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The Raw and The Cooked

Simple Meals + Honest Book Reviews + Practical Living

Creamy Lemon Pasta 🍋

This creamy lemon pasta cost less than $15 to make, takes less than thirty minutes to come to life, and it feeds my family of six with leftovers for lunch the next day. This creamy lemon parmesan pasta has become my favorite warm-weather switch-up from the heavy tomato sauces I lean on all winter. The sauce is ridiculously simple to throw together: 1 cup half and half, 6 tablespoons of butter, lemon zest, grated parmesan, and fresh lemon juice at the end. Throw in whatever veggies you have on hand, and the real surprise? Sweet apple chicken sausage. Bonus points for the protein, but It also adds a subtle sweetness that really ties everything together. 

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Three Ingredient Pasta Sauce

Naomi, our seven year old, came home from school this past week, hell-bent on cooking a pasta recipe she ‘invented’. And it actually happened to coincide perfectly with a viral three-ingredient pasta sauce recipe the internet keeps showing me. So I figured, sure! Let’s give it a go. It was a really simple, and with a small tweak, and a handful of fresh toppings – like parsley, grated Parmesan, and red pepper flakes – it turned out delicious.

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Numbers 8:1 – 12:16 | Beha’alotcha | “When You Raise”

Hello, hello! It was another great week over here. I got to spend the morning with my two youngest at our absolute favorite outdoor playground this week (see photo above), with iced coffee, snacks -always snacks- a good friend, and her children. Summer vibes, strong! Though we still have a solid two weeks of school left for my older two children.

This weeks Parsha deals with two large themes that we’re all familiar with: complaining and jealousy. It’s interesting to me that both of these topics are thrown together, back to back. So let’s get into them both!

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Numbers 4:21 – 7:89 | Naso | “Lift / Count” 

I hope everyone had a fabulous Shavuot and Memorial Day Weekend. It’s hard to believe we’re already in summer mode, weren’t we just buried in snow and ice? We spent the weekends with friends at the lake, and this was the morning coffee view. Impossible not to marvel at God’s beauty and generosity. He didn’t have to endow us with the gift of sight, and yet, He did. I’m also still riding the high of a Shavuot program with had with our local Jewish community. We had three fantastic speakers – and a delicious bagel lunch – talking about the importance of Shavuot, which, I’ve decided, I’m going to share a bit here. Because why not?

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Why I’m Finally Slowing Down My Reading Life 📚

Every year, I set a reading goal. Sometimes it’s 50 books, if it’s a postpartum year. Sometimes 75. A few ambitious years, even 100. For a long time, those goals felt motivating. They gave structure to my reading life and made me feel productive, disciplined, like I was “keeping up.” But this year, after nearly two decades of tracking books and chasing numbers, I found myself asking a different question:

What exactly am I rushing toward?

And honestly… who cares how many books I read in a year? There is no version of life where we get through every bestseller, every hidden gem, every recommendation, every “must-read” list. Our time is limited. And maybe accepting that is actually freeing.

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Numbers 1:1 – 4:20 | Bamidbar | “In the Wilderness”

When I first got my copy of The Rational Bible by Dennis Prager, I remember feeling genuinely elated. This ancient, often dense and difficult text was finally opened up in a way I could understand—clear, thoughtful, and deeply engaging. And, maybe just as meaningful to me, it was written by a Jewish author.

A lot of the accessible, lay-friendly Bible commentaries I’ve found come from Christian writers—which can be wonderful (if you’ve been following along, you know I’m a big fan of John Mark Comer). But there’s something uniquely grounding about learning from someone who shares your foundational perspective. It adds a different kind of clarity. So when I realized that Prager’s Rational Bible series skips Leviticus (for now), I had to shift gears a bit. I leaned on Sefaria to get through that stretch—grateful for it, but it just wasn’t the same as sitting down with a physical book and a highlighter in hand.

Now, I’m back. Highlighter ready. Pages turning. Welcome to Numbers—Bamidbar.

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