This recipe has been on the list to make for almost a year now. Most times during the year though, bringing a mac and cheese cheesecake to a party is just weird. But at a christmas party, it's somehow normal. Let's be clear, this isn't a cake of mac and cheese, this is a savory cheesecake with cheddar and pasta in it. It came out super festive and awesome, and I would suggest anyone to bring it as a unique app to your next gathering.

At the Asian market I noticed that they had square rice paper. I have only seen the round kind in the past. When Mandi saw the square kind, she instantly suggested that I use them to make some sort of Thai or Vietnamese lasagna.  The first thing I did was buy a pan the same size as the rice paper.  Then I went back and forth on some different ideas and flavors to use in this lasagna, and finally went with drunken noodles. The sauce can really stand up to the prolonged cooking time, and it's pretty much my go-to Thai dish anyways. I used ground chicken and diced up the veggies extra small to give it that lasagna feel, and swapped out the ricotta cheese for some tasty tofu.

Big Macs are delicious. We can all be food snobs and pretend like they aren't, but the fact is, big macs were developed by scientists for optimal deliciousness. If you don't believe me, I bet you haven't had one in a while, and I REALLY bet you haven't had one drunk in a while. That being said, I'm not selling out to fast food or saying you should all be eating more big macs, I'm just stating facts. This recipe came to me a few weeks after thanksgiving last year when I was (surprise!) eating a big mac (and probably drunk?) I was thinking about what makes the burger good. Its OF COURSE NOT the burger itself. It has more to do with the interplay of the cheap bread, cheese, pickles, and crunchy lettuce. For some reason it came to me that the ratios of meat to bread to flavorings are similar to that of stuffing, and I thought it would be fun to literally buy 8 big macs, chop them up, stir in some chicken stock, and bake it off as a stuffing. Well I sobered up, realized I didn't want to spend 40 bucks at McDonalds, and had almost a whole year to develop this recipe. This stuffing came out absolutely amazing. When you eat it there is no question that you are eating a stuffing, and also no question that it is big mac flavored.

Regular stuffing I'm not crazy about. I know that's blasphemy to most people around this time of the year, but I just really don't care about it that much! Cornbread stuffing though, one that's loaded with sausage and studded with tart cranberries, is a totally different story. I can't get enough of the stuff! I decided to borrow these flavors for a pre-Thanksgiving polenta I made the other night to hold me over for the big event! Make this this weekend to hold you over like I did, or make a big pot of it to serve as a twist on a thanksgiving side dish. Either way you and your family will love it! This is a sponsored post from the great people at Jones Dairy Farm, and if you want more great Thanksgiving inspiration you can check out their Facebook page.

The idea for this one came from the type of shots where you float one alcohol on top of the other. I thought it would be fun to do with soups and this was the flavor combo I happened to be craving that day. The soups went great together. A nice sweet simple pumpkin soup with that extra sweetness from the caramelized onion was a great contrast to the sharp spice of the ancho floater.

A friend of mine who happens to be gluten free is going into surgery today, so I decided to make her some cookies as a treat for before and after the operation. I went with an alton brown recipe that had rave reviews as the cookie base, and then loaded it up with all sorts of mix-ins to help cover up any potential weirdness in texture from the lack of white flour. I don't think I needed all the mixins, because the cookie batter came out really great, but the chunky goodness only helped these cookies go from great to amazing.

Every time I try and make an extra layered lasagna, it's never as deep as I want it to be. I decided to find a deeper vessel for my lasagna and finally settled on a mason jar. The fun thing about this lasagna is you can really dig deep through the layers and when you eventually reach the cream sauce and pesto its like you have uncovered buried treasure! I actually had an extra thin and long fork that was the perfect spelunking tool.

My initial idea on these was to make jarsagnas (or lasanjars?) as Christmas gifts for people and hand them out frozen, but I decided not to. First of all, they were pretty tedious to make. It was totally worth it because they were amazing, but making a couple of them with friends helping out was fun, making 20 to hand out to people would be a nightmare and not even that good of a gift since it's single serving. Secondly, putting a frozen glass into a preheated oven would probably result in an explosion and I didn't want to be known as the lasagna bomber for the rest of my life! More on baking in mason jars at the bottom of this post.