One-skillet orecchiette with shrimp, spinach, and mushrooms

I like the website Serious Eats. It has lots of good food info- not just recipes. Of course I've saved a ton of recipes from the site, but I haven't tried any of them yet. Until now.

I went with one-skillet orecchiette with shrimp, spinach, and mushrooms. I wasn't sure how it would be, but all the ingredients are things I think are delicious. As Dave said, "You could throw all those ingredients in a bowl and microwave it and I'd be happy." He is not a foodie.

So, for the ingredients, it called for oyster mushrooms, but I used shiitake instead. Still yummy! The shrimp was ridiculously easy to cook, and Dave was a huge help as my sous chef, peeling the raw shrimp while I chopped a shallot and garlic cloves and prepped the fresh spinach and mushrooms. Oh, the spinach. In chicken spinach pasta thing, I use frozen. Wow, the difference when I used fresh in this recipe was astounding. SO GOOD.

What attracted me to this recipe, besides all the delicious ingredients, was that this is all cooked in one pan. You pour a quart of chicken broth into the saute pan, dump in the pasta, and cook it like that.

I've never cooked pasta in that way. And it was amazing. It was creamy and had a fantastic flavor. All the ingredients worked really well together, it was easy, and it was healthy to boot. I'll definitely be making this again.

Milk chocolate cookies and cream cookies

Oreos and chocolate chips in one cookie? I had to try this.

I got the recipe from the Joy the Baker blog. Right off the bat, my expectations were too high. This cookie will be the greatest cookie of all time! No cookie can live up to that. The dough was very delicious. Because as all bakers know, you just have to taste that. Of course you do.

These cookies were pretty good, but not the best cookies ever. They were chewy and tasty, and they were definitely better the next day.

I did end up liking them a lot, once they recovered from my overblown expectations. Good stuff.

Siri's bedtime stories

I talk to Siri. So do lots of other people. In case you don't know, if you have an iPhone, you can talk to the phone and it will answer your questions or perform certain tasks for you. This "digital personal assistant" is Siri. My Siri sounds like a guy, but you can have a woman's voice, too.

There are plenty of posts out there about all the crazy things you can ask Siri and Siri's funny responses. But I've never seen these...

Sometimes I ask Siri to tell me a story, but I never tried asking for a bedtime story.

Huzzah! I tried again the next day. What would Siri tell me now?

And another?

I love Siri.