Cooking is my love language.

Maybe it's just me, or maybe it’s the Italian in me, but I absolutely love cooking for others and sharing recipes.

Being from Portland, ME I was lucky enough to be the granddaughter of an Italian women. My grammy’s mother, who came from Italy, was an Aceto, before she married. My grammy grew up in Portland’s own, ‘Little Italy’ neighborhood; to this day there are still Italian festivals held their annually, Italian sandwich shops & Italian markets that were started in the early 1900s around the time when the Italians were coming to America.

My grammies recipes are some of my all-time favorites and my favorite traditions start with my grandparents! I am sure these traditions started long before I was thought of, but I love knowing I’ll be able to pass down the same traditions.

Every year my grandmother makes her homemade meat sauce passed down from the generations of Aceto's before her and makes manicotti for our family. This has been our Christmas day lunch EVERY year. I love making her recipes but especially her sauce!

Then there is my Grampy! He passed away in 2019, a week after his 80th birthday, and I miss him every day. Around Thanksgiving, every year without fail, my grandfather made his 'candies' peanut butter balls, peanut butter fudge and Maine needhams - he would make so many of each, their entire mud room would be filled with baking sheets of peanut butter balls waiting to be dipped or the needhams waiting to be dipped, as well as peanut butter fudge cooling - I'll never forget that smell walking into their home and smelling all the peanut butter and chocolatey goodness. My grandmother is 1 of 5 sisters, and grammy also had 4 siblings - so there are a lot of aunts, uncles, & cousins but by Christmas, everyone would get a plate with handfuls of each 'candy', wrapped in plastic with a Christmas bow on top.

My boyfriend is also from an Italian family, even bigger than mine, his grandfather, Saverio, was one of 11 brothers and sisters, and I don’t know the exact number, but I believe each of them had at least 5 kids of their own.  Believe it or not, his grandfather and my grandmother grew up on the exact same street in Portland’s, ‘Little Italy.’ Needless to say, my boyfriend’s family has a long list of Italian traditions as well, and when the holidays come, it’s fun to honor both traditions. I am very lucky he loves to cook too!

As someone who loves to cook, one thing I always found extremely frustrating was trying to think of different dinners to make, you know - not making the same 20 meals on repeat week after week.

I would google - ‘dinners for two' and although a lot of dinners would pop up, realistically I would only cook about 25% of what I found … I know I can’t be the only one. Even the cookbooks I own, everything looked good, but they weren’t thinks we would actually make after getting home from a long day of work!

I started to keep a list of dinners I’d make that we actually liked and would eat! You can find the list here! You will also find a bunch of my favorite recipes - and I hope you enjoy them!