slow cooker chicken tacos

jason and i have very different weekday lunch habits. he goes out to lunch with the guys almost every day and refuses to eat the same lunch two days in a row. i am the complete opposite. i bring my lunch almost every day and regularly eat the same thing five days in a row (i've been known to eat the same lunch for weeks at a time). and because i tend to eat the same thing for at least five days in a row, i like lunches that are either quick and simple to assemble every day or something i can make once and eat all week.

knock off mongolian beef

if you hadn't realized, i was on vacation last week. we ate some really great food and some really horrible food - more on that later - and while i had great intentions of lining up posts before i left, vacation planning and preparing to be away from work for a week took over, leaving me with little time to post. which also means i have a week's worth of cooking and eating ready to share!

trifecta cookies

i'm a sucker for a good cookie. aren't you? peanut butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal. i'll take them all. and lucky for me, this cookie has all three rolled into one!

i made a batch of these the day before i left on a four hour drive with a carload of women. 55, 50, 29, and 19 year old women to be exact. surprisingly, no one ate a cookie until midafternoon. when it was pouring rain and we stopped at a gas station. three of us waited in the car while one ran in. it was that exact moment when my mother said "hmm, ok, i'll take one of those cookies now." perfect timing. the three of us devoured eight in the next two minutes.

peach gelee

these are not my mother's orange slices.

my mother loves orange slices. those sickeningly sweet, coated in sugar, chewy candies that look like cartoon orange slices. not every time, but most times, we went to the grocery store, my mom would buy a small bag of these. and she always opened them as soon as she got in the car, passing the bag around to my sister and i until our teeth couldn't take it. then they would end up closed with a clothes pin, stashed in the candy cupboard at home. i don't know what it was about those things, but mom loved them.

blackberry peach cake

this cake combines two of my absolute favorites: blackberries and peaches. blackberries make an appearance pretty frequently around here, so it's no surprise they're one of my favorites, but i have yet to profess my love of peaches.