Some of My Favorites, Revisited

Do you have dishes that you have made so many times you don't even have to look at the card anymore?  I have several.  Family favorites (or maybe just mine) that we make time and time again because you don't really have to put any thought into it.  I am sure you all know what I am talking about.  Well, here's my problem....when I stop looking at a recipe, I start getting creative.  So, here are three recipes that are a "new twist" on an old recipe.

1.) Broccoli Casserole.  My changes to this one are not earth shattering, but enough that my husband who does not like broccoli and used to only tolerate the casserole can now eat more of it than I do, and that's saying a lot.  The original recipe is a staple for any  kind of holiday meal at my grandmother's house and I LOVE it just the way it was.  I only changed a couple of things and now, it is a recipe that I can remember without having to dig out the card every time.

Broccoli Casserole

1 bunch of FRESH broccoli, chopped (Jimmy says this makes all the difference!)

1/2 of a medium onion, chopped

2 Tbsp butter

1 cup instant white rice, prepared according to directions on box

1 can cream of mushroom soup (The original calls for cream of celery.  I suppose you could use cream of broccoli, etc. and come out with similar results.)

4 oz. Velveeta

3 slices of whole wheat bread, cubed

2 Tbsp butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  

Steam broccoli (I just put it in a medium pan with about 1/2 cup of water, put the lid on it and turn the burner on medium.  It takes about 5 minutes.).  Drain all water off of broccoli.  Add chopped onions and butter.  Put the lid back on the pan and let simmer until onions are tender.  Add soup and  Velveeta.  Cook, stirring frequently, until cheese is melted.  Pour into a greased 2 quart casserole dish. 

In a small bowl, melt butter.  Add bread cubes and toss well.  Top casserole with buttered bread crumbs.  

Bake for 20-30 minutes or until bubbly.

2.) Brownies.  I will be honest.  I am not a huge brownie fan, but Jimmy could eat them all day every day.  I  have attempted to make brownies from scratch, but they never turn out as good as the ones from a mix, so I gave up on that a long time ago.  Every now and then, though, I start feeling creative and start adding things to the mix.  And every now and then, they actually turn out pretty good.  This recipe has turned into a small (ok, HUGE) addiction in our house and I have received so many compliments.  If only they knew how EASY this is.

S'mores Brownies

1 large box brownie mix (I use Betty Crocker "Family Size" Fudge Brownie mix)

3 eggs, beaten

1/3 cup water

2.3 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup peanut butter and chocolate chips

3 graham crackers, crushed

1 cup mini marshmallows

Prepare brownies according to directions on box.  Bake in a 9x13 pan.  As soon as they are done, turn your oven to broil.  Top brownies with peanut butter and chocolate chips, crushed graham crackers and marshmallows.  Put back into the oven and WATCH CAREFULLY for marshmallows to become toasted (this only takes 1-2 minutes.).  Remove from oven immediately.  Allow to cool for a few minutes before trying to cut

3.)  BBq Chicken Wrapped in Bacon.  I think I have already posted Jimmy's most delicious chicken wrapped in bacon recipe.  I kid you not, he won my heart with that mess in college.  It is a go-to recipe that I don't mind going to time and time again.  Last night, he took it to a whole new level....barbecue sauce!!  And instead of wrapping the bacon around chicken breast "tenders," he used whole breast and turned them into more of a roll.  Then, while on the grill, he topped them off with a little barbecue sauce.  YUM YUM!

BBQ -Chicken and Bacon Rolls

3-4 chicken breasts (he cut these in half "widthwise"?  so they would not be very thick and then cut each into about 2-3 pieces)

bacon (the same number of slices as you have pieces of chicken

1 cup of your favorite barbecue sauce

Start the grill to let it be getting ready.  Prepare chicken.  Salt and pepper each piece.  Lay one slice of bacon on cutting board.  Put one piece of chicken on top.  Roll chicken and bacon into a "pinwheel."  Secure with a toothpick.  Repeat with remaining chicken and bacon.  Brush with barbecue sauce. Cook on grill until chicken is no longer pink, turning once during cooking.  This probably took 15-20 minutes total. Brush again with barbecue sauce and allow to cook for 1-2 additional minutes.  

This morning, I turned one of these "rolls" into a quesadilla and it was even more delicious than I thought it would be.  I simply sliced the chicken and put it on a flour tortilla,  added a few small pieces of apple that I we had leftover from breakfast and then topped with cheddar and provolone cheese. 

So, there are three super-easy and delicious recipes for you to try.  What have you been having for dinner lately?  Have you dug up an "oldy, but goody?"  Have you gotten creative and changed up something you have made a million times before?  Share!  We are back to having cube steak for dinner tonight...blah!

It's the Most Important Meal of the Day!

So, just as we all suspected, me finding time to maintain this blog hasn't exactly been as successful as I had hoped it would be.  I won't give you a long list of excuses because, well, I don't really have any good ones, so I will just post some recipes and wish you all a great weekend!

Today's Theme:  Breakfast!

Breakfast has never been my favorite meal.  I haven't liked eggs since I was a toddler and quite frankly, I don't care too much for eating first thing in the morning.  This proves to be a problem about 9am when my stomach is growling and my patience is wearing thin because all I care about is "when is lunch?"  So, help a girl out...post your favorite breakfast recipes. Things that can be made ahead and heated up and eaten "on the go" would be great. 

Here are a couple of my favorites:

Brunch Casserole

4 pieces of bread, cubed
1 pound sausage
6 eggs, beaten
1 tsp dry mustard
1 cup milk
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 350.  Spray a 9x13 baking dish with non-stick spray.  Line bottom of baking dish with bread crumbs.  Brown sausage in a skillet.  Drain.  Spoon sausage on top of break in baking dish.  Combine eggs, milk and dry mustard.  Pour over top of sausage and bread.  Top with cheese.  Bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes or until eggs are set and cheese is melted. 

*This recipe works well for individual servings if you make it in a muffin tin.
**Can be made the day ahead and kept in the refrigerator or even frozen.

Sausage Mini Muffins

1 pound bulk pork sausage

1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cheddar cheese soup, undiluted

1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

2/3 cup water

3 cups biscuit/baking mix

Preheat oven to 350 degreees. In a skillet over medium heat, cook sausage until no longer pink; drain. In a bowl, combine soup, cheese and water. Stir in biscuit mix until blended. Add sausage. Fill greased muffin cups three-fourths full. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks. Serve warm.

Pineapple Upside Down Biscuits

1 (10-ounce) can crushed pineapple

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1/4 cup (1/2 stick butter), at room temperature

10 maraschino cherries

1 (12-ounce) package refrigerated buttermilk biscuits (10 count)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease 10 cups of a muffin tin. Strain the can of crushed pineapple, save juice for later. Combine the pineapple, sugar, and butter, and mix well. Divide the pineapple mixture among the muffin cups. Place a cherry in the center of each muffin cup, making sure cherry hits bottom of cup. Place 1 biscuit in each cup on top of sugar and pineapple mixture. Spoon 1 teaspoon reserved pineapple juice over each biscuit. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until golden. Cool for 2 minutes. Invert the pan onto a plate to release the biscuits. Serve warm.


Iced Chocolate Chip Scones
(*We make this recipe in one of my cooking labs at school...if high school freshmen can do it, you can too!  They are always a big hit!)


2 cups flour + extra flour for rolling
2 Tablespoons sugar
6 Tablespoons cold butter
2 Tablespoons butter, melted
1 egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup mini chocolate chips


Icing


1 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons cocoa
1/3 teaspoon vanilla
2 Tablespoons milk (may need more)


Mix powdered sugar and cocoa together in small bowl.  Add the vanilla and milk and stir.  Add more milk 1 teaspoon at a time if needed.


Preheat oven to 450.  In a large bowl, combine the flour and sugar. Cut the 6 tablespoons of butter into very small pieces and use your hands to cut it into the flour mixture. (Should look like coarse crumbs.)  Add the chocolate chips.  Stir the buttermilk and egg together in a small bowl and add to crumb mixture.  Stir until moistened.  Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface.  Knead 8-10 times.  Divide the dough in half.  Pat into 5-inch circles.  Cut each circle into 6-8 wedges.  Place around 1 inch apart on greased baking sheet.  Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in the microwave.  Brush the tops of each scone with melted butter.  Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until golden brown.  Use a spoon t drizzle icing on each.


Easy Buttermilk Biscuits


2 cups flour
5 tablespoons shortening
1 cup buttermilk
2 tablespoons butter, melted


Preheat oven to 450.  Spray a baking sheet with cooking oil, set aside.   Measure flour and place in a mixing bowl.  Place the shortening in the middle of the flour and cut it in using 2 knives or a pastry blender.  When the flour/shortening mixture looks like "little peas" pour in the buttermilk.  Stir until moistened with a fork and roll into a ball.  Lightly flour countertop and pat out dough to the thickness of a deck of cards.  Cut out biscuits using a biscuit cutter (you can use a glass if you don't have a biscuit cutter).  Be sure to dip the biscuit cutter/glass into flour so dough will not stick.  Place the biscuits on the prepared baking sheet, and brush the tops with melted butter.  Bake for 10-12 minutes.




I hope these recipes help you to get your days off to a great start.  Now it's your time to share your favorite morning time (or "breakfast for dinner") recipes!

They say the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach!

I think the same applies to women, or at least to me! When we first started dating, I was an RA in the dorm at UT Martin. On my "duty" nights, Jimmy would often bring me dinner cooked in his illegal toaster oven. What can I say, chicken wrapped in bacon, some rice-a-roni and a can of mixed vegetables is pretty good when you've got a night of noise complaints and checking fire extinguishers ahead of you. One day, I will post his super easy chicken recipe, but in the mean time, here's what I prepared for our Valentine's dinner.

Main Course:

I made the stuffed shells recipe Emily posted in response to my "go to" meal post. I dropped the bowl I had thawed the spinach in, thus ruining the spinach and breaking a bowl I really thought was unbreakable. So, no spinach, but they were still delicious without it. Will DEFINITELY try again and maybe next time all of my dishes will survive.

For a side item, I bought frozen asparagus for the first time ever. We love fresh asparagus, but it was almost $5 a pound and looked AWFUL! I put aluminum foil on a baking sheet, divided the asparagus into 3 bundles, tied each one together with a piece of bacon, salted and peppered them to taste and baked at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes. YUM YUM! I think it was even better leftover the next day.

Garlic cheese bread was pretty simple...just bought Italian bread in Kroger's bakery, sliced it about an inch think and topped it with butter, garlic and parmesan cheese.

Dessert

Hershey Bar Pie

2 (4.4 oz) Hershey bars

small container of whipped topping, thawed

graham cracker pie crust

Melt Hershey bars. Stir in whipped topping until smooth. Pour into pie crust. Refrigerate at least 30 minutes or until ready to serve.

Nothing fancy, but it was all very good.

Your job is to share what you cooked for your sweetheart this year. (We don't want to hear it if he took you out...share another recipe and make us feel better about slaving over a hot stove on V-Day!)

New Day, New Look, New Name??

So, next week's menu is planned thanks to recipes and other blogs shared in response to my first post and let me tell you, I am liking this...A LOT! When I set up the blog yesterday, I didn't pay much attention to design, so I changed it a little bit today. The background is a little more suited to the topic and I added a search feature so that WHEN we have hundreds of recipes posted, we can search based on ingredients, etc. I also noticed that there is already a blog called "The Dinner Dilemma," so I am trying to come up with something a little more creative for this one...any ideas?

While you think on that, here's a recipe.

Lasagna (recipe from Jimmy's grandmother)

1 pound ground beef

1 medium onion, chopped

12 oz. tomato paste

24 oz. water

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

I Tbsp parsley flakes

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp sugar

12 lasagna noodles

16 oz cottage cheese

2 eggs

cheese for topping (parmesan and mozzarella)

In a large skillet, brown ground beef. Drain. Add onions. Cook until onions are done. Add tomato paste, water and seasonings. Simmer at least one hour. (The longer the better!) Cook noodles until done. Beat eggs and add to cottage cheese. Layer ingredients beginning with sauce, then a layer of noodles, then cottage cheese mixture. End with sauce on top. Top with cheeses. Bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour or until bubbly and cheese is melted.

Help is on the way...I hope!

So, you know you have finally arrived at adulthood when you spend your snow days chatting with your girlfriends about the price of daycare and that dreaded question, "What's for dinner?" Menu planning seems to be a common problem, at least among my friends. It's the same ol' thing over and over and over. You know what I am talking about...those same five meals you cook week after week after week. No one in your family gets excited about them, but as my dad would say, they "fill an empty spot" and you don't have to think too much about them, so you continue to cook them over and over and over.

It's time for a dinner time revolution! Your "I'm so sick of this, I'd rather eat Spam!" might be my, "Wow! I never thought about that!" So, let's share recipes, menus, meal plans, etc. and see if we can't all help each other out of that dreaded dinner time rut.

My hope for this blog is for us to share recipes...some we are sick of, some we love no matter how many times we have them, some we've never tried at all. So, I will try to update regularly (who knows how often that will be...maybe once a week) and you respond accordingly. So...let's get started...first task...share the recipe/meal that you make so often you don't care if you EVER have it again! (Just respond to this post...we'll see how that works.)

Here's mine:

Cubed Steak

3 cube steaks

Dales marinade

1 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

1 egg

1/4 cup milk

2 Tablespoons cooking oil

*you may also cook sliced onions and/mushrooms if you would like to. I usually cook those before I cook the steak and remove them from the skillet before adding the steak.

About an hour before you want to have dinner, put steaks into ziplock bag and cover with Dale's marinade. Refrigerate until ready to cook.

Mix flour and seasonings in a shallow bowl. Mix egg and milk in a separate bowl. Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat. Remove the steaks from the refrigerator. One at a time coat with the egg mixture on both sides and then with the flour mixture. Repeat. Place in a single layer in the skillet. Cook approximately 5 minutes on each side or until outside is brown and crispy and the meat is no longer pink. (I will confess that I always cut these open to be sure!) On a good day, I can pull off a pretty decent gravy by removing the cooked steaks and then browning about 3 tablespoons of flour in the skillet and then slowly adding about 3/4 of a cup of water. I make no guarantees on that one.

Cubed steak is very inexpensive and most people like it. It is a good meal...the first 200,000 times you eat it!

Now, it's your turn!