Tag: side dish

Creamy Coconut-Dill Dip

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Back in May, 2012 (over FIVE years ago!), Heather and I posted a recipe for a coconut-dill veggie dip. The dip was a huge hit with friends and family alike, and it was one of our first encounters where we didn’t carefully read the label and ended up with a brand of coconut cream that was also loaded with sugar. It was a good lesson learned, and we remade the recipe with better ingredients to make sure the recipe held up.

Since 2012, a lot has happened for us: we changed jobs, got married, bought a house, had our son, and we also improved our cooking and photography. With a dinner guest planning to come over Monday evening, it seemed an appropriate time to revisit this recipe and try to make it better. In this we’ve succeeded. This dip is creamy (and protein packed, thanks to Great Lakes Unflavored Gelatin) and runny straight out of the food processor and has the same texture as store-bought French Onion Dip when allowed to rest in the refrigerator. We devoured it with veggies and our favorite olive oil potato chips while our beef and eggplant curry simmered on the stove. Our guest particularly liked it with the chips.

Thanks for joining us over the past five years, and we hope you’ll continue to stick around. Let us know in the comments what has been your favorite recipe!

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Roasted Brown Butter Ghee Green Beans with Macadamia Nuts

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Roasted vegetables are a time-honored classic, and green beans are a regular part of our side dish rotation. Over the Christmas season, we enjoyed our take on green bean casserole. While we’re often utilitarian eaters, having our green beans with a little olive oil and salt and pepper, we occasionally like to jazz things up.

Recently, we were gifted a jar of Tin Star Food’s Organic Grassfed Brown Butter Ghee from our friends at Real Everything, and we knew we needed to do something special with it. Brown butter sauces are rich, and complex, and brown butter ghee kicks that up another level. This was a side dish that became an entrée when we made it, and we think you’ll eat it up just as quickly. Check out Tin Star’s other products; we’re fans of quality, lactose-free dairy products.

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Simple Cinnamon Applesauce

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Applesauce was something that I grew up enjoying, but only out of small, plastic containers.  As I grew older, I stopped enjoying the treat, and assumed I didn’t like it anymore.  Heather encouraged me for almost a year to try her homemade applesauce, but I always turned it down saying I wasn’t “an applesauce person.”  That was stupid on my part.

Thankfully, last autumn, she made it anyway.  This applesauce is delicious, and I look forward to the times when she cooks it up at home.  Better yet, it’s really easy.  I hope you’ll take the time to make it as well; it’s a delicious homemade treat that’s way better than the stuff that’s pre-packaged in plastic.

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Grilled Portabello Mushroom Caps

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grilled seasoned easy portabello mushrooms

Mushrooms.  These fungi were something that I strongly avoided for most of my formative years–my father is not a fan, and I ipso facto also was determined to dislike them.  Eventually, I was tricked out of this delusion, and I’m a better person for it.  I would challenge each of you to go eat something you are certain you dislike because you’ve “always hated it” and be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.  Thanks to this initiative, I now enjoy: asparagus, brussels sprouts, beets, lobster, and mushrooms.

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Colonel Cole Slaw

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This recipe is an attempt to pay homage to the cookbooks that attempt to have the same effect as The Masked Magician Secrets Revealed.  I really hope the reaction to this recipe doesn’t result in a similar style of exile and anger.  We all know of the famous Southern Colonel who is known for his poultry and sides, and we decided to try and rip a page out of his book without the associated diabetes.  


My mother was kind enough to share such a cole slaw recipe from a book that suggested using 1/2 cup of sugar for cole slaw.  I think back to my fond memories of this delicious side, and I felt betrayed.  To me it feels like the equivalent of lacing your food with some addictive substance and just non-chalantly accepting the accolades of how “addicting” it is.  Here is our take, sans sugar and dairy.