Let’s talk about food! Two years ago, we did a cooking episode and a lot has changed since then, so we are updating our list of favorite things to cook.

You can find the podcast posts archive here.

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Show Notes:

Dishes for Date Night at Home:

Elsie – Detroit-style pizza and Stuffed crust cast iron pizza

Emma – Air fryer chicken wings with Buffalo sauce, Broil steak, Air fryer steak, Chili and Chicken and rice with cashew chicken sauce or sweet and sour sauce

Holiday Tradition Recipes:

Elsie – Chicken Alfredo, Oatmeal cookie shot, Cinnamon Toast Crunch shot, Sugar cookies, and Gingerbread cookies

Emma – Fresh pasta and casseroles

Sweets + Treats:

Elsie – No bake cookies and Ice cream

Emma – Soft peanut butter cookies and frozen cookies

At-Home Cocktails:

Elsie – Aviation cocktail, Paper plane cocktail, Painkiller cocktail, Jungle bird cocktail, Green tea shot, Old fashioned, and Bee’s knees

Emma – Agroni and Spritz

What Do You Take To a Party?

Elsie – Chex mix and Pitcher mojitos

Emma – Overnight no boil lasagna, Homemade focaccia, Caesar salad with dressing

What Do You Love To Make When Guests Come Over?

Elsie – Sugar cookies, Chili, Cheese boards, Queso, and Chocolate chip cookie dip

Emma – Dips, Salsa, Detroit-style pizza, Oreo dip, Dunkaroo funfetti dip

Breakfast Recipes:

Elsie – Breakfast casserole, French toast casserole, Roasted sweet potatoes, and Air fryer sweet potato

Emma – Tator tot casserole, Biscuits and gravy casserole, and Pancakes

Summer Recipes:

Elsie – 7-layer salad, Creamy pasta salad, Margaritas

Emma – Mango salsa, No bake cookies

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Episode 229 Transcript:

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Emma: You’re listening to the A Beautiful Mess podcast, your cozy comfort listen. Let’s talk about food. So two years ago, we did a cooking episode and a lot has changed since then. So we thought that we would update you on some of our favorite things to cook at home. This is all home cooking. Things we love eating at home, recipe land. 

Elsie: So you guys know, we are in our food blogger era now. If you’ve looked at our website recently, and sometimes people come who haven’t been for a few years, they’re like, wow, that’s a lot of food. And that’s true. It is.

Emma: And a lot of booze. 

Elsie: I am trying to finish our cocktail archive this year. And it’s fun. I love it. 

Emma: Oh, yeah. So much fun. Well, and we have tons of shots too. And one day, we got to photograph all these bomb shots. I think we talked about it a little bit, which if you don’t know, a bomb shot is where you drop a shot into a drink. And they’re really fun to photograph. I was telling Elsie, it reminded me of photographing geysers in Iceland because it’s explodes like the liquid. And I thought it was really pretty and really fun to do.

Elsie: Your photos were really good. Yeah, we still have one more, no two more, that we have to complete. But anyway, it’s been our food blogger era. If you need a recipe, definitely go to A Beautiful Mess now more than ever. It’s definitely like a big variety still. I do think we have a lot of like the most alcohol recipes ever. But that won’t be forever. That’s just what we’re on right now.

Emma: She’s working on her grind.

Elsie: But anyway, yeah, we’re gonna go through all the different categories. Talk about all our favorite recipes, things we like to make at home. Little weird stuff. So if you’re needing some inspiration to spice up your home cooking, this will be a good episode for you. I always need that inspiration.

Emma:I do too. As much as I love cooking, I always get in a rut.

Elsie: It’s probably because we do it professionally now. Because like when you do something professionally, then you don’t do it as much as a hobby. Usually. 

Emma: That’s true. Yeah. Like most of the time when I’ve had friends whose like dad was a chef or things like that, they’re like they never cooked at home. They just made toast because they were tired. They were like I cooked all day, you know? And I’m like, yeah, I can understand that. Mainly, I get sick of doing dishes more than cooking. 

Elsie: The dishes are crazy. 

Emma: The dishes are crazy on the days you’re photographing. Anyway, so we have a bunch of different sections. So we’ll just go through the sections of different things. So first up is dishes for a date night at home. I also think of this as just like, for us, we don’t always eat our dinner with Oscar. We usually eat with Oscar, our son, like we’re eating the same foods as him, but it’s like we have a mini meal and he’s having his meal. And then we have our real meal after he goes to bed.. That’s a lot of what we’re doing, which I don’t know maybe is controversial for parents, whatever. You parent how you want, I’m gonna parent how I want. But I like to eat my real meal after he goes to bed.

Elsie: Yeah, our kids love eating with us around the table, but we don’t do it every night. So I understand. 

Emma: And there’s just some things he doesn’t really want to eat. And also, it takes long enough to cook and his bedtimes at seven. You know, just stuff like that, where you’re like, well you know. So anyway, so these are dishes for just my husband and so we can call it date night at home. But to me, it’s like just a regular Wednesday night where we’re about to turn on Star Trek.

Elsie: Your favorite things to make home. Okay, so I put down I think the pizza recipes are very ultimate. So the Detroit style pizza is my number one. And my number two is the stuffed crust pizza that’s in the cast iron. Those are just like, they’re so good. And you can make them in your oven so anyone can make them. You don’t have like a pizza oven or you know anything special. 

Emma: We do a lot in our airfryer. So we will make chicken wings. And we’ll do different kinds of sauces. I recently did like a homemade buffalo sauce and we’ll use that a lot. So I love chicken wings. And it’s not something we feed our son. I mean, he could eat it, but he’s not really a bones kid. Yeah, so it’s more our thing. And then we do a lot of steak. So when we’re eating it, like just a steak itself, we boil it and I have a blog post about boiling steak. And usually honestly my husband does that and I will make some kind of side like risotto or vegetable side or maybe pasta, whatever. But a lot of times I’ll make steak in the airfryer and we’ll cut it up and we’ll use it as almost like fajita or like toss it into a stir fry. A lot of times it’s like kind of a taco like taco situation. 

Elsie: That sounds good. 

Emma: Yeah, it’s really good. And then my husband actually has special dishes that he does a lot. He’s a big stir fry guy. But his big ones other than the steak, which already mentioned is he makes chili all the time. We kind of have this ongoing thing with the chili because I love chili, but he makes it so often and I never thought about it before. But now that he does it so often, I’m like, oh, I always thought of chili as a fall food. 

Elsie: I think it’s a fall food for me.

Emma:  I didn’t realize how much I attached it to fall.

Elsie: So you guys eat chili all year round? 

Emma: All year round. He made chili this week. He just makes chili all the time and it’s good. It’s the chili that his dad made growing up. He’ll make it with chicken. It is good. It’s not different from the fall, but I am always kind of like, oh chili, I didn’t realize how much this is, I told him I was like, it’s almost like green bean casserole to me where I’m like, it’s not that it’s bad outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I just don’t think to eat it. It’s just to me like a food that you eat at that time of year and I didn’t even register to me how much I thought of chili that way because like a lot of restaurants have chili on the menu all year round. Anyway, I don’t know if you need a 15 minute segment about chili, but my husband makes really good chili, but he makes it all year round. And I’m kind of like oh, I’m a fall chili person. I didn’t even know that until now. We eat it with Fritos. He eats it really healthy and I eat it with lots of cheese and sour cream. That’s our way with that. 

Elsie: Love it. My kids love, this is like I think it’s Midwestern, but at Steak and Shake they make like the spaghetti with chili on top and my kids love it. Chili Mac. They love it. Yeah, it’s thing. I made it at home and it was a hit.

Emma: It’s good. It’s got good flavor. But somehow I’m always like smells like fall now.

Elsie: Yeah, that’s funny. Yeah, I think I’m on your team. I would not make chili. It’s already not the season for me until probably September and then I’ll be like very in the mood again. So I like September through January. I feel like at the Super Bowl is the end of chili season for me.

Emma: Yeah. And then the last thing we’ll make fairly often is essentially it’s like sheet pan chicken like baked chicken, like cut into pieces baked on a sheet pan and rice. Then I have a few different sauces I make. So I have a cashew chicken sauce. It’s on our site. And I have a sweet and sour sauce that I have on our site. Now our towns Springfield, Missouri is kind of known for Chinese food but like Springfield style Chinese food, Google it, it’s a whole thing. So for me, it’s a very like childhood thing. If you go to the restaurants around here though, like the takeout classic ones, it’s like fried chicken, which I love. That’s definitely a guilty pleasure food for me for sure. Eating out is like cashew chicken, Springfield style cashew chicken. But at home, we don’t fry it. We like bake it. It’s not breaded, so it’s a little bit healthier. It just has the sauce and the chicken and the rice and sometimes I’ll steamed broccoli or stir fries and bell peppers or whatever. 

Elsie: Nice. That sounds good.Okay, let’s talk about holiday tradition recipes. So this year after Thanksgiving, it was also Emma’s like hard Thanksgiving because she was pregnant in the sick way. So we had the idea that we might start next year, because she was like eww, making like all these Thanksgivings which I get. When you’re contributing to more than one Thanksgiving and you blog Thanksgiving. It’s just, it’s too much Thanksgiving,

Emma: You’re like how many times can I make green bean casserole before I’m like hey man.

Elsie: So we had the idea that this next year, we might do weird Thanksgiving, try to do some kind of like a themed Thanksgiving or in some way, maybe mix some traditional foods just like the top favorites with like some weird foods that make it more. I like that idea. I feel like that would make it like maybe a little more exciting. 

Emma: I thought we could maybe get Jeremy involved too because he likes to cook like authentic, like spicy Chinese food or like different things like that. He’s had phases. I thought that could be kind of fun. Something like that. This year for Christmas Eve, we did fresh pasta. 

Elsie: It was such a vibe. We were doing like our Nancy Meyers. It was such a vibe. I think I’m gonna do that every year now.

Emma: Yeah. Our brother and his wife they did like this red truffle sauce. We had meatballs. Yeah, I want to do that every year. So I’m like, okay, we kind of already have a little bit of like a pasta Italian theme going for Christmas Eve. So I feel like Thanksgiving needs to be like Chinese or Mexican or something different than that.

Elsie: I like to have Chinese for Thanksgiving. 

Emma: Well i was like, maybe we could do dumplings. I mean, we can buy frozen ones but maybe we could do like kind of like a dim sum type thing or I don’t know. I guess you don’t need to hear us brainstorm our holiday for next year. 

Elsie: The recipe that I’m gonna put down for this one are, we have a chicken alfredo recipe. That’s perfect. It’s like the Nancy Meyers Christmas necessity.

Emma: It’s a great any time of year.

Elsie: Yes. It’s for all year. And then, for just being funny, I think it’s hilarious to have a Christmas shot. And so these are the two I recommend either the oatmeal cookie shot or the Cinnamon Toast Crunch shots. I feel like they’re just like, kind of like vaguely, like cinnamony the oatmeal, you know, just like they kind of taste like that time of year. So either for Thanksgiving or Christmas, do one of those. It’s hilarious. It’s fun. It’s silly. And then the other things that I’m so passionate about are sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies. Now I’m like a little more on team gingerbread cookie, but both of them every year, always and forever. 

Emma: I love it. And yeah, my husband’s family, we’re still going to do a very traditional Thanksgiving. I do love all the traditional foods. It’s just when you cook them four times you’re like okay. We have a pretty epic, in my opinion, casserole archive on A Beautiful Mess. So if you need stuffing, if you need green bean casserole, if you need funeral potatoes, if you need any classic Midwest southern casserole you can think of we probably have a version of it or we will soon. We will next year because I do love making casseroles and I do love eating casseroles. I just don’t really want to make the exact same one four times while I’m nauseous. That was this year, but that won’t be any other year. I’m not doing this pregnancy thing again. This is it. 

Elsie: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Next year, we’ll bring an update back about how weird Thanksgiving turns out because I think it’s a fun aspiration. Okay, what about sweets and treats.

Emma: Sweets and treats, so I’m always in forever a cookie person. We always have frozen cookies in our freezer. So we’ll make like a big batch of something usually the soft peanut butter cookies that I have the recipe on the site. It’s Trey’s favorite. So we make that pretty often. I also have a post on our site that’s like how to freeze cookie dough properly. And basically, it’s you need to freeze it in the balls. That’s the headline, but the tips are, you need a cookie dough baller so you can measure them out because you don’t want a whole bunch of different sizes. Because you’re gonna pull them out of a bag and just bake a couple at a time and you don’t want a giant one and a small one because one is gonna get burnt and one’s gonna be too raw. So you want them to be measured out. And then also you’ll want to set them on some kind of cutting board or baking sheet and pop them in the freezer uncovered for just a little while, like 30 minutes to an hour. Then put them into a Ziploc bag or a reusable bag, however you want to store them. You don’t want to put them in there right away because they’ll stick together and you’ll end up with a big clump of cookie dough. And that’s what you don’t want. Cutting through frozen cookie dough trying to make even balls at that point is not ideal. So you want to freeze them into individual balls that are all the same size. And we always have that in our freezer. And we will bake like one or two at night, most nights honestly. And then also if we have people over randomly or just people over and we’re like hey does someone want some cookies, then we can throw a couple and it’s like 10 minutes and that’s it. So it’s nice. It’s like a great like little hack to always have cookie dough in your freezer. And you can freeze almost any cookie dough. Like any cookie dough that you bake. You can pretty much freeze it. Most of them freeze well. AS far as home cooking goes cookies is where it’s at. 

Elsie: Yeah, I agree. I love learning cookie recipes. I think it’s one of the most fun categories for sure. My husband’s favorite cookies, they’re not my favorite cookies to make but they are so good is no bake cookies. You know they’re not aesthetic.

Emma: It’s probably my favorite cookie to make and eat. But it’s not Trey’s favorite but I make them a lot myself. 

Elsie: Yeah, he loves them and Emma’s recipe is perfect. So definitely try that one. I’m trying to think of what my favorite dessert is. I just want to say, I think I’m just an ice cream person. I think I’m just an ice cream person. Yeah. 

Emma: Ice cream is great. 

Elsie: Yeah. Any kind of ice cream. Okay, so at home cocktails. I have so many notes on this one because it’s my zone for the year. Okay, so for fancy. My top two are the aviation cocktail and the paper plane cocktail. That is if you just want like a cocktail that seems like it’s from a restaurant, like a fancy hipster bar. You will feel that with these and they are so good. 

Emma: I’m a fan of different types of martinis, also playing the dry martini, whatever, but anything in a martini glass, cosmo too.

Elsie: Hell yeah. 

Emma: Cosmo has a few more ingredients though so you have to kind of be prepared but yeah, those are delicious and you really only need one or two and you’re  good. 

Elsie: It’s true. Okay, for tropical I will send you straight to the painkiller. The painkiller is where it’s at. I think it’s the best one. I just like love the nutmeg. The Jungle bird is really good too. 

Emma: I was gonna say jungle birds probably my top but it’s painkillers next. 

Elsie: Yeah. And then for a shot, the green tea shot is everything. It doesn’t taste boozy. It’s sweet. It’s like summery, it’s nice, it’s fun. If you just want to learn like a classic, especially if we’re having like a dinner party or I don’t know, I feel like if you want to like impress someone, I would learn the old fashioned. It’s easier than it looks. I would learn the Boulevardier. I love that one. It’s similar to the old fashion. It’s even a little bit easier. And the bee’s knees I think is the best old fashion like little coupe glass drink and it’s like super simple. It’s like a honey and gin and lemon drink.

Emma: I also love a negroni.

Elsie: That’s all you had to add. 

Emma: Yeah.

Elsie: Negronis are great too. 

Emma: I also really love if we’re taking summer drinks, I love a spritz. So I will buy like the little bottles of Prosecco. Some spritz are made with Prosecco. Some are made with different things. It just depends. But for like a Prosecco, you know, Aperol Spritz. I’ll buy the little bottles because you don’t want to open a whole giant bottle of Prosecco if you’re the only one. I mean, maybe you do. I don’t know but not me.

Elsie: Yeah, like, if you’re not having a party, you probably want to get the small bottles. 

Emma: Yeah, then you can  have one or two.

Elsie: That’s common sense, she’s speaking good judgment there.

Emma: Watch out.

Elsie: By the end of the year, we’ll probably have every popular cocktail recipe on the site. So there really is nothing we don’t have. So if you’re trying to learn something, there’s so many to learn. You’ll have so much fun, just like scroll through.

Emma: I love reading the history of them too nd learning, like where they were made the first time. 

Elsie: The histories are fun. 

Emma: And also, like if you’re missing something like what could you use instead? Like a lot of our recipes will have that. So I don’t know, I think all of that’s like really helpful and just kind of like fun to learn. 

Elsie: Yeah, I agree. 

Emma: And then you look cool when you go on order, because you know, you know what you want.

Elsie: You do look cool. Okay, what do you take to a party?

Emma: Okay, so I wanted to mention this too, as far as like, take to a party, my friends and I we also do a lot of it’s called meal train. I believe it’s a website, mealtrain.com or might be meal-train.com or something. So it’s a way to organize it. But basically, anytime someone has a baby, or if there was a death in the family, or just something going on, where it might be nice to send a friend, sign up and have friends bring them meals. That’s like a thing that me and my friends do. And they all did it for me when I had my last baby. And I’ve done it for lots of friends as they have babies, and also a few deaths in the family, things like that. So I wanted to mention what I always make because I don’t always bring food to a party. It depends on the party. Like if someone’s like asking you to bring something like if it’s a brunch, or if it’s a dinner, but a lot of times people are like you just bring a bottle of wine because people are already doing what they’re doing. But this is like the meal I bring for meal train. So if I’m bringing a friend a meal, this is what I always make. I have this overnight no boil lasagna. It’s really a very simple, basic lasagna, but it’s delicious and it’s very comforting. And it’s on our site. And then I make homemade focaccia which I don’t have a recipe on our site, but I always use the Bon Appetit one. I like use exactly the Bon Appetit one. It’s a great recipes. The way it’s formatted is not my, it’s like a little convoluted in a way but if you’ve never made focaccia before then it has a lot of like videos in it. It’s a great recipe. So I do that. Sometimes I will kind of do my own topping situation because focaccia if you don’t know it’s the one that looks kind of like bubbly. And you can add things like olives or rosemary sprigs, or some people will add like edible flowers. There’s a lot you can do with focaccia, so I will sometimes kind of do some kind of variation. But at any rate, it’s like a giant like nine by thirteen pan of focaccia bread so I’ll make the lasagna I’ll make the focaccia and then I’ll make a simple Caesar salad. And when I say simple I do like to make my own caesar dressing. It’s really good. It’s worth it. It’s not hard, you just throw stuff in a food processor and blend it. That’s all you do. It’s really not a big deal. It does have raw egg yolks so if that freaks you out or if you have a friend who can’t have that maybe do something different. If you can, I think it’s worth it. Fresh caesar dressing is delicious and then you just toss it on, you know any greens you want. A lot of times I’ll do kale partly because it travels better because it’s hearty but I also just really like Caesar kale salad I think it’s really good. So that’s like my meal train meal that I take people all the time and now you know. If you have a baby and you’re my friend you’re getting lasagna.

Elsie: I know I’m like how do I get this meal delivered to me?

Emma: You are going to need someone to die I guess. Adopt another baby.

Elsie: Not happening, unfortunately. Okay, the things I bring are chex mix. You got to get the colors of the M&Ms to the theme. So like, at the Fourth of July family thing, I get the red, white and blue. And at Christmas you get green and red. Halloween orange and black, don’t be messing around. Yeah, you can do like pastels this time of year. I think chex mix with the themed M&Ms, it’s my main thing that I take, which is probably saying a lot about me. And the other thing I think is so great to take is the picture mojito. So just hear me out. Picture cocktails are the perfect party cocktail. Like I just don’t think that people who are hosting can get enough help with that. It’s nice to have something besides wine. So I think pitcher cocktails are like a great thing to take. And then you contributed something and took something else off the hostess plate.

Emma: I love it. 

Elsie: Okay, so what do you make when guests come over? I think that I don’t have like one thing that I usually make so I put sugar cookies. And then just depending on the time of year, either like in the fall time I would do chili, and in the spring and summertime, I would do cheese boards usually.

Emma: No same. It depends if I’m serving a meal, like if we’re just having like, a couple of friends over and we’re all going to sit down have dinner together or if it’s like a bigger party. In that case, it’s probably going to be more like cheese plates and dips. And we have a lot of dips on the site and a lot of really good dips, by the way. Also salsa like mango salsa and a bunch of other ones. So those are all good. But my number one thing to make if my friends eat dairy and gluten, which some people don’t, and some people do, but if they do, then I always make the Detroit style pizza. Which I feel like you mentioned earlier as a favorite at home meal. No one in my family likes pizza. My husband and my son don’t really like pizza. So the Detroit style pizza is a waste on just my family because it’s just me eating it for like three days straight, which I will do. I have no shame. But, you know, it’s like kind of a lot of effort just for yourself. So if I have friends coming over who eat gluten and dairy then I make Detroit style pizza and a big salad.

Elsie: Make that next time I come over, I want it. 

Emma: It’s so good. It’s kind of like focaccia but with pizza on top. It’s very saucy, but not like Chicago style pizza. That’s a whole different thing. To me more like a lasagna or soupy in a way. It’s good, but it’s different. The Detroit style though is my top. 

Elsie: Okay, I have to call out specifically out of the dips, the queso and then the chocolate chip cookie dip. I think those are like my favorite. 

Emma: I make the queso a lot. 

Elsie: The queso, it’s just like classic and it’s good. And like no one doesn’t like queso you know what I mean. And the chocolate chip cookie dip is like a fun. It’s kind of like a kid friendly recipe. It’s good for like a baby shower or like that sort of thing. Like it’s a sweet dip so it’s like don’t make it for your family at home. Make it for a party for sure. 

Emma: It’s nice to have something sweet around and you might not want to like go to the trouble of baking a whole dessert or something. So having a sweet dip is nice. And the cookie dough one is probably my favorite but we also have an Oreo one and there’s a What am I trying to say, not funfetti.

Elsie: Dunkaroo, it’s called Dunkaroo funfetti dip I think.

Emma: That’s what it is and that one’s really good too. It’s very like kid nostalgic. So if you’re wanting like something just to have something sweet around at a party, I think a sweet dip is a really good way to go. 

Elsie: I agree. Okay, so for breakfast recipes. I just have to say Emma has like, she’s like the breakfast casserole queen. So we’ll list them all out on the website or on the show notes and you’ll be like what the hell. She has like so many really, really good breakfast casseroles.

Emma: I get the most compliments on my breakfast casseroles from my father in law too, which means a lot to me. He’s a very complimentary man like I think he would complement anything I would make but I can tell that my breakfast casseroles, the tater tot casserole and the biscuits and gravy casserole in particular he loves. He’ll come over for Christmas or whatever and have seconds and I’m like Bill’s loving it. Five stars from Bill and it means a lot ot me.

Elsie: Let’s try to remember there’s one just called breakfast casserole. There’s one called french toast casserole.

Emma: Tatertot one is actually, it’s not technically a breakfast. Like you could do it for dinner too. If you wanted. I just usually serve it as a breakfast casserole. It’s really good. It fits any time. 

Elsie: Yeah, it’s the Midwest in us. We were raised in the church, what do they call it like Sunday dinner type of culture. It’s a casserole culture. So it’s how we were raised. It’s a part of our childhood.

Emma: And to me tater tots anytime a day, apparently. 

Elsie: The breakfast recipe I make the most often is just like sweet potatoes like roasted sweet potatoes. And I also put them in skillet, I also airfryer them. So I can put that in the show notes. I think we have it all the different ways, but sweet potatoes for breakfast are the sh*t like with rosemary I love them.

Emma: Yeah, and here pretty soon we won’t link this because it’s not there yet. We have one recipe. But we’re going to do a pancake grind. And I’m very excited because honestly, pancakes is kind of my husband’s thing. Like I’ve mentioned his chili already. But he’s also the pancake guy at our house because he has a griddle. So some people are a griddle pancake family and some people are pan pancake family. We grew up we were pan. So like pancakes have like a crispy edge around it. You know, it’s like kind of a whole different thing. Whereas griddle pancakes are more like to me like a McDonald’s pancake. They are more even and the whole thing is soft. That’s more his vibe. But he’s the pancake guy at her house and he makes pancakes with our son at least once a week. They made them this morning. Oscar always gets to pick the color. Today it was yellow. Usually it’s blue. But anyway, we’re gonna do a pancake grind. I know we have one recipe on the site already. That’s pretty popular. That’s like homemade pancakes that doesn’t have milk but sometimes you’re out of a random ingredient and you need to know how to make pancakes. So we’re gonna go through a series of those and just like the very best pancake recipes, which I’m excited about.

Elsie: That’ll be fun. I love pancakes. It’s like a top breakfast food for sure. Okay, let’s talk about summer recipes. 

Emma: So some top ones for me is mango salsa, which mangoes are more in season in the winter, at least here where I live, different hemispheres, different whatever. But you can still sometimes find them and the mango salsa recipe we have on our site has some tips if you end up with mangoes that aren’t quite ripe yet, how you can ripen them at home. Because that does happen from time to time. I’ll also point out if you just want to swap the mangoes for peaches. You can do peach salsa. It’s just a one for one swap it out people. But I love dips and salsas and to me, dips can be like a whole food category, especially during warm weather times. It’s kind of like, what’s the character in Only Murders in the Building and he just eats tips all the time. I’m like, that’s me in the summer. I’m like, I’ll just eat dips, I’ll just eat, you know, whatever dips all the time. So that and then we’ve already mentioned no bake cookies, but that is to me forever and always a summer thing. I make them all year round. But it’s because growing up there was this whole era maybe it’s still going on I don’t know where if our air conditioner was on our dad didn’t want us to use the dryer or the oven at all. It was a conserving energy thing. And it’s like your bill can get kind of expensive if you’re like running all these different things. So if the air conditioner was on, which was always on in like July, August, like it gets very hot and humid in the Midwest, where we’re from, then we couldn’t use the oven or the dryer. Clothesline and no bake cookies were like kind of the only cookies you could make, anything no bake. So to me, it’s like a summer like I really want cookies, but the air conditioners on okay, I have to make no bake cookies.  It’s just always gonna be you know, gotta hang the bedsheets on the clothesline and have a no bake cookie. It’s July. like just always imprinted in me because of my childhood. I actually really love it. It’s like a very like special little thing to me. 

Elsie: Okay, my two favorite summer salads are the seven layer salad. It’s like a very southern recipe, but I love it. I stand by it. I think it was delicious. And I’ll definitely be making it every year. And then my favorite pasta salad that we have right now is the creamy pasta salad. It’s a mayonnaise based pasta salad. And I like them both ways. I like the oil based ones too. But I have no problems with mayonnaise at all. I love mayonnaise. I know how do people live who don’t like mayonnaise? 

Emma: I don’t know, what do they eat? 

Elsie: And then the other thing that I think is perfect for summer is margaritas. So we have our classic margarita, homemade margarita mix. And then I just made a few more but I’m starting a margarita grind. So I’m going to do like twenty more margaritas this year. All the flavors.  And it’s so fun. Like it’s like such a simple, but amazing drink. And once you learn how to make one, then learning all the different flavors, it’s just like so easy. So it’s gonna be fun.

Emma: Anything with salt I’m pretty interested in like a salt room or cookies with salt on it. But yeah, citrus and salt. That’s where it’s at. 

Elsie: Totally. 

Emma: Well, now it’s time for a joke or a fact or meditation with Nova. 

Elsie: All right, this week Marigold is with us and she wants to do her joke. 

Marigold: What did the tree wear to the swimming pool? 

Elsie: What? 

Marigold: His swimming trunks.

 
Elsie: Oh, that’s a good one. Good job. Thanks so much for listening. We will be back next week with a comfort rewatch of Mamma Mia. Oh my gosh.