I have been on a french bread pizza kick lately. It's a fun, fast way to satisfy a pizza craving.
I found the key to great french bread pizza is to butter and toast the bread before you add the toppings. I added a little crushed garlic to the butter too. It makes the pizza extra crispy after you bake it with the sauce, cheese and toppings.
I wanted to make something that Aaron and I could have for breakfast quickly each morning, so I decided to make a quiche. Can you believe I've never made one before? It was so easy to make and it turned out delicious! All we had to do was cut a slice each morning and heat it up in the microwave.
A lot of people asked what recipe I used and it's the quiche lorraine recipe out of my tried and true classic Betty Crocker cook book.
The hardest part of the recipe was waiting 10 minutes before digging in! (weird mini hands courtesty of Aaron)
Every year I feel I need to outdo the Super Bowl party snack I made the previous year. Luckily, my friend Liz sent me this recipe for Kimchi Queso, and double lucky... Aaron and I just made a big batch of kimchi. (I am always torn as to whether I should type kimchee or kimchi. I need to commit to one or the other)
It turned out pretty well, but I think if I made it again I would use some Velveeta. *gasp* Yeah - nothing melts as well as Velveeta. The cheddar straight up has a tendency to separate and not stay dippable very long. Here are 14 cheesy facts about Velveeta.
When Aaron and I were at The Cub Room, he ordered a Bloody Mary. I tried a sip... and I liked it... except for the alcohol. What can I say? I'm not much of a drinker.
I wanted to make our own at home so I could leave the alcohol out of mine... and experiment with what sort of additions I could have sticking out of the glasses!
After looking online and doing some tweaking, this was the recipe we came up with.
3 cups of tomato juice
3 tablespoons lemon juice
3 tablespoons lime juice
1/3 cup pickle juice
2 tablespoons worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon hot sauce
2 tablespoons horseradish
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon celery salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon pepper
(if you are having it spiked - 1 oz vodka)
For garnish, we rimmed the glasses with bacon salt and added sticks of bacon and stirrers speared with olives.
I would also like to point out that I don't like the name "Bloody Mary", (invented and first called that in 1921). A drink with the word "blood" in it grosses me out. I have opted to call these "Spicy Mateys".
Last year my mom got me the coolest Crock Pot. It is wifi enabled! I connected it to our home wifi and then downloaded the wemo app which allows me to communicate with the Crock Pot remotely. I can schedule the cooking, check in on it, change the settings and get notifications.
Crock Pot season is here and Aaron was hungry for pot roast so I used a combination of a recipe from my Betty Crocker cookbook and the Crock Pot booklet. You can see how I was able to check in on the pot roast during the day. Aaron kept texting me - "How is the pot roast?!"
The pot roast was perfect when I got home. What you see here is the topping of spices and horseradish on top.
I am hooked! There are lots of recipes on the Crock Pot website that I can't wait to try.
Beef stew | Slow cooker lasagna | Cheesy Jalapeno Chicken Burritos | Easy Italian Sausage Scramble | Slow Cooker Apple Oatmeal | Cinnamon Swirl French Toast Casserole
I canned a few jars of homemade grape juice. Isn't the color gorgeous? They look like quart sized lava lamps.
The grapes came from my parents' vines. Ignore the pug foot. The pugs didn't help me pick at all, so I don't know why they are trying to get into the picture.
The grapes may not have come from our own garden but I couldn't help using these stickers made with this embosser we ordered almost a year ago. How cute are they?
I'm going to post the grape juice recipe here again. It's just so darn easy and tasty.
I just love birthdays and I always work to make them as special as possible for people. When I was planning Aaron's birthday, I worked out his birthday week gifts and a special dinner out. Picked up the cards and a balloon. But what to do for a cake? Then it hit me. He LOVES peanut butter pie. But it is the one thing I have not made for him. I've never made a peanut butter pie. The day had come. It was going outside the usual birthday cake but I didn't think he would mind.
I don't think I've seen him so delighted before. And it wasn't the dinosaur candle holder.
Peanut butter pie is way easier to make than I realized. I feel a little bad I haven't made one sooner than this. But that probably made it taste all the better right?
Here is how I made it:
Peanut Butter Pie
1 package of Nutter Butter cookies
5 tablespoons melted butter
1 and 1/4 cup peanut butter
1 softened 8 oz package of cream cheese
1 and 1/4 cups powdered sugar
1 thawed 8 oz Cool Whip
Crust: Turn the cookies into crumbs in a food processor. Mix with melted butter and press into pie pan. Bake in 350 degree oven for 5 minutes.
Filling: Whip peanut butter and cream cheese with a mixer. Add in sugar and continue to whip. Add in Cool Whip and beat until nice and smooth. Scrape filling into cooled pie crust and put in the fridge for at least one hour.
(actually I get the 12 oz Cool Whip and use the extra on top of each pie slice)
Just when I thought dutch babies couldn't get any better, Aaron came up with an idea. My mom just gave me another small cast iron pan and so he made BABY dutch babies in them! Single serving dutch babies for breakfast!
We have been having dutch babies in our house for breakfast and brunch for years. The way they pouf up is always a fun morning show.
To shake things up this time, we made a sort of bananas foster syrup to pour on top.
Here is our tried and true Dutch Baby recipe:
2 whisked eggs
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup milk
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter
Cut butter into a cast iron pan and heat in a 400 degree oven until the butter melts. While butter is melting, mix other ingredients together. Pull the pan out of oven, pour batter into it and return to the oven. Bake until puffy and browned, about twenty minutes.
I love kitchen tools and I love trying new things. Thanks to a the gift of a Jalapeño Pepper Roaster from a very thoughtful friend, we tried our hand at "standing up" Jalapeño Poppers on the grill. This was timely as I am trying to make summer last by grilling outside as much as possible.
There are lots of recipes online but I made up my own using ingredients I had in the fridge. We had pizza camp pies earlier so I had a few items leftover that were perfect.
Jenny's Pepper Poppers
I stuffed each pepper with a little bit of each of the following.
Cream cheese
Sausage
Fresh Mozzarella
Jalapeño pepper jack cheese
Then Aaron cooked them on the bbq grill for about half an hour.
Note I wore gloves to handle the raw peppers. I've made the mistake of using my bare hands before and paid for it when I took my contacts out later that night.
The peppers had a delightful grilled flavor while the cream cheese cooled down the heat. Nice for an appetizer or as we had them, along with a grilled steak. The roaster was really helpful, because it kept all the cheesy goodness from leaking out of the peppers!
I like to make a lot of things homemade. But sometimes you have to weigh the benefit of how much better something is handmade than it is store-bought, in relation to the amount of time and effort it takes to hand make it. Homemade ricotta is a win win. It tastes significantly better than store-bought AND is fast and easy to make.
As usual, I took bits and parts from recipes I found and came up with one that fit what we had in the pantry.
Handmade Ricotta
Place two layers of damp cheesecloth over a sieve and place the sieve over a bowl.
Bring 4 cups whole milk, 2 cups heavy cream and 1 teaspoon of salt to boil over medium heat.
Turn heat off and stir in 3 tablespoons of white vinegar. Let it sit for 1 minute while it curdles.
Slowly pour the mixture into the sieve and let it drain for a half hour.
That's it! I like to have it while it's still warm but you can keep it in the fridge for about four days and it's still tasty.
Aaron grilled some bread while I roasted garlic and cherry tomatoes in the oven and they all went together with the ricotta. It was melt-in-your-mouth good.
I didn't get a picture of the garlic or tomatoes before they were all gone.
I got some funny looking zucchini in the garden this year. One blobby zuke is earmarked for zucchini bread and the other for supper as zucchini pancakes.
Years ago, I collected a bunch of great zucchini recipes from blog readers. Zucchini pancakes are a crispy and tasty way to use up a zucchini. (the sour cream is key by the way)
We have started picking cucumbers from the garden. Enough to make a small batch of pickles.
We used the cucumbers for a half gallon of shake pickles. I know the jar looks like a quart jar, but that is because Aaron is holding it.
Aaron's mom used to make these pickles. I remember going to their house and taking a turn spinning the jar around the kitchen counter. They are easy to make and you keep them in the fridge so you don't have to can them.
Seven Day Shake Pickles
Enough sliced cucumbers to fill a gallon jar
2 sliced onions
2 1/2 cup sugar
3 cups vinegar
1/4 cup salt
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp tumeric
Layer sliced cucumbers and onions together in a gallon jar. Stir together other ingredients and pour over the cucumbers and onions and place in the refrigerator. Shake once a day for seven days.
Aaron mentioned he used to like 7 Layer salads when he was a kid. I decided to make one for the holiday weekend, but since I am an overachiever, I made a 14 Layer salad!
For a typical 7 Layer Salad you can layer the basic 7 items - lettuce, hard boiled eggs, bacon, celery, onions, peas and cheese. This varies from recipe to recipe to recipe to recipe.
If you want to go for the gold with a 14 Layer Salad - ljc style, then include the addition of spinach, radishes, carrots, mushrooms, peppers, broccoli and cauliflower.
Then the dressing that goes on top is 1 cup mayo, 1 cup sour cream, 1 Tablespoon of sugar and 1 teaspoon of Lawry's season salt.
The Zillion Layer Salad (as Aaron begain to refer to is as) goes great with BBQ Pork Spareribs on the grill. This was our first try at ribs on the grill and they turned out pretty darn tasty. What is Memorial Day weekend without lots of grilling?
While I was in Vegas years ago, my friends Walt and Peggy turned me on to horchata at their favorite Mexican restaurant. Unfortunately every time I go to a local Mexican restaurant, they "didn't make horchata that day".
Being made from rice, I figured I could try my hand at making it myself.
I used this recipe and it was a piece of cake with the Vitamix. The horchata was the perfect pairing with grilled quesadilla and Mexican corn. I'm going to try some of the other recipes I found for a taste comparison.
For some reason both Aaron and I got hungry for broccoli cauliflower salad. It is sort of a picnicky food but we made it anyhow. It's really easy. Basically it is the following ingredient all mixed up together:
broccoli & cauliflower chopped into bite sized bits • crumbled up bacon • small slices of red onion • coleslaw dressing
The other night we decided to make a "fancy pizza". Somewhere I saw a pizza with eggs on top and wanted to give it a try. When I googled "egg on pizza" I found recipes for "mushroom and egg pizza", "asparagus and egg pizza", "spinach and egg pizzza", and more. I figured, why not add it all?!
We started with Wegman's pre-made pizza dough. I had enough to think about with all the veggies than to worry about the dough. To start, we coated the dough with Wegmans Basting Oil (Grapeseed Oil, Canola Oil, Dried Thyme, Dried Parsley, and Garlic - in case you don't have a Wegmans near you) and a drizzle of truffle oil.
Then I added: steamed spinach (with water squeezed out), tomatoe slices, gouda cheese, mozzerella, mushrooms, and steamed asparagus. This went into the oven at 400 degree for about 7 or 8 minutes. I kept checking it to see how the crust was doing. I slid the pizza out, cracked three eggs onto it and baked it another 3 to 4 minutes.
It was delicious but it drives me crazy that the one egg yolk broke.
Lent begins this year on February 18, so the Carnival celebration before Lent begins runs from February 13 to 17. In Italy it is Carnavale, like the famous Carnival of Venice. The Carnival of Venice is where the well known carnival masks come from.
What better to enjoy during Carnival than some delicious Italian pasta? Red Pack has lots of recipes like this one for Italian Gravy. Growing up I had only known of tomato sauce. To me, gravy meant beef or chicken gravy poured over mashed potatoes. Here is a little history as to why this red sauce that simmers all Sunday afternoon is called gravy.
Red Pack sent me a few cans of tomatoes to try and I am absolutely going to give Italian Gravy a shot my next available Sunday.
Red Pack is having a giveaway to make Carnevale even more fun. You could win a big cooking prize pack worth $350 or one of the 300 Red Pack tote bags. Enter here on Facebook. The Giveaway runs though March 4.
Red Pack is also offering one of my readers a Red Pack kit like they sent me! To enter for a chance to win just leave a comment about what dish you would make with Red Pack tomatoes. I will randomly choose a winner a week from now on Wednesday, February 11. Good luck!
UPDATE: I used the random number generator and got the number 5. The 5th comment was Kat! Congrats Kat!
I was flipping through the William Sonoma catalogue when I spied this recipe for Easy Weeknight Chicken. I thought the ingredients sounded really good. Then I saw that it has to soak in the marinade for one hour. In my book, that is not a weeknight dinner. Ironically I should have been tipped off by the misprint of "10 hour incative prep time" as a warning... THIS IS NOT A WEEKNIGHT DINNER.
I made it on the weekend instead. And it was delicious.
While we were in Korea, we had a lot of great food, but my favorite was bibimbap. I didn't have this at home a lot when I was growing up, more of a simpler version of just rice with a couple additions. When I had the full blown dish, I was hooked. I've been looking forward to making it at home. It's not difficult... there are just a lot of separate bits to prepare.
Bibim means "mixed" and bap means "rice". Add in toppings - it's ideal to have at least five different colors of toppings, some gochujang - red chilli paste, bbq beef and a fried egg.
For our bibimbap I made spinach, bean sprouts, carrots, mushrooms, and bbq beef. I added some kimchee I had in the fridge too. I mixed the gochujang with sesame see oil, sugar and garlic for a little sweetness. My fried egg was a little over cooked but I'll work on that.
The entire thing was mixed heartly and eaten with a long handled spoon. Delicious.
I had dolsot, stone bowls to serve the bibimbap in but I didn't heat them up to make dolsot bibimbap. If you heat the bowls, the rice gets nice and crispy on the bottom. I'm not sure if I can heat the stone bowls on our glass stove top, I need to do some research on that first. Hopefully next time I make it I'll have it figured out.
Every holiday we like to have a big batch of Chex mix to snack on, especially while we are playing cards. My Grandmother had always made it and this year I took it on.
I added a few new additions... goldfish crackers and bugles. I tried round pretzel balls but those got thumbs down from the family. Beyond that I used the traditional Chex Mix recipe on the side of the Chex cereal box. Did you know the Chex Mix recipe first showed up on boxes in 1952?!
I learned one thing thorugh trial and error however. Don't cut corners and use the microwave to save time. It is way better if you bake the mix in the oven at 300 degrees for one hour. It makes all the difference.
