French Toast Muffins - Take 1

Yesterday I found this gem on pinterest: French Toast Muffins! Sounded good to me!! My daughter has been asking for French Toast lately and this sounded quicker than making traditional French Toast for breakfast. I don't know if it was quicker, but it was very tasty!!

So here it is, about to go into the fridge until later when we can eat...

 And here it is, being eaten!

If you paid attention to the title of this post you can probably expect we had some issues...

First of all, I adjusted the recipe from the get-go. I only put in 1/2 TBSP vanilla because that seemed like a ton of vanilla to me!

Secondly, the crumble was not so much crumble as it was...cookie dough consistency? seriously. but it was very yummy as 'dough'! I just put little dollop fork fuls around the muffins.

Finally, the cooking problem... We baked it the 25 minutes and all that egg that seeped out around the muffin cups was still very wet. Hmm... I am notorious for over cooking scrambled eggs to make sure my kids are not eating raw egg...I wasn't excited about eating what was definitely still raw egg... We added I think 10 minutes, and then my husband suggested the broiler. We may have also adjusted it to 375* or 400* for those extra 10 minutes...
When we pulled them out they were at least double in size. By the time the pan made it to the table they had sunk in like little craters....
You can see they didn't all come out very well. The insides were less "done" than I would have liked but! they were soooooo yummy I didn't mind the slightly gooey texture at all! My husband and I didn't add syrup- it was perfectly sweet and very tasty!!

Our plan for Round 2? Decrease the milk by at least half. Maybe one less egg...

...maybe bake the crumble recipe into cookies? *grin 

Summer Meal

Here was dinner a couple weeks ago, to spark your own plan:
Meatballs, Corn on the Cob and Grilled Pineapple! (those who don't like pineapple got a fruit salad of apples, bananas and grapes!)

To grill the pineapple, he cut it into halves and brushed them with a mixture of brown sugar, honey, apple cider vinegar (and considered using Sprite).

And just so you know, its not just me who thinks life is easier with a menu plan. Check THIS POST out! Use it as inspiration and make a plan that works for you!

Dinner was a hit!

So you know I gotta share it here! We made kabobs and flat bread, the kids loved assembling them and they even loved eating it!

We started by thawing two steaks and three chicken breasts.
We marinated the chicken for about three hours, with just:

• 1/4 cup olive oil  
• 1 tbsp granulated garlic
• 1 tbsp honey
• 2 tbsp lime juice

We quartered and boiled some "new harvest" red potatoes, and sprinkled them with seasoning salt and olive oil. Then we chopped up half a white onion, a package of button mushrooms, one zucchini and one corn cob. Then we set it all out and let everyone assemble their own kabobs. My husband made a few extras to use up stuff including a steak and potato only skewer, and we still ended up with two chicken-only skewers to cook the leftover chicken.

When we were done making the kabobs, and they were lined up on the cookie sheet at the top of this picture, he drizzled them all with olive oil and a sprinkling of seasoning salt. Then they all hung out on the grill til they were done! (the steaks were quite rare....)

While the kabobs were grilling, we also made THIS flatbread recipe. I added about 1/2 tbsp of dried basil to the mix, and since we have a jar of yeast, rather than packets, we used 3 tsp of yeast as our guessed amount. We pinched off blobs of dough and then rolled it very thin. We brushed the electric griddle with olive oil and threw the dough on sort of like a pancake, flipped it once and that was that!

This is my plate, to give you an idea! (a potato fell off from the middle...) My husband pushed the contents of his skewers onto his flatbread, and ate it sort of like a taco, and my kids discovered they could deal with the mushrooms better if it was with the flatbread.

The chicken was amazing! The flatbread was amazing! The potatoes were fabulous! The zucchini was rather bland, and the corn wasn't great, but the meal was a hit! We have leftovers and definitely plan to make it again!

Homemade Oreos!

I don't think I've made these since starting this blog, so I had to add this one!

We needed to make a quick treat to share with some sweet friends, and this is what we picked. It is so easy, and they are sooo tasty!!

I first got the recipe about 11 years ago, and it looked like this:

2 Pkg Devils Food Cake mix
1 1/2 cups Crisco
4 eggs
Mix to combine, roll dough into balls, bake 10 mins at 350*. Use cream cheese frosting between two cookies to make an oreo.

This time I used this recipe found HERE. Except we didn't have two packages of Devils Food Cake, so we used a Dark Chocolate Cake mix and a German Chocolate Cake mix, haha, and we made our own frosting found HERE. Whatever you use - YUM!

Vegetable Appetizer!

This post got lost in my drafts...not sure why I never shared it, so here it is, just in time for harvest season!

Today for lunch I ate a zucchini. I made THIS recipe for zucchini fries (which I found on Pinterest) and here's how mine looked:

Zucchini Fries

It was messy and time consuming but they were super tasty!! I think its worth making a few times a year, haha. I'm really lousy at the dipping dry-wet-dry process, but that's ok.
I just dipped them in a basic marinara sauce and it was a very tasty (and mostly healthy) lunch!

Food Lately...

Its really, really hot. I don't want to eat food, much less cook it. So mostly we're eating our favorite stand-bys, or grilling burgers/hot dogs, or yes, even eating out. One night the kids got pbjs and my husband and I ate about 3 hours later after we'd cooled off!
But, we have tried a few new recipes in recent weeks, that I thought I'd link up here and let you know what we thought about them. You're welcome! (most of them come from one of my husband's fav food blog)

Crock Pot Nachos: This was a hit with me and the kids. I took the leftovers with me to my parents and they enjoyed it too! Not hard to make at all, but you have to accept that nachos are dinner, haha.

Black Beans & Rice: My kids didn't love this, but they ate it. My husband and I enjoyed it, but I was definitely done with it when I finished my plate. So, its great, in one serving portions.

Creamy Fettucini with Ham and Peas: The pasta was just fine, a lot like the Swedish meatballs and alfredo my husband makes. The kids were happy to eat it tho.

Asian Lettuce Wraps: I'm the first to admit I don't like Asian food. My husband knows this, but sometimes we all take turns picking our favorite, right? And that's ok! He didn't love this one tho, and I didn't like it even a little bit. Our kids sure did though!! At first they thought it was weird that we were rolling lettuce around food "like a crepe!" but they gobbled them up! Parts of the meat and rice fell out, like when you eat a taco, so they just got more lettuce, tore it up, and ate it all like a salad! Of course they like a meal I did not! haha... Also, we substituted in ground turkey for the ground chicken.

"Chicken Cordon Bleu - The easy way." This one was very tasty! We all enjoyed it and it really was so easy to make- hooray for that! I'm sure this will live on in our "regulars".

Bacon Wrapped Chicken

Have you seen this one on facebook yet? My husband decided we needed to try it and it was a hit! I'll let him type it:

Bacon Wrapped, Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts-Burt's Version:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 block (12 oz?) cream cheese
1 bunch of 12 green onions, chopped up
1 tbsp. of onion powder
1 tbsp. of granulated garlic or garlic powder
1 tbsp. of sour cream
2 tbsp. of chives
2 strips of thick sliced bacon

Directions:

Pound out each chicken breast so they are about 1/4" thick or less than a 1/4" thick. Be careful not to make chicken pate. Not the point. You may need to trim the chicken pieces a bit so that they have a semi uniform shape that will be easy to roll.

Whip together using a electric hand mixer the cream cheese, green onions, onion powder, garlic powder, sour cream, and chives until it has taken in some air, is lighter in consistency, and is easily spreadable.

Taking great care to not contaminate the cream cheese spread with raw chicken, put a good size dollop of the mixture on one side of chicken breast and spread it so it evenly coats the one side. Then roll up each flattened piece up to look like a log or a pinwheel as best you can. You may need to use toothpicks to keep them rolled up. Which is fine because you will use the toothpicks with the bacon anyways.

You should have some of the cream cheese mixture left and it will be really good with crackers, so long as you don't poison yourself with salmonella by getting raw chicken juice into the rest of it.

Take each piece of bacon and wrap it around each chicken log in a way that makes the most sense to you. The bacon should be raw and if you use a good thick cut type of bacon, you can even stretch out each piece a little so that it will wrap easier.

Put in a baking dish and cook at 375 for 30 minutes, then turn your oven to broil and cook for another 5 minutes. There is no need to pull the pan out of the oven when you do this. The broiling will help make everything crispy and yummy.

Someone said on the internet that you can sub turkey bacon for the bacon, and a low fat cream cheese to make this healthier, but I think that is just cheating. One other note, there was quite a bit of liquid in the pan after the chicken was done cooking. As I look at this, those drippings probably could have made a really killer gravy if I'd thought of that at the time. Chicken, cream cheese, and bacon drippings. Yes, really killer gravy.

The rest of the meal included sautéed green beans:

1 16oz package of frozen green beans
1 cast iron frying pan (my favorite cooking pan of all time)
Olive Oil, enough to coat the bottom of the pan
1 tbsp. butter
1 tbsp. margarine (yes use both if you have them)
Whatever seasoning you would like to use with the green beans. Lemon pepper would work great.

Put the pan over med high heat. When it is hot, put in the oil, butter, and margarine. Let them melt completely and wait until the butter starts to turn brownish. It should have a nutty smell to. Be careful here, because browning butter turns to burned butter quickly. Add the frozen green beans. Toss around so they get coated. (You can pretend you are a chef on Food Network.) Add your seasoning. Add a little more than you think you need. The beans and heat will absorb and mute the flavors. Cook, tossing and stirring continually, until the beans have thoroughly cooked through and even have little black strips on a few of them. That is flavor, not burned bits. A lot of black strips would be burned. Taste them as you cook. When they taste good to you stop cooking them.

And the really good spinach salad that Tanya made:

I just bought a bag of baby spinach leaves and dumped that into the bowl. I hulled and thinly sliced 10-12 strawberries and sprinkled them in, and chopped up a tomato too. Then we chopped up some honey roasted peanuts and sprinkled that over it. We have some Litehouse Huckleberry vinaigrette that we served with it and it was very tasty.

Some craisins, cut up grapes or any other berry would be great with it. Any fruity vinaigrette would go well with this salad.

YUM!

Meal Planning

I don't know about your house, but I definitely make better dinners if I have a plan ahead of time. If its 430 pm and I'm suddenly realizing these people need to eat, we don't eat very good meals...and I start to look and sound like this:

haha. Anyway, my system works like this:
We get paid every 2 weeks. I have a grocery budget which I try very hard to stick to. I like to get my major shopping done on payday, allowing for the fact that will need to restock milk and produce, and whatever else may come up. So if I plan dinner ideas for at least 14 days, and then buy the food we need to make those dinners, we should be set! (I also keep a pantry full of "food storage" that we rotate into our fridge food...if that makes any sense to you.)
Recently I was trying to put together my menu and was not in the mood to think of meals, so I was asking friends for ideas. (friends are a fabulous resource!!!) Two of them half-jokingly told me that when I came up with my menu I needed to do theirs as well. Hence this post! *grin
I get my dinner ideas by asking my kids what they want (which is always pizza and spaghetti), looking at food blogs (I bookmark specific recipes when I see them), checking my food emails (from Pillsbury & Betty Crocker), and flipping thru our stack of recipe books. And when I can't fill a menu from that I scroll thru this blog for meals that I know we like! I also make sure to have at least one leftovers night per week to make sure the fridge isn't hoarding any science projects, although honestly my husband often takes the leftovers to work for free lunches!

So here is my current menu plan, with links to recipes where I can add them! Enjoy!!

• Saturday: Domino's Pizza
• Sunday: Crock Pot Orange Chicken, Fried Rice
• Monday: Tortilla Soup, chips
• Tuesday: Leftovers
• Wednesday: Mexican Shepherd's Pie, chips, mixed veggies
• Thursday: Tomato Zucchini Pasta, garlic bread, peas
• Friday: Grilled hamburgers, deep fried french fries, grapes
• Saturday: Cheesy Chicken & Broccoli, mixed veg, slice of bread with jam
• Sunday: Meatballs, baked potato with butter & cheese, roasted broccoli
• Monday: Leftovers
• Tuesday: German Pancakes, bacon, fruit
• Wednesday: Beef & black bean enchiladas, chips, lettuce
• Thursday: Hash
• Friday: Baked chicken tenders, baked french fries, apples
• Saturday: Crepes, fruit
• Sunday: Swedish meatballs (recipe found on McCormick Swedish Meatball seasoning & sauce mix packet) & fettuccine noodles with alfredo sauce, mixed veggies

I just noticed, we've been having a LOT of chicken lately...hmm.

Sometimes I like to sort of have a "schedule" that is really just me spacing out similar foods, where each week we have a soup, an Italian meal, a Mexican meal, a breakfast dinner, a super simple meal like burgers or mac n cheese, leftovers and then some kind of meat and potatoes type meal. That gets me thru a week without a whole lot of brain power, haha. Also, since I shop for all these things just as the menu period is beginning, I easily can switch things out depending on how busy I am or what I am more in the mood for each day.
Hope this helps you out today too!

Cheesy baked chicken

Have you noticed the plethora of recipes posted all over facebook? Well this is one such recipe! Since I can't link you to my friends' wall and there is no source listed, I'm copying and pasting!

It starts with a photo and then this:

You may never fry chicken again after tasting this baked crispy chicken.

Crispy Cheddar Chicken

2 lbs chicken tenders or 4 large chicken breasts
2 sleeves Ritz crackers
1/4 teaspoons salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/2 cup whole milk
3 cups cheddar cheese, grated
1 teaspoon dried parsley

Sauce:
1 10 ounce can cream of chicken soup

2 tablespoon sour cream
2 tablespoon butter

Crush crackers. If using chicken breasts and not tenders, cut each chicken breast into 3 large pieces. Pour the milk, cheese and cracker crumbs into 3 separate small pans. Toss the salt and pepper into the cracker crumbs and stir the mixture around to combine. Dip each piece of chicken into the milk and then the cheese. Press the cheese into the chicken with your fingers. Then press the cheesy coated chicken into the cracker crumbs and press it in.

Spray a 9×13 pan with cooking spray and lay the chicken inside the pan. Sprinkle the dried parsley over the chicken. Cover the pan with tin foil and bake at 400 degrees for 35 minutes. Remove the tin foil, bake for an additional 10-15 minutes, or until the edges of the chicken are golden brown and crispy.
In a medium sized sauce pan combine the cream of chicken soup, sour cream and butter with a whisk. Stir it over medium high heat until the sauce is nice and hot. Serve over the chicken.

Well, I don't know about you, but I read the quantities they wanted me to get raw chicken all over and then toss and I was not about to use {waste?!} that much!! I measured out 2 cups of cheese and figured if I needed more I could get more. Yeah, I probably used 1 1/4 cups of cheese. I smooshed up one sleeve of ritz crackers....I bet I could have used half of one. I also only added half the salt and I never measure my pepper because I like it freshly ground.
I want to note that it was not easy to get the cheese and then the crumbs to stick to the chicken, and it seemed like a lot of cheese fell off into the chicken...which doesn't matter a lot, but the process was a little frustrating...

My husband put together the sauce. He followed the instructions as listed but he added about 3 tbsp bottled alfredo sauce. Mixed and heated it up and we put it on the chicken! YUM!
Then! He cooked up some shaped pasta and mixed about half the sauce with the pasta, which we served on the side!

Add a helping of veggies and there was dinner tonight! Dinner was great. The recipe is worth keeping and doing again. Everyone enjoyed it- hooray!

Pork Chops!!

You already know my husband is an amazing cook. But when we have pork chops in the freezer, he almost always chops them up into bites and puts them in some kind of stir fry. He says he doesn't know how to make pork chops without them drying out too much. I think my kids have only had Asian/diced pork chops. Which is kinda sad! One of my favorite dinners when I was a kid was pork chops. I have asked my mom how she made them and her answer is "oh its been too long." dang.
So a friend told me how she makes hers, including how to avoid them drying out, and I thought it was definitely worth trying!! Dinner tonight!

Oven Pork Chops - by Rabilin Snow
Thaw the chops. Set the oven to 350* or 375*.
Put a little water in the bottom of a broiler pan, lay the pork chops on the top of the pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper. (both sides) Cover with foil.
If the pork chops are thick, (1/2 inch - 1 inch) bake about 15 mins, and turn to cook on the other side an additional 10-15 minutes.
If the pork chops are thin, 7-10 mins each side is long enough.

This is the only picture I caught, and its "in progress". Our pork chops were quite thick so we did 15 mins on one side, 15 on the other, and back for another 5 on the first side before my husband said that the juices were clear so it was fine to eat. He and I had a little A1 sauce with our pork chop and it was delicious!! Our kids ate theirs plain and enjoyed them too!

When my friend told me how to make it, she also added that my husband would take the basic idea and "perfect it", haha. So, his suggestion is to sear the chops before baking them. I'll let you know if we give that a try! In the meantime, this is a good method!



Bake a Cake!

While going thru my freezer this morning I decided to pull out some frozen zucchini to make a cake! Just for fun! YUM!

The complete recipe is listed below, but I did use applesauce in place of the vegetable oil, and for probably the first time ever, I used actual buttermilk!
Growing up, we always sprinkled chocolate chips on the top and then baked the cake. The chips stay on the top, and that's in place of a frosting. After today's cake came out, most of the chips had sunk in so that you could only see about 5. Weird. But the thing was, I really, really wanted frosting...I asked my husband what he thought and he said to frost it anyway, so I used half of a chocolate buttercream recipe and that was just enough to cover this 9x13 cake. And it made it soooo rich! And! we discovered that most of the chocolate chips had sunk to the bottom of this cake! Weird!!

 

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

(Cheryl Lawrence)

½ cup soft margarine                                                  ½ cup oil

1 ¾ cup sugar                                                              2 ½ cups flour
2 eggs                                                                          4 tbsp cocoa powder
½ cup sour milk or buttermilk                                    1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon                                                            ½ tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg                                                               1 tsp soda
2 cups grated zucchini                                                           

Cream Margarine, oil and sugar. Add eggs, vanilla and milk. Separately blend flour, cocoa, salt, soda an spices. Mix oil-sugar mixture. Add zucchini. Pour into 9x13x2 inch pan which has been greased and floured. Top with chocolate chips and nuts if desired. Bake 40-45 minutes at 350*

More like a SPLAT

..than a flop... haha.
So, my husband was helping me plan out our menu so that I could get the grocery shopping done, and suggested we start putting at least one recipe each round that comes from a cookbook we have taking up space. brilliant! :) So last week we tried this recipe...

Which came from this book...

It was very simple to put together, as everything I've ever seen from Pampered Chef is. My can of chicken is more than 10 oz...maybe it was 15? I used 1 tsp of lemon juice rather than zest, and the bell peppers I had were frozen slices of red, yellow and green, and everything we had didn't quite total 1/2 a cup, so we had all three kinds in our mixture. Then I ran in to a snag...
I don't own a pizza pan, or any round pan!
...and neither do the two friends I called, haha!
So, I ended up doing sort of half circles on the rectangular pans I do have, like this...

and it was a hit! It was a light meal, perfect for spring or summer. It was really good- everyone of us enjoyed it. I'm pretty sure my kids have never raved about anything I've made as much as they did this, haha.
Not so great as left overs- crescent rolls don't reheat very well.

But the story behind the title?
As I was rotating the pans in the oven, because the two rectangle pans didn't fit very well,
one pan was resting on the stove and started slipping....
and in my attempt to shove it back on and save it...
I flipped it over.
and it looked like this:

That was not happy.

Valentine Jello

My husband saw THIS on one of our favorite food-inspiration blogs so I bought the ingredients and we're having it with our Valentines dinner!
I must admit, while I was mixing the white gelatin (for 30. long. minutes.) I was worried that it wouldn't taste good...it did NOT smell good.... However, it was a big hit and it was very yummy! PHEW! haha! As a note, I bought Juicy Juice Berry to make the red jello.

Here are my pictures...

 ta-da!

Simple Chicken Soup

Today our corner of the world experienced something called Freezing Rain. And it was very cold, even in the house. Plus a couple of us were not feeling well, so it was the absolute perfect day for chicken noodle soup! I used this post as my starting point and here's what I did:

We had about 2.5 cups of frozen turkey stock left from Thanksgiving, which I put in the pot, on medium heat. Then I chopped up 1 onion, 8 carrots and 5 celery stalks, and put them in the pot as I completed each kind of veggie. I pulled out 4 boneless-skinless chicken pieces and put them in the microwave to thaw just a little. I cut them into very thin slices, similar to the carrot "coins", and chicken is easy to cut if its partially frozen. I put in two bay leaves, a tbsp of minced garlic, 3 cups of water, 2 cubes of chicken bouillon and some black pepper. My husband added maybe a tbsp of lemon juice too.

I was going to put in egg noodles, but I mentioned that I don't like noodles in my soup and my husband said it would be totally fine to leave them out! yeay! haha! With the chicken cut as thin as it was, it didn't take long to cook- really only until the carrots were done. We served it with biscuits and there was our dinner! I think my quantity will do 7-8 servings. And it was very tasty!

Chicken with spinach and mozzarella

It's been a while!! I've been just making more of the same for the last long while, or even (gasp!) eating out! But here's a post for you!

I needed a new idea for dinner and saw this linked on facebook. So, I tried browsing the links and we had the ingredients for this one so hey, hey! there was the winner!
Well, I sort of had the ingredients. I didn't know we were out of shredded mozzarella, so I used string cheese, haha! And because it won't get over 20* outside...and my grill is totally covered in ice and snow, I didn't grill the chicken- I just browned it on the stove. meaning I cut the frozen pieces of chicken into two (giving them all a flat side), laid the pieces in a hot cast iron pan, ground up some black pepper over them, and sprinkled on a bit of seasoning salt as the chicken cooked.
I used another pan to heat up the spinach mixture.
When the chicken was cooked thru, I put the pieces on a foil-lined cookie sheet, smothered each piece with the spinach mixture, and topped that with strings of cheese, haha. Most of the chicken pieces got a slice of frozen red pepper, but I knew the kids wouldn't love it so I left it off some. The spinach was SOO tasty with the garlic!

I served it with some not-totally-done brown rice, the crunch made it so tasty!! And then just some simple mixed vegetables on the side.
My son didn't love the spinach, even tho he loves garlic, but the rest of us enjoyed it a lot!

Too bad the lighting in our dining room is crummy, especially at dinner time...