Grab a knife and take a deep breath...

When you love food, Thanksgiving is pretty much the ultimate. It is a holiday dedicated to eating... what more could you want. However, mix in some family dynamics, traffic from hell, and battling the crowds in the grocery store and it can add up to equal parts stress and joy. So at the end of a long, crazy weekend, we arrived home and I needed a way to unwind. For me, cooking was just the outlet I needed.

While I was looking forward to cooking up a storm, I was in no mood to tackle grocery shopping. As always, my motto in the kitchen is to work with what you have and tonight was no different.

A night of cooking for stress relief calls for some comfort food... Roasted Butternut Squash and Bacon Pasta.

To start with, you'll need to cube up a medium butternut squash. Now, there are no two ways around this - cutting up a butternut squash is a total pain in the butt (and prospectively dangerous - every time I do it, I imagine chopping off a digit). Everyone does this task a little differently... some peel it beforehand, but I have no patience for that.

I chop mine in half, then slice the neck in half again, and run a knife down the sides. The base is a little trickier. Cut off the very bottom so that it sits flat, and keep cutting the sections in half until they're manageable. Run a knife along the inner flesh to remove the seeds and innards and then also run it along the outside to remove the skin. Cut all of the larger pieces into small chunks.

Get the squash cubes into a 425 degree oven on a baking sheet coated with a little olive oil. Sprinkle the cubes with a mix of salt, pepper (I used a blend of red and black), and thyme (or, any woody herb). Bake for about 30 minutes, or until tender.

While the squash is baking, get together the rest of the ingredients. First, fry up a few slices of bacon. For any regular blog readers, you'll notice that I use bacon a lot. Not only is it quite possibly the most delish food of all time, it's a great way to get the flavor and texture of meat in a dish, but you only need a little bit. I try and eat meat-free as much as possible, so using a little bacon is a way to meet in the middle.

I addition, you'll want to cook a half pound of pasta. Good grief, how embarrassing is this photo? I didn't have enough of either type of pasta, so I just combined them. While I wouldn't do this if I was making this dish for guests, it got the job done and - as I say so often - I just used what I had.

Once the bacon comes out of the pan, chop it up, and saute a cup or so of thinly sliced onions or shallots in the pan drippings. Could they be more gorgeous in the pan?

When the squash is done, toss it together with the bacon and onions.

All good comfort foods need cheese and this one is no different. The sauce starts with a good pinch of salt and a quarter cup of flour in a dry pan. You'll want to toast the flour on medium heat for just minute - this really just removes the raw taste from the flour. Slowly whisk in two cups of milk, bringing it up to a boil. Cook for a minute or so, until the milk mix is thickened a touch. If you like the science part of cooking, this step is for you - it always amazes me to see how flour and milk magically make sauce.

Turn the heat off and mix in your cheeses. For real, add whatever you have on hand - just make it about three-quarters to a full cup of cheese. Tonight I had a cheddar blend and a soft style cheese called quark. The sauce will be thick enough to coat a spoon.

Toss the cooked pasta into the sauce... in case you're wondering, at this point, you've pretty much made homemade mac and cheese - delicious on its own! But, I promise that it will get even more delicious with the squash-bacon-onion mix in there.

Spread the pasta into a baking dish, coated with a little oil or cooking spray. Oh, and then top it with more cheese... I mentioned that this was about stress-relief, right?? Again, this can be anything you have on hand - I used parmesan. Get it in the oven for about ten minutes, or until the top cheese melts.

Having a pan of steamy deliciousness come out of the oven was my antidote for all the weekend's stresses.

Grab a fork and say ahh.

Kitchen Sink Curry

Every once and a while, I open the veggie drawer in my fridge and I gulp... This happens when the drawer is overflowing with piles of produce that need to be cooked - half used onions, carrots beyond peak freshness, pounds and pounds of potatoes lacking inspiration. At this point, I know there's only one solution to this problem - Kitchen Sink Curry.

If I do say so myself, I make a great veg curry. Despite himself, even my husband likes it (when I married a Brit, I was wistful about the fabulous curries we'd concoct together... little did I know that his version of adventurous eating was having rice with a roast instead of mashed...).

Aside from being very flavorful, healthful and stupid-easy to make, the best part of this curry is that you can toss in whatever you've got on hand - and lots of it, especially if you make a double batch (the leftovers freeze beautifully). Just got your CSA delivery of local squash and greens? Get it in there. Leftover crudité from your cocktail party? Dice it up and throw it in. A drawer full of veggies you hate to see go south? Start chopping.

While you can toss almost anything you want into this dish, onions and carrots pretty much always form the base. However, use any quantity you like... I just chopped up what I had - a HUGE yellow onion, half a red onion, and about six carrots - for about five to six cups of vegetables. Cook them down in some olive oil for five to ten minutes.

Once the onions and carrots are tender, get your spices in the pan - two tablespoons of curry, a tablespoon of brown sugar, a tablespoon of ginger, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes (or, to your heat-liking) and a few cloves of garlic, chopped - and cook for another minute or two. Over the years, I've learned to take a few shortcuts in the kitchen - one is to use jarred ginger over fresh. I find few things more annoying than grating my own ginger. The jarred stuff saves time and aggravation and loses nothing in flavor.

Since I had it on hand, I chopped up about three cups of potato. Another shortcut is that I almost never peel potatoes. I actually love the flavor of the peels, plus that's where all the nutrients are. I also had some snap peas, a few red and yellow pepper strips, and cherry tomatoes left over from a party. Chopped 'em up. I also like some kind of legume in my curry. For this, I used two cans of garbanzo beans, rinsed.

Get the onion-carrot mix into a large crock pot, along with your other veggies and legumes. I like as much variety of color as possible in my curry, so I also put in a can of diced tomatoes. Salt and pepper liberally. If your large (five quart) crock pot is full-ish with veggies, you'll need about four cups of liquids in there. I recommend vegetable stock - but chicken stock, or even water will do.

Set the crock pot for the six hour setting and just let it do its thing. At about the five hour mark, you can put in whatever more tender veggies you have - greens, butternut squash, summer squash. If you cook certain vegetables for the whole six hours, you'll end up with mush. Today, I had kale and dandelion greens, chopped into bite sized pieces.

At the end of the six hour cycle, add a can of light coconut milk. This gives it that slightly sweet, creamy consistency that makes curry spectacular. It's the secret to the whole dish. About now, your house will also smell awesome.

Cook up some couscous or jasmine rice to serve with the curry and you are ready to eat!

Got everything but the kitchen sink in your veggie drawer? Not to worry. A delicious use of everything in there is just a little chopping and slow cooker away.

Letting Sous-Chef Take the Wheel

I do 99.99% of the cooking in my house. So, when the husband-slash-sous-chef decides that he's going to make a meal, my insides get all antsy. Generally, this situation requires lots of coaching, with me taking over somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through.

Therefore, when he asked me - ohsocasually - this afternoon how hard it might be to make bolognese sauce, I may or may not have audibly groaned. But, against my better judgement, I decided to go along for the ride - it was a weekend evening, after all, and if nothing else we had plenty of time on hand.

He decided on a mushroom bolognese, which I was pleased about - good meaty flavor and texture, but heavy on the veg. A quick trip the grocery store and we were ready to roll. In the end, I must admit that he really did most of the cooking on his own, which left me free to document it all. And the results were outstanding... read on.

Start with reconstituting a half ounce of porcini mushrooms for thirty+ minutes in hot water. Once the mushrooms have regained their pliability, drain them in a paper towel lined colander. Reserve the steeped liquid.

Next, get to chopping... three to four cloves of garlic, an extra large onion, the porcini mushrooms, and two ten ounce cartons of cremini mushrooms.

Heat olive oil in a dutch oven. Get the onion in the pan, along with a half a pound of ground pork, a good pinch of salt and freshly ground pepper. Cook until the pork just starts to brown.

Add the mushrooms and garlic to the pan and cook about fifteen minutes, or until the liquid is almost gone.

Now, it's time for the liquids - two tablespoons of tomato paste, half a cup of dry white wine, the porcini liquid, and a can of whole peeled tomatoes (you may want to cut these up a bit with kitchen scissors). Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for about half an hour.

While you're letting the sauce cook, if you're anything like the husband-slash-sous-chef, you'll like to do things like check your email and play "circus" with the cat.

Once the sauce has cooked down a bit, stir in a quarter cup of milk. Turn the heat to low and let it hang out while you boil the pasta.

Finally, peel a bit of good parmesan cheese and chop some flat leaf parsley for garnish.

Pour a nice robust red, and serve up the pasta and sauce. Top with the cheese and parsley. Enjoy!

Here's the best part... while this recipe has several steps and the prep is probably a little longer than you'd prefer on a weeknight, it's actually very straightforward and can be prepared to perfection by nearly any spouse-slash-sous-chef. So, go for it... you won't be sorry. It's delicious.