What’s Been Cooking: April 2026

After a long winter in Vermont, spring is finally starting to show its face! This month, we traveled south for an early taste of warm weather, enjoyed a Mexican restaurant-style feast at home, and stocked our freezer with easy, high-protein breakfast wraps to simplify our mornings.

🌸 A Whirlwind Weekend In NYC

We seem to find ourselves in NYC a lot! This month, it was for two reasons:

1. Attending a family member’s PhD defense
2. Visiting our college friends for a much-needed night out

After driving into the city and attending the defense, we got to spend the evening with family during the after-party (where we also had delicious Brazilian food for dinner) and some late-night karaoke. The next day, we had brunch with family, spent a few hours walking around Central Park (and saw the cherry blossoms in bloom!), and met up with our friends for dinner and drinks.

As always, our trip involved lots of great meals from restaurants including The Smith (brunch), Tompkins Square Bagel (the best breakfast sandwiches we’ve ever had), Darjeeling Kitchen & Café (great momos and curry!), and Bukas Café (delicious ube and matcha lattes).

Sharing meals, drinks, and laughter with friends and family always reminds us of why we started The Candid Cooks. The best memories really are made over good food – and when we can capture those moments through our cooking, we get to relive them over and over.

😅 It’s All About Balance

Since we use most of our dinners as opportunities to develop new recipes or photograph dishes for the website, we meal plan religiously and try to stick to it as much as possible. But some weeks, that just doesn’t happen – and that’s okay.

When we returned home from traveling, we were craving healthier, lighter meals (as usual after a trip). So that’s what we planned. But come Tuesday evening, we were already feeling exhausted and burnt out from getting back into the swing of things, and just craving comfort.

So we ditched our meal plan, drove 5 minutes to the grocery store to pick up ingredients, and had ourselves a truly comforting dinner: pepperoni pizza and fries with store-bought, processed queso and chick-fil-a sauce.

It’s nights like these that remind us life is all about balance. Do we love cooking homemade meals from scratch? Yes. But do we also need easy (and sometimes highly processed) dinners every once in a while? Absolutely.

🌯 Burrito Feast

The weeks leading up to a holiday are always fun for us, because it means we get to remake some of our favorite festive recipes in preparation for all the content we share in our email newsletters and social media posts.

As lovers of Mexican food, the lead up to Cinco de Mayo is alwaysthe best. This year, we revamped our chicken burritos ranchero recipe and took new photos of our spicy mezcal margarita and Mexican bean dip. Which meant that we enjoyed a giant Mexican feast last weekend! 

We served our burritos with a side of cilantro lime rice, homemade refried beans, guacamole, and lime crema (made with Greek yogurt + fresh lime juice + salt). Along with the bean dip, it was way too much food, but we weren’t sad to have leftovers for the days afterward.

If you’re also excited about celebrating Cinco de Mayo, check out our Cinco de Mayo menu inspiration roundup for ideas on what to make. We’re planning to enjoy our crispy pork belly tacos and a round (or two) of margaritas!

🍳 Breakfast Meal Prep

We’ve been wanting to make a giant batch of our bacon egg and cheese breakfast burritos for a long time now to stockpile in the freezer. So when we headed to Costco for our usual restock trip (which happens every few months), we picked up 4 pounds of bacon, 2 pounds of cheese, 2 dozen eggs, and 40 tortillas to finally make it happen.

We weren’t exactly prepared for how much of a mess our tiny kitchen would become trying to cook that much food all at once, but we had so much fun prepping these! Alex fried the bacon while I grated the cheese and a few potatoes and cracked eggs into a giant measuring cup. Then I fried the potatoes while he scrambled the eggs, and we somehow managed to make it all work between 4 pans and every mixing bowl we own 😅

All in all, we made 21 regular sized wraps (with standard 8-inch flour tortillas) and 2 burrito sized wraps (with 10-inch burrito tortillas). Since we’re trying to track our protein lately, we did the math and figured there’s around 23 grams per wrap – not bad for a grab-n-go breakfast from the freezer.

Reheating them worked like a charm in both the microwave and the toaster oven. It only took about 3 minutes in the microwave for 2 wraps (covered with a damp paper towel) and they tasted like they were freshly made. We’re excited to have plenty more of them to enjoy over the next few months!

☀️ Spring Is Almost Here

Vermont keeps teasing us with a handful of warm, sunny days here and there, followed by cloudy or snowy/rainy weather in the 30s. This is pretty typical this time of year, but even still after 3 years here we can’t believe how long winter drags on!

We had a wonderful taste of summer last weekend when it hit 70 degrees and the sun was on full blast. To soak up as much warmth as possible, we took a long walk by the waterfront to one of our favorite local breweries, Burlington Beer Co., for lunch. Our favorite dish there is the Korean nachos, so we split a tray and also ordered their special of the day, four cheese arancini with spicy caper dipping sauce 🤤 As always, it was delicious. If you’re ever in Burlington, it’s definitely a top spot to visit!

The sunshine also made it impossible to resist a cold treat, so we finally stopped by Shy Guy Gelato, which has been on our list to try since we moved here. After a very long winter, sitting under the sun while eating gelato felt like the most indulgent Saturday afternoon activity.

Here’s hoping actual spring weather (and summer!) is just around the corner. We’re looking forward to lighter dinners and refreshing drinks on the balcony – what foods are you craving this time of year?