Like just about everyone I know, I'm in way too many Facebook groups. The admins of several of these groups often post questions to get group members interacting with them and with one another: "Where's your favorite vacation destination?"; "What are you most looking forward to doing this summer?" and things of that nature. The one I've probably seen most often, however, is some variation of "What are you having for dinner?" Most of these groups are run by moms looking for dinner ideas for young kids and picky eaters. I have two advantages when it comes to answering this particular question:

1. I might no longer be a young kid, but I am definitely still a picky eater (for health reasons as well as personal preferences).
2. I also happen to follow way too many recipe bloggers.

That's how I got the idea for this article: a collection of my favorite recipes (picky-eater approved) most of which are quick and easy so they're all busy-person-with-a-life/college student/beginner-friendly. Three of them are dinner and two of them are dessert, because come on--after my guides on making my Oreo Cupcakes and my snickerdoodle cookies, how could I not give you dessert recipes?

Bon appétit, my friends!

1. Dinner - Garlic Bread Pasta

This is one of my favorite recipes ever. At this point, I know it by memory and I eat it about once every two weeks. It earned its place in my regular rotation after I purchased my very first cookbook, called "Always Eat Dessert First," which is filled with recipes for both dessert and dinner and was written by one of my favorite recipe bloggers.

This gloriousness involves not only pasta, but browned-butter-coated breadcrumbs, putting all the goodness of garlic bread into a pasta dish. I'm a pasta enthusiast, and I have pasta for dinner at least six days a week, so this dish was absolutely carb heaven. I do use more garlic than the website I'm linking you to calls for--they call for three cloves minced, but I usually end up using more like five, grated with a microplane--but other than that, I'm pretty sure this is the perfect recipe.

Check out the recipe here and have a look at the cookbook it came from here.

I mean, it has chocolate chip cookies on the cover. Not to go all Chandler Bing on you here, but could this *be* any more perfect?

2. Dinner - The Best Macaroni & Cheese Ever

Yes, this was the best photo I could find. Weirdly enough, I don't have my own pictures from times I've made this recipe. I should make it again and remedy that.

Remember how I mentioned I was a picky eater? I pretty much grew up on the blue box stuff. Eventually my tastes became slightly more varied, and I actually started liking mac and cheese with breadcrumbs on top (my mother's shocked reaction when I told her that should confirm just how picky I was). One of my friends was coming to stay with me for a night, and I was searching for something I could make for us for dinner. Something simple, something that just about everyone liked, and something that was vegetarian-friendly. I happened upon this recipe, realized I had all the ingredients on-hand to make it, and decided this would be dinner. It was a good choice, too: my friend declared it the best mac and cheese she'd ever had and asked me for the recipe. I made it again when I went back to my mom's house for the holidays, and the whole 13x9 pan was almost gone in less than an hour. Even my mom--who is on Atkins, by the way--ate a small bowl. It was good enough to make someone who has lost over 100 lbs on Atkins have a cheat night.

My tips:

- GARLIC. If you're making a whole recipe, grate about three cloves into the cheese sauce and about three cloves into the butter for the breadcrumbs before you melt it. If you're making a half recipe, reduce this to two. Not a requirement, but so good.
- The recipe is a tiny bit misleading in how to prepare the cheese sauce. Don't dump everything in the pot at once: get the butter a little melty, then put in the flour. Keep stirring that up until the butter is all melted and the mixture is thick and bubbly, then add the milk. Once the milk is warmed up, start slowly adding the cheese. Perfect every time!

Find the best macaroni and cheese ever (not the recipe's title, but generally agreed upon by my friend, my mom, my mom's coworker who is also a pasta enthusiast, and me) here.

3. Dinner - Parmesan & Garlic Linguine

So, have you guessed that I'm a really big fan of garlic yet? I'm pretty sure I could repel vampires naturally with the amount I consume. Hopefully you are, too, because this is my last recipe suggestion and again, garlic.

I think this was the first recipe I tried making when I started living on my own. One night, I decided "I'm tired of frozen dinners--let's try cooking something!"

I might have eaten the whole pot.

I did adjust the recipe a little bit, though: this calls for just one half of a clove of garlic. One half of a clove, even the biggest clove of garlic I have ever encountered, is not nearly enough for me. To each their own, of course, and if you're not a garlic-lover like I am, then that might be the right amount. I usually up it to more like three or four cloves, depending on the night. I've also found that to save on calories, whole milk can be substituted for the heavy cream. You get almost the same result, but it's not as wildly different as what can happen when you start substituting ingredients, and the calorie reduction is pretty significant. Especially if you end up eating all of it.

Especially if I'm sharing, I also serve this with steamed broccoli and a prepared box of Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits (yes, the box mix--I don't make everything from scratch). Get the recipe here!

4. Dessert - Snickerdoodle Rice Krispie Treats

It's summer. No one wants to heat up the oven to bake stuff. Well, except me, but I love to bake stuff, it's what I do for fun. Fortunately, these are Rice Krispie Treats--they're no-bake. But they taste ah-mazing, because they're not just any Rice Krispie Treats. Remember the first recipe I shared with you for garlic bread pasta? The same author wrote this one, and for a while she was on a browned butter kick. This recipe benefited from that though: the browned butter gives them a really warm, cozy taste, and paired with the cinnamon and vanilla that go into the melted marshmallow, it makes for a really fantastic experience. Find the recipe here (and make it now. Seriously).

5. Dessert - Eggless Cookie Dough

While we're on the subject of no-bake stuff, cookie dough. Most of the people I know buy the frozen stuff and eat it straight from the package. After an incident involving french toast and eggs past their prime, I can't bring myself to do that anymore, but after visiting the oh-so-popular shop DŌ in New York, I was definitely re-addicted to raw cookie dough. I went searching for recipes that I could make at home and found these. Best part: no eggs, so the risk of getting sick is almost nothing. Of course, there is some risk of getting sick from contaminated flour (because the world couldn't let us have our raw cookie dough even without the eggs), but there's actually a way to treat flour at home to minimize even that tiny risk (do it in 15-to-30 second intervals to reduce your chances of burning the flour though). You could so easily make these recipes into cookie dough truffles, too, or just eat 'em with a spoon. My tip for these: particularly for the chocolate chip and sugar cookie dough, using milk instead of water might give you a more cookie-dough-like consistency. Don't be afraid to experiment! Check out the recipes here and snack on raw cookie dough to your heart's content!