It feels good to finally be able to sit down and write again. The first three months of 2017 have been the least amount of blogging I've done in the last couple of years. There's been a ton of great things happening in our lives and one of which we went out to celebrate this past weekend, Jenn's new job.

It's been a month since our last Chef Joel & Jenn, but we're hoping this is the start of many in 2017. Our first recipe is actually two recipes within one post. We've made a lot of baked chicken but usually they've involved lengthy prep for sauces. We decided we wanted to make something that would be slightly easier to make during the week. We also made some mashed potatoes to go with the dinner because Whole Foods only had bags of potatoes instead of individual, so we had plenty of potatoes to use. 

One of the latest trends for Jenn and I is to try new restaurants when we go to the theater. To celebrate the holiday season we finally went to go try Vaca a restaurant right across from South Coast Repertory and one of the most raved about restaurants in Orange County. When we made the reservations (almost a month ago) we found out that the head chef of Vaca is someone we are watching right now on Top Chef Season 13. Kind of a crazy coincidence.

Welcome to a new aptly titled "Pastry Chef Jenn & Joel" where we switch roles on who's chef and sous chef and we make desserts. Our first endeavor down this road was to make an Apple Pie. To do so we had to make a 60+ mile excursion to the beautiful Oakglen area in Yucaipa. 

A couple of days ago we were watching The Daily Show and they did a segment on how Facebook is where the majority of people get their news. Although for me it's Twitter, I do go on Facebook more then I'd like to admit. My newsfeed is a mixture of anti-Trump, pro-Clinton news articles with the occasional friend posting a picture of his/her kid and a recipe thrown in the mix. This past Sunday I did my normal morning Facebook browsing and came across a video recipe for a Rigatoni Chicken Parm Bake that I immediately showed to Jenn and we decided to try and make it. 

It's been a couple of months since the last Chef Joel & Jenn post and with that I know I've begun falling behind my goal to write a certain number of these this year. To try and right that wrong I'm going back and writing up the last one we did in late July right before Jenn whisked me away to Paris for my 30th birthday.