little special and slower.

Starting Limoncello in early September means it’ll be ready just in time for the Holidays. I bottled up my first batch in .25L Weck bottles, and am planning to give mine out throughout the holiday season! (Friends and family, if you see this before you get yours, no you didn’t.)

I had grand plans for some entries documenting our contribution to Thanksgiving dinner (stuffed mushrooms and a cranberry tart), but because I was running behind on Thanksgiving day, taking pictures of the process took the back burner. Since then, Christmas shopping, getting our apartment ready for holiday visitors, and two week long (and counting) debilitating back pain has prevented me from doing as much cooking and writing as I wanted to. But I’m getting back in the swing!

Here’s a little bit of everything from the last three weeks…

I tried my first real English scone at the cafe at Kew Gardens when I was studying abroad in London. It was one of the most delicious things I ate while in England. It was nothing like the scones that I grew up making with my mom, which were full of oatmeal and oozing butter. English scones are definitely nothing like Starbucks scones. English scones are more more similar in shape to American biscuits, but still less buttery so a little bit dryer, but delicious.

Inspired by the many hours of this season’s Great British Baking Show that I’ve been watching lately, I was in the mood to bake something completely new to me. Thumbing through The Italian Table, I came across Crucchi, which is a unique (to me at least) variety of biscotti. It’s not the long uniform biscotti that I’m used to. Instead, Crucchi is an irregular mound of hard chocolate and hazelnut cookie.

I’m so grateful to have friends that are a home away from home (and love food as much as we do). This weekend, we were surrounded by people that remind Ryan and I why we’re so grateful to have landed back in New Jersey, despite it being a place we thought we’d never live in again. In reality, New Jersey is filled with some of the people that mean the most to us, and provides us with an easy launching pad to visit those that live further away.

The recipe of the week is…sourdough starter! ‘Tis the season to start bread baking once again, and now that we’re settled in a kitchen of our own where I can use my bread baking gadgets galore, it was finally time to start my starter!

After searching for weeks, we found the perfect cabinet on Facebook marketplace to turn into a bar cabinet! In this entry, I document our process to refinish it, which did eventually happen, despite my dogs’ best efforts.

On top of this meal being a winner because it tasted so darn good, it was really simple to put together. I wasn’t expecting it to pack such a punch for a one sheet pan meal, but it did. When grocery shopping, we thought about doing less chicken than it called for because we seem to always have leftover chicken from meals that doesn’t get eaten, but we ended up having more than the recipe called for and zero chicken left behind.

Cleaning house before a trip may feel unnecessary, but I hate returning to a messy home and needing to jump right back into chores. Being away is good, but being home is the best, especially when home welcomes you with fresh sheets and asks nothing immediately of you other than to sit back and relax.

Not so much mastering as burning the title ingredient of this recipe.

My library of cookbooks, and why I’m challenging myself to cook a new recipe each week.

Welcome to our home.