Peanut Butter Oatmeal Dream Bars

I think I found this recipe on Pinterest and have been looking forward to trying it out! Trouble with baking and babysitting is that you overlook steps...like the bake time for the filling.... lol. Oh well- it still turned out very tasty! 

You can find the recipe HERE.
I did not use dark brown sugar, and I used regular oats. Also, I don't have a ton of experience with sweetened condensed milk, but I was surprised to note that it just kept thickening the longer it sat there mixed with the pb. And it was difficult to spread so I just put dollops of it on the crust to get it everywhere. :)
I only had dark choc chips in the house, and couldn't find king size Reese PB Cups so I just chopped up 6 of the regular sized ones like this:

I think next time I might possibly cut the salt in half. And the author is right- chill them first. Don't get me wrong- the gooey mess IS dreamy good, but really messy, haha!

Fried pizza egg rolls!

This post is to let the new readers know the real me, and that health food is not 110% normal around here...giggle...

The other night for dinner we had deep fried pizza, haha! (sort of)

The "recipe" (instructions, really) was found HERE.
It really is just a string cheese, with a few pieces of pepperoni, rolled up in egg roll wrappers!

This time they were fried for 3 minutes each. The cheese was not melty like we hoped, so my husband decided that he would fry them less, and then put them in the oven under high heat to better melt the cheese.
He whipped up some pizza sauce, based on our spaghetti sauce recipe HERE, but with a bit of Worcestershire sauce and maybe a few other changes. He and I dipped our pizza sticks and the kids preferred it without the sauce. Also, with the salads, 3 sticks filled up my husband and I, and the kids could only finish 2 each.
Then we had salads and carrot sticks on the side to help round it out a bit, haha!

ETA: Fried 2 minutes, put in a 300* oven as they come out of the fryer, serve about 10 minutes after the last batch goes in the oven.

Hummus!

I really like hummus, but the cheapest way to get it is at Costco and I get tired of the one flavor over and over. I was excited when I saw this link on pinterest to try making our own! So here's our journey...

After trying 4 local stores, I couldn't find tahini anywhere, but we did finally find a bottle of sesame seeds...and my husband checked google and learned that tahini is just sesame seeds and olive oil!! We used our Blendtec to make it smooth and tada- that step was done!

fresh tahini!

If I can get it frozen or whole, I try not to buy canned foods, believe it or not. So I bought a bag of dry chickpeas for this. Chickpeas soaked for 13 hours, simmered on the stove about an hour, until tender. (can I just say how amusing it was to find myself sorting dry beans, late at night, to soak in my grandmother's pot...when she's the reason I remember sorting dry beans ever)
And then the mixing began! He used the food processor to make the different hummus blends.

Classic Hummus

First my husband made the CLASSIC variety on that link-
16 oz chickpeas
1/3 cup tahini
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. lemon juice
1 scoop minced garlic
 It came out really thick, so he just drizzled more olive oil while it mixed til it was smooth. Then he still added more lemon and some salt and pepper. Pretty good- but the tahini was really strong, so next time we'll use less. Maybe because it was fresh?

Guaca-Hummus

Next up- the GUACA-HUMMUS!
16 oz chickpeas
1 avocado
1 jalapeno
1/4 cup cilantro
2 tbsp. lime juice
salt
pepper
ok, I absolutely love guac, and this was UH-mazing!! It was like a lighter, clean guac, if that makes any sense at all... it is SO good with tortilla chips or pita chips! YUM!

Southwestern Hummus

Then, he was going to make the tapenade variety, but I was raving about the guaca-hummus so much that he said he could just make that again. Since I only bought one jalapeno, he swapped out that for the roasted red peppers (shown below). So here's a different SOUTHWESTERN HUMMUS and um, it might be the winner!!!
1 avocado
2 cups chickpeas
1/4 cup cilantro
1/2 bottle roasted red peppers (about 6oz)
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp chili powder
2 tbsp. lime juice
drizzled olive oil to make it a smooth paste
 It has a kick, but it's a good one!

 

Classic, Southwestern & Guaca-Hummus, ready to be enjoyed!

and incase you have as much "fun" looking for the roasted red peppers as I did- they're by the pickles, (not the vegetables, nor the Mexican, nor the Italian) and this is the bottle I grabbed.

*Hummus, as far as I know, is used in two basic ways- as a dip or as a sandwich spread. I'm allergic to the fresh vegetables I've heard of dipping into it, so I usually eat it with Keebler Townhouse Flatbread crisps, or Keebler Pita crackers. The Bagel Chips are really good with it too, and I am absolutely going to use tortilla chips with the other flavors we made tonight! I'm also considering sandwichy ideas to use it in!

Let me know if you make your own hummus and what you think! :) I am looking forward to meals this week!

**Edited:
1/27: Tonight he made the Tapenade variety in the same link. We were very low on parsley so he threw in some dried oregano, and some onion powder and it too is fantastic! Have you tried these yet??

Shakes for 2014

I haven't posted here in a long time! But actually I have a dozen or so draft posts (41 actually...!), haha, that I should really get back to! We'll see how it goes...

In the meantime, we got a Blendtec blender for Christmas from my parents which means that all smoothies now come out smooth. This makes breakfast easy so we bought a bunch of fresh produce to combine with frozen produce and put together some baggies inspired by this link HERE that keeps showing up on facebook. Once we got it done, I posted this pic on facebook and got some questions, so here's the place to answer them!

What's that? Oh, just 16 bags ready to be thrown into smoothies! Spinach, pomegranate, apple, banana, pineapple, peach, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, ginger just waiting for oj, yogurt, coconut oil and milk! Yeay breakfast!

So! What's our plan?
On a {recent} typical day, I throw in:
- some frozen berries,
- a couple handfuls of spinach,
- two spoonfuls of yogurt (plain or vanilla),
- a tbsp. of coconut oil,
- half a chocolate instant breakfast packet (kills any bitterness or hint of spinach taste),
- pour on some milk and tada- breakfast!

We had frozen strawberries and peaches, and then we bought fresh spinach, a pineapple, a pomegranate, bananas, some gingerroot and some apples, and then more frozen berries (blackberries, blueberries and raspberries). We peeled and chopped and otherwise prepped things, and then just started tossing them into baggies! Every bag got some spinach and a slice of ginger. I made some pineapple/pomegranate bags for the Orange Shake, and some bags were just berry mixes.

Today, for example, I had the updated Orange Shake. I threw in my bag of pineapple, pomegranate and ginger, 1/3 cup frozen oj concentrate and the milk and there it was!
I plan to throw in the yogurt and milk every day and on berry days add the instant breakfast. And yes, I've also been putting about a tbsp. of coconut oil into my smoothies because that's supposed to help with thyroid issues and apparently I need that. With the Blendtec, at least, it comes out totally smooth, and I was concerned about that- I don't want a chunk of oil while I'm sipping my fruit, lol!

Happy healthy mornings to you!

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!