What’s Been Cooking: November 2025
This post may contain affiliate links. We only promote products we actually use and truly love!
As the year comes to a close, we’ve been busy cooking up new recipes, filming video tutorials, and trying new restaurants during our travels. Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to lately!
🍴 A Sneak Peek At Some New Recipes
As the year winds down, we’ve been focused on two things: holiday and game day recipes. Because as soon as the new year comes around, we’ll be gearing up for the Super Bowl!
Here’s what we’ve been working on this month:
- Buffalo chicken calzones – We’ve been dying to make calzones for the longest time and finally got around to it. It was surprisingly easy, and they turned out so good! We’ll absolutely be sharing this one in time for the NFL playoffs.
- Jalapeno popper dip – Another game day snack we’ve been excited about! We tested two versions – one with a cream cheese base, one with a cottage cheese base – and the cream cheese was the clear winner in terms of both texture and flavor. This one will be going live on the blog very soon!
- Cinnamon roll cookies – We first tested this concept with our homemade cookie dough recipe and a failed batch of maple fudge that turned into a delicious ganache-like icing. It was delicious, but not perfect, so we tried it again with store-bought sugar cookie dough… and it was a total flop. We’re going to keep working on this one in the background, so maybe it’ll be ready by next Christmas 👀
We also had a wonderful cheese night that gave us an excuse to take new photos of our baked brie en croute recipe. We paired it with hot pepper peach jam, strawberry blackcurrant rosemary jam, and the rosemary roasted almonds we learned to make from Alice Waters’ MasterClass.
Our spread also included apple slices, goat cheese, gouda, cheddar, and a few fancy sea salts we enjoy sprinkling on the goat cheese. What are your go-to items for a cheese board? We’d love to hear about your favorite pairings in the comments.
🧀 A Kitchen Fail (That Still Tasted Delicious)
A few Sundays ago, we set up to film two of our game day recipes for social media: beer cheese nachos and Southwest egg rolls. The egg rolls went off without a hitch… but the nachos were a different story!
Filming still throws us off just enough that recipes will occasionally go wrong. This time, our cheese sauce didn’t come together how it should have. Alex labored away trying to revive it, and while he eventually got it to combine with lots of aggressive stirring, it was super thick. And we didn’t notice until he tried to pour it over the nachos for the camera.
Instead of a glorious waterfall of cheese sauce, it plopped onto the tortilla chips in gooey lumps. Not very appetizing to look at, but thankfully just as delicious as always – even if some chips were smothered in cheese while others got absolutely none.
Honestly, I wasn’t too sad about it because I’ll take any excuse to eat a plate of nachos. What’s another Sunday spent capturing the final few shots of this video if it means I get to enjoy beer cheese nachos again?
🏒 Weekend In Boston
Brief backstory: Alex and I met at Northeastern University where we both went to college, and one of our favorite activities was attending hockey games together at the historic Matthews Arena. Sadly, the building is so old and structurally unsound that they’re tearing it down – so we had to go to one last home game and relive the memories.
We also took this opportunity to finally grab dinner at Sweet Cheeks Q, Tiffani Faison’s restaurant in Fenway that we’d been planning to try senior year before COVID disrupted the world. Everything we ate was incredible – especially the “bucket o’ biscuits” (which came in a literal bucket) and honey butter, and the mac n cheese.
Even though Northeastern lost in overtime, it was so much fun to be back at a Huskies hockey game and visit all our favorite spots on campus!
❄️ First Snow In Vermont
We got our first real snowstorm early in November, which perfectly coincided with us switching out our Halloween decorations for Christmas lights and snowmen. For a few days, we enjoyed an early taste of the holiday season and all the coziness that comes with winter in Vermont.
Has it snowed already where you live (or does it snow at all)? To us, the snow is what makes winters here bearable – it’s so pretty to look at.
🦃 Thanksgiving Fun
The week before Thanksgiving was total chaos, but it involved all my favorite things about the holiday season: baking cookies, Christmas shopping, and finding creative ways to use up the food in our fridge before going out of town! Anyone else in the same boat?
One of the more creative dinners we ate that week was a breakfast burrito version of our loaded baked potato tacos, which involved adding scrambled eggs and using a large tortilla since we didn’t have any small ones on hand. So good.
On our way to visit family for the holiday, we stopped at our favorite brewery – Tree House – and treated ourselves to an order of garlic knots with beer cheese (yum) and a vodka sauce pizza. We usually just get Panera from the rest stop on our travels, so this was an extra special treat to kick off a week of great food. If you’re ever in New England, absolutely stop by a Tree House Brewery to try their amazing beers and food!
For Thanksgiving, we contributed our crockpot loaded potato soup and sweet potato white chocolate chip cookies. Both are always a hit and disappeared fast, as usual! We also got a jelly-making lesson from Alex’s aunt, where we made the best strawberry hot pepper jelly. It went so good with all of the cheese (brie especially), bread, and desserts!
What was your favorite food this Thanksgiving? Are there any recipes you make year after year because they’re just that good?
We hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll be back soon with a special year-end recap edition of What’s Been Cooking!
Follow Us On Social Media
If you have any questions regarding the information presented in this post, please refer to our Nutrition Disclaimer here.
