It’s about that time of year when the sun is shining and the air is warm – time to make some sun tea! Since I’ve gotten back into my health kick and mostly taken soda pop out of my diet (I did say mostly – two or three a week is perfectly fine!), tea or water is my drink of choice. One of my favorite ways to add a little variety to my sun tea is by adding different flavored tea bags. Right now sitting on the deck is strawberry sun tea, which will be sure to be a favorite of both me and the kids. Luckily it’s not hard to find all kinds of different flavored tea bags at the store. The strawberry we picked up was a generic store brand even. Yes, it really is that easy! Read More →
Our local Pizza Ranch has a new pizza on their buffet that my mom and I have fallen in love with. So of course, I had to try to duplicate it, since I tend to do that with a lot of yummy dishes I find at restaurants. Over the weekend we tried,and it was a huge success. What I love about this pizza is it’s so simple. All you need is 4 ingredients plus a thin pizza crust. It’s not as impressive as our “Mountain pizzas” we usually make, but it’s yummy regardless. Those 4 ingredients are: - Alfredo sauce - Spinach (we used baby spinach) - Roma tomatoes - Mozzarella shredded cheese Yup. That’s it! Baked for about 20mins on 400*, it was fantastic and oh so easy. Enjoy! Read More →
We’ve been making a lot of hamburgers lately, mostly because I keep buying frozen patties. I know, way to cheat right? It’s just easier, especially since we got the George Foreman grill and can just throw the patties right on it. Since we’ve been making hamburgers so much, we’re always looking for new stuff to put on top of them. Last week we made burgers twice, and had several unusual toppings available. Here’s a run down of what we’ve used: - Avocado Yup, sounds odd but this is one of my favorite things to put on a burger. I’ll even go so far as to as for it in restaurants when getting burgers. - Bacon Not so odd, but sometimes forgotten. Made easier with our grill, even though the bacon isn’t quite as good if we’d cooked it normal. Since it goes on a hamburger, it doesn’t really...
What a combination, eh? Well, it just so happens this is what’s sitting in our fridge right now and needs to be used.I feel like we’re in an episode of Chopped, and I’m totally caught off guard. How we ended up with such a mismatched selection of foods I’ll never know. I guess this is what happens when you let the kids influence what you buy. Hey, at least they were asking for nutritious foods and not junk, right? Not to fear though, I have a plan. Last week I picked up some frozen hamburger patties (hurray for being lazy), which will go well with the blue cheese and mushrooms. Actually, I’m going to make a sauce of sorts out of the blue cheese and slightly tweek this recipe here. Maybe substitute mushrooms for onions or something like that. Either way the blue cheese and mushrooms are going together, and on...
It was a week or so in the making, but we did it. Right down to the starter itself, we made it! The starter wasn’t nearly as complicated as I would have thought. Just a cup of flour and a cup of water in a plastic container, and we were set. After that it just needed to be “fed” every day for the next few days. (This site has some excellent details on how to start your sourdough starter, how to feed it, and what to do with it later on). I did cheat a bit and used a different bread recipe, one a little less complicated from where we got our starter instructions from. One that just said “use a starter”, which we had. I pulled the recipes from this site, which had more than just bread. Here’s the one we used, in the bread machine, and baked: 1 1/2 cups sourdough starter, room temperature 1/2 cup plus 3 Tablespoons...
I can be quite the lazy cook sometimes. While it’s true I love my bread machine and the pizza crust we make with it often, sometimes I just want something a little faster. Years ago before we even thought of having a bread machine, I made my pizza with the most unlikely crust. Flour tortillas. Yup, those things you usually make tacos and quesedillas with. I used them for pizza crust. The other day I got to thinking about it, and decided I wanted to use them again. Why not? It made an EXCELLENT thin crust, and was really tasty too. I use several too, spreading them out in the shape of a full size round pizza, so they overlap a bit. I used another old favorite substitution for pizza sauce – plain old tomato sauce. Since we added spices to the rest of the pizza, adding anything to the sauce really wasn’t necessary (I did it...
I absolutely love cooking roast. I actually love cooking it more than I love eating it, but that’s beside the point. What I love more is adding fun ingredients and seeing what comes of it. The Experimental Pot Roast One Sunday while snowed in, I decided it was a perfect day to throw a roast in the oven. But I decided to throw some different things in and see what came out of it. Here’s what I added: - Blend of spice including sun dried tomato - Fennel seeds - Fresh cracked pepper - Garlic salt - Roasted red bell peppers (from a jar) - Jalapenos - Red potatoes Now granted the blend of spices I had is going to be slightly difficult to recreate, unless you have the exact fun spice container I have. But it proves a point you can about add anything you want to a roast depending on your tastes. If you happen to see “fun blends...
Kids aren’t the easiest critics to please, that’s for sure. So if you need some ideas for easy dinner ideas for kids that they’ll actually EAT, we’ve put together a list for ya. We didn’t just go by what the Idea Queen children said, but asked around a bit for some more kid-friendly meals others would enjoy as well. So here it is, the top -number- easy dinner ideas for kids: 1. Pizza And I don’t mean ordering it! No, homemade pizza isn’t as hard as you think, especially when you stick to one topping. Pepperoni is usually safe, and lucky for us moms, a super easy topping. Premade pizza crust in a bag, easy squeezable sauce, and a package of pepperoni and shredded cheese. Hey, I said easy, not completely healthy. 2. Tacos Maybe a little more effort than the pizza, but still pretty easy. Fix up some...
You’ve got a pound of ground beef. Now what to do with it? Here are a few of our favorite easy dinner ideas with ground beef: - Tacos This is our favorite meal around here, and it’s made on a regular basis. Not just any taco meat will do though! See our suggestions on cooking perfect taco meat. If you have just a pound of hamburger, this is usually enough for 2 kids and 2 adults if your serving a few sides or load up on the toppings. The taco meat recipe can also be done with 2 pounds without problems. - Hamburgers or Beef Burgers No duh right? But sometimes we forget that sometimes ground beef can be just ground beef. You can make it interesting by adding different sauces or veggies. One of my favorite restaurant meals is a hamburger with avocado and mushrooms. YUM! - Meatloaf Not a very complicated dish, and recipes are usually...
I thawed out some pork chops for supper, then sat there and looked at them for a minute all naked on the counter. I had absolutely NO idea what I was going to do with them just yet, which is the way I normally cook. Thaw out some meat, then figure it out. Let me tell you, that’s lead to more than one interesting meal, and not always great. Still, seems to work for us for the most part. I started with a recipe for Chicken Fried Pork Chops, but really this was just to spark some ideas. With it being 4pm, I didn’t have time to mess with the crockpot (which this may be why I never use it – that requires planning). So I improvised with no more than a glance at it. First, the breading. I took milk, eggs, and sour cream and mixed them in a bowl. Yes you heard me, sour cream. I’ve had issues in the past with breading, so I...
