The week between Christmas and New Year’s is my favorite week of the year. I always feel more relaxed, refreshed and ready to take on whatever lies ahead in the start of the new year. I love looking back on the blog while writing posts like this and seeing what I’ve cooked over the last 12 months. For someone who didn’t’t know what to make for dinner more than half of the time, I didn’t do half bad.

I can’t thank you enough for visiting Aggie’s Kitchen for recipes, this blog fulfills me more than you know and I appreciate all my readers, friends and family who have supported it and me over the years. Hope you are enjoying the holiday and I wish everyone the best in the upcoming year. Bring on 2016!

Here are the Top 15 Most Popular Recipes on Aggie’s Kitchen from 2015: 

1. Creamy Avocado Lime Dressing

2. Slow Cooker Split Pea Soup

3. Mexican Slaw Salad with Black Beans

4. Slow Cooker Asian Citrus Pork Tenderloin

5. Honey Balsamic Roasted Brussels Sprouts

6. Slow Cooker Pesto Chicken Melts

7. Strawberry Grapefruit Ginger Smoothie

8. Apple, Celery, Walnut Salad with Honey Dijon Vinaigrette

9. Roasted Red Peppers with Pesto and Goat Cheese

10. Greek Village Salad

11. Almond Peach Kefir Smoothie

12. Taco Turkey Black Bean Rice Bowls

13. Spring Beet and Goat Cheese Salad with Walnuts

14. Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Brussels Sprouts with Pecans

15. Kale, Red Pepper and Goat Cheese Frittata

From the past:

Best of 2014 – My Favorites and Yours

Best of 2013 – My Favorites and Yours

My 12 Favorite Meals of 2012

Bye Bye 2011

Top 5 Favorites of 2009

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My kids went back to school this week. Although I truly enjoy the laid back, non-structured days of summer, by August I find myself feeling a little bit of a mess and craving some routine. Every start of the school year always makes me feel a bit more refreshed and energized and ready to take on a new season. Can anyone else relate??

(Welcome to 3rd and 5th grade! The little guy started preschool a couple mornings a week too. 🙂 )

One thing that I slack on big time over the summer is meal planning. I find myself winging it most days and nights and our dinners are a bit spontaneous and pieced together. Once school starts though, things change and I am a little more on the ball (ha!) with having a dinner plan, especially when after school and evening activities start up. I’ve learned I really have to be or we would be eating sandwiches or scrambled eggs every night for dinner (which isn’t a such terrible thing really, just a bit boring). Needless to say, I do look forward to the more structured idea of “dinner time” during the school year. These Slow Cooker Salsa Verde Pork Tostadas made it to the first week of dinner menu!

This is my first month posting along with The Recipe Redux group and our theme for August was “Back to the Dinner Table”. A perfectly appropriate challenge for all of us, especially this time of year, don’t you think? Getting us back into the groove of eating dinner together is always a good thing. If you are unfamiliar with The Recipe Redux, they are the first recipe challenge group created by Registered Dietitians with a focus on taking delicious recipes and making them better for you. When I first started blogging (over 7 years ago) I was a part of a couple of recipe challenge groups (a Barefoot Contessa group and Ellie Krieger group) and I had a lot of fun with them. It always kept me inspired to try something new so joining up with these awesome bloggers in The Recipe Redux group was a no brainer for me.  

One of my family’s favorite and most requested dinners is these Turkey and Spinach Tostadas. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made them in the last year. I wanted to change them up and do something a little different this week, so I got some help from my crock pot and made these super simple Slow Cooker Salsa Verde Pork Tostadas. You can use any green salsa you like, I took a shortcut and used this store bought salsa but if you are up for it make your own salsa from scratch (like my Roasted Tomatillo Salsa). The technique of baking up the tostadas is the same as the turkey and spinach ones, but this time I used the shredded salsa verde pork and added black beans (corn would be a great substitute for any family members that don’t care for beans).

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The last couple of weeks, my grocery store has had avocados and mangos on sale. Would it be too obvious to tell you my produce drawer is filled with plenty of both right now?

Yep. I have a few more mangos & avocados than I know what to do with at the moment. This is not a bad thing.

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Click here to pin this slow cooker pork tenderloin recipe!

I’m back with another pork tenderloin recipe. The Roasted Chili Maple Pork Tenderloin I shared back in November was my introduction to cooking with pork tenderloin and it turns out many of you love this cut of meat too. I’m amazed how much my entire family loves it and I can’t believe I have avoided cooking it for so long.

This time, I decided to try something different and cook it using my slow cooker. Yep, that tenderloin was cooked in the slow cooker and finished off under the broiler. I tried this new-to-me-method after seeing a recipe for Teriyaki Pork Tenderloin in The Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution cookbook from America’s Test Kitchen (if you missed it, I’m giving away a copy of this cookbook plus 3 others this week here). I wanted so bad to make the Teriyaki Pork Tenderloin recipe but I was missing some pretty key ingredients so I had to improvise and try something a little different.

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