Seeing a star fruit (or starfruit) in the grocery store can be a little intimidating or seem ‘too exotic’ if you’ve never sliced and eaten one your self, but don’t be scared, it’s delicious and easy. Follow this step-by-step, no-fail method of slicing and creating beautiful dishes with the starfruit. They are a cheap fruit in Costa Rica, but well worth the price in the United States too.

I was introduced to arepas for the first time while living in Charlotte and eating with my Latino friends. A Costa Rican friend of mine gave me the arepa dough and a few tips on getting the consistency correct as well as cooking them on the stove top. Check out the recipe and enjoy.

This olive oil and sea salt whole wheat cracker recipe gives you a healthy alternative to the MSG-laced store-bought varieties. This is the basic recipe allows the chef to add their own flavor to personal taste, but even plain is a party in your mouth. These crackers are great with cheese, spreads, salsa, you name it.

This post boasts a recipe for homemade dog food proven (by us) to reverse the effects of arthritis and keeps our dogs healthier and stronger than ever. It combines fresh vegetables, rice, barley, garlic, sage and chicken livers and trumps bagged dog food any day of the week.

I have seen recipes call for roasted garlic before, but never tried it. So, I decided now was the time. I looked for other ingredients at the organic food market to make a good pasta salad to last for a few extra days this week, and came up with some walnuts and Parmesan cheese. A perfect mix. The salad turned out great, and roasted broccoli has a more hearty flavor than steamed. Enjoy!

The rainy season finally showed up here in Costa Rica, which is the only chance of simulating any type of winter. And with Winter, comes soups, stews and chili. This is when I started thinking about a meal that I could make last a couple of days, and out came the southwest chicken soup.

After considering opening a burger place just to have class A beef and all the toppings Costa Rica has to offer, this weekend toiled with a few recipes and cooked a batch on our grill with Willingham’s seasoning of course. We topped them with pineapple-jalapeño salsa, some fresh farmer’s market tomatoes, sauteed green beans and grilled plantains. Find the pineapple-jalapeño salsa recipe here.

A quick love story for you. Man meets woman, falls madly in love, tries to impress her with chicken scallopini, he does so, she marries him and lives happily ever after with man and his chicken scallopini.

Here’s how my husband won me over and the latest on how he’s perfected the recipe.

Nothing says tropical like fish tacos. With cilantro sauce no doubt. And now my husband touts a great skill of homemade tortillas, so we combined efforts and out came Costa Rican fish tacos. The one thing that we definitely agree on is more more more cilantro. So, in the following recipe, you’ll see that there is no shying away from our favorite herb.

In Costa Rica, the salads are mostly made with a base of cabbage as opposed to lettuce. My best guess at the reason why is because cabbage is heartier and a head will stretch farther than a head of lettuce. Another notable difference with salads here is that they rarely use much of a dressing. Mostly just a little oil, lime juice and sometimes a splash of vinegar. This weekend I tried my hand at a Costa Rican typical salad, but with a twist (of course!).