The foodie magazine Bon Appetit recently had a great cover shot of a chili made with Beef Brisket and Butternut Squash that looked incredible. We thought it was really inspiring, but we don’t normally keep whole Beef Briskets lying around so we had to come up with something on our own that would round out the dish a bit.

If you like Bon Appetit like we do then you should also check out Cook’s Illustrated which is basically the print version of the PBS show America’s Test Kitchen (or vice versa). They recently had a special issue all about classic soups and stews. Included among them was a recipe for Chili con Carne that had some great instructions for making your own Chile Powder from scratch using those dried, store-bought, pre-bagged Chilis you can find in the Ethnic Foods section of your grocery store. We thought there might be some potential for greatness if we combined aspects of both recipes into one great dish. Read more »

Having never roasted a Chicken before (can you believe it?), we decided that it was high time we gave it a shot. Man oh man, we won’t be waiting very long before we do this again, that’s for sure. It was awesome! Moist and really, really flavorful and way better than we expected for a first try.

Like most things we’ve been slow (ie: too scared) to try, we kind of thought there might be more of a trick to this than there really was. Sister Amy made it sound like something we could probably manage so we summoned up the courage to give it a go.

After poring through about a million recipes on the internet we cobbled one together that sounded to us like a pretty sure thing: slide some Butter and Thyme under the skin, stuff the bird with bunches of fresh Thyme, Lemon wedges, and smashed cloves of Garlic, and then drizzle the whole thing with Olive Oil and Salt & Pepper. Yes, it really was just about that easy… Read more »