What’s Been Cooking: February 2026
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Between the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, our 10 year dating anniversary, and Valentine’s Day, February was full of reasons to celebrate and enjoy good food! Here’s what we were up to this month:
👨🏻🍳🍞 More Adventures In Bread Baking
Last month, we shared how Alex made us bread bowls for the very first time with his new double bread baker. This month’s bread project involved using this cast iron loaf pan for focaccia dough to make a tall, bubbly loaf for sandwiches.
It turned out absolutely delicious! We made our sandwiches with grilled chicken, chipotle mayo, avocado, and cheddar cheese – highly recommend this combo. Focaccia and chipotle mayo go so well together.
If you’ve ever wanted to get into bread baking, we highly recommend Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish. It’s our go-to cookbook for artisan bread, pizza dough, and focaccia recipes.
🍴 New Recipe Successes And Failures
While we’ve slowed down our new recipe development to focus on updating old content on our website, we’ve been working on a few exciting ideas over the past few weeks. One succeeded, one is still in the works, and the other was a total failure:
- Success: We love our sun dried tomato pesto recipe so much, we wanted to make a simple pasta dinner using it as a base for the sauce. After trying it a few different ways, we dialed in the recipe this month to a delicious, easy to make dinner for two that we’ll be sharing this Friday!
- In progress: We made a Mexican-ish potato and black bean skillet for dinner a few weeks ago when we were craving something comforting and nutritious that wouldn’t be a ton of work. It turned out pretty good, so we’ve been trying different versions of it to find the best cooking method and balance the textures of crispy potatoes and tender veggies. Be on the lookout for this one in the next month or two.
- Failure: Last year, I was determined to make Guinness brownies for St. Patrick’s Day using boxed brownie mix. But instead of brownies, I ended up with a fluffy, cake-like texture that I thought I could turn into cupcakes. This year, I tried making a cupcake version, thinking it would be totally foolproof and we’d have a great recipe to share with you guys ahead of the holiday. Wrong. While they tasted great, the texture was too crumbly and they fell apart as soon as I tried to take them out of the pan. For the sake of our health, I’m cutting my losses with this one – the two of us can only eat so many failed desserts!
🍝 Special Occasions Call For Italian Food
Maybe it was growing up in an Italian family, or maybe it was that going to college in Boston meant every “fancy” event was celebrated over pasta in the North End – but I always crave Italian food for special occasions. So with two celebrations in February (10 years since our first date and Valentine’s Day), we cooked two extra special Italian dinners.
Homemade ravioli: Alex got me a ravioli press for Christmas, so we finally broke it out to make ravioli from scratch. Long story short, it took us about 3 hours to make everything and we forgot to flour the press, so our first batch got entirely stuck and Alex had to carefully pry each raviolo off with a knife 😅 They turned out delicious, but it was probably the most high-stress dinner we’ve ever cooked together. It’s truly a testament to our relationship that we still had so much fun and laughed it off while agreeing to never make something that complicated for a special occasion again!
Chicken picatta with risotto: One of our favorite recipes from Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia Table cookbookis her chicken picatta with artichokes. Last time we made it, we thought it would pair well with our parmesan risotto recipe – so we combined them this year for our Valentine’s Day dinner. Followed up with strawberries and chocolate fondue for dessert, it was a lovely (and delicious) date night at home.
🏈 Super Bowl Betting We Approve Of
Our kind of sports betting involves food, of course.
Every year when we watch the Super Bowl, Alex makes us a prop bet sheet so we can guess at things like who’ll get the first touchdown, how long the national anthem will be, and if there will be a surprise guest at the halftime show. We also use Mancala gems to bet on more specific (and sometimes silly) things throughout the game, like “the next commercial will have a dog in it” or “the QB will get sacked on this drive.”
In the past, our bets never had a prize – it was just for fun. But this year, I suggested we up the ante with a prize for both of our games. Whoever won the main prop bet sheet would get to request a dinner of choice for the other person to cook them, and whoever won the Mancala gem bets would win a beer from their brewery of choice.
In the end, we tied on the dinner challenge and I won a beer. This week, we’re finally cashing in our prizes!
We went to Foam Brewers over the weekend for my beer and their delicious onion dip, which I still want to figure out how to make at home. And last night, I cooked Alex his dinner of choice, pesto parmesan chicken and risotto. It turned out so good – I told him I’d make this for us any day! All I did was mix some grated parmesan into the breadcrumbs for crispy pan fried chicken, and stir jarred pesto into our usual risotto instead of using parmesan and lemon juice for flavor. I also made a quick lemon aioli with light mayo, lemon juice, and salt to drizzle over the top.
Later this week, Alex will be making me a gourmet pizza with spicy red sauce, pepperoni, and caramelized shallots on homemade garlic and herb focaccia. My mouth is watering just thinking about it 🤤
💙 Being Kind To Ourselves
Aside from the special meals we cooked this month, it was important for us to acknowledge that February can be hard. It’s often when we feel the effects of winter the most and just want to curl up and hibernate. So we gave ourselves some extra love through lots of easy dinners on the couch while watching the Olympics, like potato and egg scrambles, simple stir fries, and roasted veggie bowls.
On the bright side, Vermont is slowly starting to show a little bit more warmth. We finally got out to our local ski mountain for some laps after last week’s fresh snowfall since it was above 20 degrees. We have our fingers crossed that it’ll stay warm enough for us to ski and snowboard some more over the next month or two!
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