Well, I'm at it again folks. Covering vegetables up with cheese so I can get myself to eat them...kind of. Okay, so I actually already love broccoli. It's one of the few vegetables that I can devour on it's own. But I covered it up with cheese anyway, because hello, broccoli and cheese. They're soulmates. You don't even have to bake them into anything. You can literally just eat broccoli with cheese and it would be the most delicious thing ever. BUT, if you're trying to be fancy, or you need to sneak some broccoli into your kid's diets, yada yada, you can bake them into these fabulous patties.

Super Bowl Sunday is in 6 days! I'm so excited! I'm excited mainly for two reasons. The first is, I'm making a cake! Y'all know how much I love to decorate cakes, so I'm using this opportunity to create a limited edition two-tiered Super Bowl cake...and I'm giving it away! Yup, details about the giveaway are all here on my Facebook page . Make sure you enter soon, deadline is Thursday night! The second reason I'm excited is because the Super Bowl will give me an excuse to make these scrumptious calzones again! Carbs don't count on game day and these babies are definitely going to be my carb of choice. They're the perfect game-day treat for obvious reasons like the fact that they're mini, portable, mess-free, can feed a crowd, etc. But what makes them really perfect is the fact that they're insanely delicious. So delicious that if any of your guests are in a bad mood because their team is losing, you can just be like "Here,...

The other day, my brother walked in on me changing the garbage bag in the bathroom and was all like "Wow, what a sight! Meriem is actually cleaning the bathroom, she's taking the trash out!". I guess I sort of have a reputation around here for not liking to clean the bathroom, or any bathrooms for that case. In my defense, I share a bathroom with three boys. So yeah, enough said. I only go in there when absolutely necessary. What does any of this have to do with these chicken parmesan meatballs? Um...close to nothing. Except for maybe the fact that similar to how I don't clean bathrooms often, I also don't cook very often. Which you've all probably gathered already from the numerous amounts of baked goods around here. I just can't help it guys. I try to post an equal amount of dishes and desserts, but I have this magnetic attraction to baking that I cannot explain. Even when I cook something, it's almost always something that goes in the...

As many of you may know, the month of Ramadan has rolled around again, this time smack dab in the middle of summer, which means days are going to super long, nights are going to be super short, and I am going to be fighting against time to get posts up for the blog. It's not so much the baking and picture taking that takes time, it's the writing and editing. I like to work at night, when it's quiet and I can focus, but now that my nights are fully occupied with eating or religious activities, it's going to take twice as long to get things done. I'm going to try my best to keep up with my blogging schedule, but I hope you guys will understand if I miss a few posts here and there. Now let's talk about these mozzarella sticks! The last time I shared mozzarella sticks with you guys was five years ago, in 2008 . It's crazy that it's been that long. But that was when I first started blogging and when my photography skills (or should I say lack ...

So, guess who waited till the last minute to figure out what to make for today's post? Yup. None other than yours truly. I actually started planning my posts out ahead of time a couple weeks ago, but then I started to fall behind slowly, and here I am, posting about homemade crackers because they were the easiest thing I could think of to make yesterday. I spotted this recipe on Lauren's site a while back and the minimal ingredients and minimal steps pretty much sold me. Plus, Lauren mentioned it kept her four year old entertained for about an hour, so I thought it'd be perfect for the four year old boy I babysit. I made them with him earlier this month, using ginormous dinosaur cookie cutters (you may recall the picture I posted on Facebook), and they came out so good . He loved his very own homemade snacks, but I think me and his mom loved them more, as we seriously could not stop munching on them. We both agreed they tasted way better than the store-bou...

As a rule of thumb, I only like to post recipes on here that I absolutely love. Anything ranging from "this is really good" to "omg I need to eat this every day, you people need to make this right now" will almost always make the cut. However, there are times that I make something that I'm not really crazy about, but I don't want to not post it because I realize that everyone has different tastes. So, what might not have necessarily cut it for my taste buds, might actually be really enjoyable for yours. Enter these quinoa pizza bites. In an effort to eat healthier (as per my doctor's orders), I decided to give them a shot over the weekend. I never tried quinoa before but I figured if I was going to eat it and enjoy it, it would probably have to be covered in lots of sauce and cheese. When I was cooking the quinoa before mixing it in with the ingredients for the bites, it smelled pretty good, so I was hopeful. But after having a couple of the f...

In life, you will meet three kinds of recipes. Recipes that you don't really like and won't try. Recipes that you like and say you'll try later. And recipes that make you want to run for your life to the kitchen to try them as soon as possible. This is one of those recipes. Of course, I'm speaking for myself here, but something tells me you'll be gathering ingredients halfway to the end of this post. I met this recipe spontaneously on Jessica's site when I was checking out her fluffy snickerdoodles. It showed up as a related post, my eyes caught glance of it, and within seconds of browsing through pictures and ingredients, I was speeding ( safely, of course ) to the store to pick up green onions and Panko bread crumbs. It turned out that they were both on sale, which I obviously took as a sign of fate--I was meant to make these.

Up until yesterday, I didn't know candied sweet potatoes were a real thing. I mean, I knew they existed because I grew up eating them, I just didn't know they were called candied sweet potatoes and that other people besides my mom made them. But apparently, even Martha Stewart makes candied sweet potatoes. And although Google tells me that the dish originated in Central Pennsylvania, I'm not sure how accurate that is considering my mom was way overseas in Algeria when she first learned how to make them from her mother-in-law. It doesn't really matter who made them first though. All that matters is that you must try them my mother's way. They are SO good. And this isn't just my sweet tooth talking, or the part of me that thinks that my mom is the best cook in the world. These are straight up, subjective facts. Whereas most people eat candied sweet potatoes as a side dish, I've had my mom's version as a main dish on numerous occasions. Th...

Daylight hours are dwindling and I am not happy about it. It's bad enough that I wake up at noon and I'm the slowest cook in the world. The last thing I need is for daylight to be working against me too. Especially, especially since I'm using a point-and-shoot camera over here. Daylight is the only thing that's making my pictures look half-decent. By the way, I don't know if it's just me, but I find it considerably harder to photograph real food than I do desserts. I'm not sure why. I can never really seem to get the setup correctly, or the props. Or the angle. I think it might be because I bake a lot more often than I cook, so it could just be an experience thing. Anyways, I hope I made this quiche look as appealing as possible because it is quite good. I caught a little bug over the weekend and lost my appetite, but the smell of this baking in the oven brought it back almost instantly. Compared to traditional quiche, this quiche is rather ...

This may come as a shock to some people, but I do actually eat real food and not just sweets! I can see how my blog doesn't exactly portray that, but I really honestly do. I won't deny that if I had it my way, I would probably live off cookies, cakes, and cupcakes and endless gallons of milk. But my body needs meats and veggies and all that good stuff to survive, so I gotta incorporate those into my diet. My favorite way to incorporate veggies into my daily eating regimen is to incorporate them with other ingredients to the point of invisibility. I'm three years old and don't like to see or taste my vegetables. Didn't you know?  I'm also obsessed with baking, so even when I did decide to make some real food, it had to be popped into the oven. Had to. Anyway, if you're a fan of tater tots, which I don't know who wouldn't be, then you will definitely love these zucchini tots. They are out of this world scrumptious.  I made them for...

If you're anything like me, you're probably always looking for new ways to prepare chicken. It's the story of my life, and I'm sure the story of many other people's lives as well. My family in particular likes to buy chicken in bulk from Restaurant Depot, which doesn't really help the situation because that just means more chicken we don't know what to do with. Gratefully, I'm always hard at work hooking my family up with a variety of different chicken dishes, like these tandoori chicken kebabs , this chicken parmesan casserole , and these cheesy basil stuffed chicken breasts . This weekend, I hooked them up with something they never saw coming. Cheesy. Chicken. Meatballs. How's that for different? You don't ever really consider grinding up chicken and making it into a meatball, or I guess chickenball would be a more appropriate name. I think I remember my mother grinding up sheep meat for us once and making it into burgers, but i...

Growing up, I always ate spinach one way . Two ways, if you count bourek . It wasn't until my interest in cooking had sparked, that I started to discover different ways to eat spinach, thanks to lovely sites like Foodgawker, and Pinterest, as of late. Upon recently searching for a yummy appetizer to make for a dinner party me and my mother threw, I stumbled upon these baked spinach dip mini bread bowls. Best stumble ever, lemme tell you. They blew our taste buds away. I never knew spinach could taste this good, but that's probably because I've never had spinach dip. We made a trial batch a couple of days before the party because we wanted to see how they would turn out if we used our own homemade dough for the bread bowls, instead of using a refrigerated French bread loaf. I should really say that my mom wanted to see, because I honestly just wanted to buy the bread loaf, but she was confident she could make them using her own recipe. And as it turned out, her...