Delicious Sides: Roasted asparagus

This isn't as much a recipe as it is a recommended cooking method. A friend of mine told me to do this and we haven't cooked asparagus any other way since. Trim the ends off your stalks, then spread them on a cookie sheet. Drizzle with olive oil, and season with salt and pepper then pop them under the broiler for 7 minutes. They. Are. Fantastic. Even the bebe scarfs them down, and she's a pretty finicky eater, already. I did these for Easter dinner and they were a big hit. We have them about once a week. Mmm mm.

Delicious Sides: parmesan baked tomatoes

I usually spend Mondays meal-planning and grocery shopping. Well, not the entire day, ain't nobody got time for that. But this particular Monday I couldn't make it to the store, probably some bebe-related excuse but I digress. Tuesday I finally made it but I still didn't have anything extravagant planned for the first 'meal-planned' night. Just a simple baked maple/brown sugar salmon. I wanted to keep consistent with my 'fancy' new cookery {?} so I pulled out the recipe book and decided on a couple of new side dishes. One simple and delicious one is this Parmesan Baked Tomato recipe. I actually forgot to do the last olive oil step, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

It was easy and delicious and looked pretty awesome on the plate. The second was these Roasted Sweet Potatoes, which honestly smelled {and tasted} more like dessert. They were amazing. I think I'll keep them in mind for Easter dinner.

The husband came home and was all like 'Mmmm, lookin' fancy!'. Okay maybe not those exact words but he seemed pretty happy and he's been more than eager to try all these new recipes along with me. So far so good, and we've only had a couple of recipes {out of the last few weeks} that we felt were 'meh'.