Tried and true

You might recall that my New Year's Resolutions were to try new recipes, make more crafts and be more frugal.

Have I become more frugal? I think so.

Have I done more crafting? Ummm...no. But I am relatively caught up on laundry, so I think it evens out.

Have I tried new recipes?  Yes!  While I've made a point to blog about the new Martha Stewart and Everyday Food recipes I've tried, I've had great experiences with meals and desserts from other bloggers and websites.  Also,  Pinterest has become a great source of new recipes for me.  I have boards for general recipes, desserts and vegetable dishes, and I am trying something new as often as possible.

Here's what I've tried, along with the links and my reviews.

Creamy Garlic Pasta by the Cheese Pusher:  OMG this stuff is amazing. I love this recipe. I've made it as a side dish and seeing how it was inhaled by my family, I made it again. The second time around, I added diced cooked chicken to make it the main course. Yum!

Cheesy Vegetable Chowder by Lulu the Baker: this is another great recipe. I foresee creating a crockpot version of this for cool fall nights.

Baked Potato Soup by Mama Loves Food: this was okay. I think I experimented a bit with the amounts of ingredients and technique here (and we all know how that usually turns out for me!) so it wasn't as tasty as I had hoped. I'll try this again in the fall, and next time I'll be sure to follow the instructions.

Crock Pot Chicken Taco Chili by Reds:  this is pretty good (and a good break from regular chili), and as far as cooking/prep go, it's a breeze!  I like to combine any leftovers with rice to make my Tex Mex Chicken Casserole.

Chickpeas in Spicy Tomato Sauce by Food.com: this was okay. I didn't make the recipe as spicy as it could have been, but this was a hearty (and different!) dish. Serve with rice!

Blueberry Breakfast Cake from Alexandra's Kitchen:  this is so, so, so delicious!  It's so cake-like that I feel guilty for eating it as breakfast instead of dessert. Word to the wise, however...Alexandra mentions in the instructions that the cake might need 10 minutes or so longer in the oven...my experience is that it most definitely needs longer time in the over. Just so you know.

Baked Sweet Potato Chips (shown above) from Martha Stewart:  these are amazing. I could eat them all day long!  Keep in mind that I had a sheet of these burn, so at the halfway mark you'll want to keep a close eye on these and probably decrease the baking time.

No Bake Cookies from Lick the Bowl Good: these cookies were a favorite when I was a kid, and I still love them just as much.  I increase the amount of oats by one cup when I use this recipe.

Terribly Terrific Toffee from A Southern Grace: NOM NOM NOM  I've made this recipe three times in less than a week now, and I might do another batch or two this weekend. This toffee, based with plain old saltine crackers, is easy to make and even easier to eat. Give it a try!

In fact, give all these recipes a try! And if you have a recipe I might like, or that you'd like to see featured on The Martha Initiative, be sure to let me know. Happy cooking!

Martha Monday--Fourth of July desserts

Independence Day is almost here...time for grilling out, parades and fireworks!  With the heat wave here in the Midwest, I am looking forward to cool desserts to follow the bbq.  And naturally, Martha has a bunch of ideas on her site.

Since it's too hot to turn on the oven, these Firecracker Ice Pops are worth a try:

This Mixed Berry Salad with Mint also looks refreshing:

But if your dessert needs to contain chocolate, then these super-easy Pretzel Sparklers are for you:

Should you feel the need to take a more traditional route and actually bake despite the soaring temps outside, then I can heartily recommend these Fireworks Cookies:

I made them last year and they were a huge hit. 

This Summer Shortcake is also a real crowd-pleaser:

I've also made this before, and it was delicious! 

My plans for the Fourth are still up in the air, but I'm sure they will include good food, good friends and good desserts.  What are your plans for the Fourth of July?

Desserts for BUNCO

I play BUNCO once a month with a lovely, and sometimes rowdy, group of ladies. We each bring a dish and eat/gab for an hour or so before we start playing. It should come as no surprise to you that 90% of the time, I bring a dessert.

For April BUNCO, I made this amazing Cookie Dough Dip from Add a Pinch (her photo, not mine):

I don't have any photos of my version because every time I went to take a picture, I ended up eating some.  It was so rich and so, so good!  If you need a quick dessert to take to a potluck or summer outing, then this is it!  I served my cookie dip with plain animal crackers, chocolate animal crackers and graham crackers.  I liked it on graham crackers the best, but let's be clear: the cookie is just the delivery device for the dip. The dip is the star here!

Then, for May BUNCO, I made Pioneer Woman's Knock You Naked Brownies (again, her picture, not mine):

These brownies start with a boxed cake mix and turn into something so much more.  These brownies are so rich, so delicious, that they really do almost knock you naked. Even if it's because you eat so many that your clothes no longer fit and you have to run around naked and when you go to the store to buy new clothes you end up buying more ingredients to make more brownies.

In unrelated news, I'm trying to make muumuus the big fashion hit of this summer. Stay tuned. 

PW notes that this dough is really thick, and she mentions shaping a glob for the top layer of brownie with her hands.  My solution is much neater than that: flatten the glob between two sheets of waxed paper for less mess.

Finally, while PW's recipe calls for baking the bottom layer for eight minutes before adding the caramels and top brownie layer, I skipped that step and just baked the whole thing at once. It turned out just fine.

Give these two desserts a try--you'll be glad you did!

Diabolical genius

A recent conversation with my friend Michelle...

Michelle:  Have you ever baked an Oreo inside of a chocolate chip cookie?
Me: NO BUT WHY HAVEN'T I? THAT'S BRILLIANT!
Michelle: I'm thinking of trying that for Easter.
Me:  OMG IT SOUNDS AWESOME!  But how would that work? The chocolate chip cookie dough will slide off the Oreo and make a big mess.
Michelle:  That's what I'm worried about.
Me: BUT NOT IF YOU BAKE IT IN MUFFIN CUPS! DO IT THAT WAY! DO IT NOW!

For those who might be wondering, I do tend to speak in ALL CAPS.  Quite often, in fact.

And a few days later, Michelle brought this into work:

Looks like a fun chocolate chip cookie in a cupcake liner, right?  But there's more...

There was an Oreo inside.  AN OREO INSIDE A CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE.

This thing was so delicious, it was wrong. But if loving it is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

That Michelle is a diabolical genius.  Emphasis on genius! And diabolical. 

Just to cover all the bases.

Martha Monday--On my to-do list

Martha provides me (through her books, magazines, television show and website) with endless inspiration for recipes I want to try, crafts to make, projects to do and more.

Here are the current Martha-inspired things I have on my to-do list:

1. Get started on my gardening

I've been planning my summer garden for quite a while, and it's almost time to start my indoor seeds.  Ideally, I'll have the peppers, tomatoes and broccoli started by mid-March. I'm itching to start seeds RIGHT NOW, but if I start the seeds too soon then I'll have spindly, and less productive, seedlings by the time I'm ready to transplant them outdoors.  Plus, I'd like to buy a few more varieties of seed (winter squash, anyone?)...I need to get on that!

2. Make some tasty Broccoli soup

I have yet to make my own broccoli soup from scratch, a problem which will be remedied later this week.  Maybe I'll add some potatoes and cheddar cheese to transform this recipe into a full meal rather than a starter course, but either way I have a bunch of broccoli in my fridge that must be put to good use.

3. Try my hand at Parisian macarons

That's not a typo...macarons are a beautiful and delicious French sandwich cookie made from almond flour, and making them has been on my to-do list for years.  I have almond flour in my pantry, so making these cookies needs to go from a "to-do" item to a "ta-da DONE" accomplishment.

Right now, the bag of almond flour mocks me every time I'm in the pantry which, based on how much I cook/bake and how popular a hiding spot it is during games with my kiddos, is several times each day.  STOP MOCKING ME, ALMOND FLOUR! 

Don't even get me started on the taunting I receive from my knitting supplies.
They're all "We've been in this closet for over five years! LEARN TO KNIT ALREADY!" 
And I'm all "Your sass is not appreciated. DON'T USE THAT TONE OF VOICE WITH ME!" 

I've been getting a lot of attitude from inanimate objects lately.  Also, I might need more sleep. Or coffee.  Maybe both.

Manda Monday--The 2nd Annual Super Souper Bowl

The 2nd Annual Super Souper Bowl was a huge success and a ton of fun!  We had five entries and everyone had a great time.  Three of the entries were from new competitors...if this keeps up, I might have to get a bigger kitchen island in a few years!

Entries included a traditional chili, a pork chili with ditalini, jambalaya and bacon-infused potato soup.  All were delicious, but this was the winner:

We provided appetizers, drinks and desserts for our guests.  Here's the dessert table:

I made dipped pretzels, cupcakes, cookies and a pretzel-jello dessert not shown because it was in the fridge. And I have to admit, the eclairs are store-bought.  It happens sometimes.

These cookies, however, were not:

Decorated sugar cookies are always a hit, and these are quickly becoming a family project.  The kids and I make the dough, the Big Guy rolls it out, the kids do (most of) the cutting, I bake everything, and then the Big Guy and I decorate the cookies.  My plan is to withdraw bit by bit from this process over the next few years, so eventually I'll be able to supervise from the couch while eating bon-bons and reading magazines.  And maybe napping.  Good times!

I hope everyone had a great Sunday afternoon/evening, whether it involved watching TV or not.

Martha Monday--Whoopie!

Whoopie! Christmas is almost here, making it the perfect time for Christmas Whoopie pies. Yum!

I followed Martha's directions for chocolate Whoopie pies. For the filling, I whipped up a quick buttercream (one stick butter, 3 cups powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons milk...more or less) and added 2 teaspoons of peppermint extract and pink food color.

To up the peppermint flavor, I rolled the sides in crushed candy canes.

Martha's recipe claims to make 24 sandwiches, but I easily got 27...and as you can see, these were huge Whoopie pies!  The next time I make this recipe, I'll halve the ingredients and make smaller cookies for the sandwiches to make the Whoopie pies more bite-size.

These chocolate-peppermint Whoopie pies are a great offering for a Christmas party.  If you have the time (because we all have oodles of spare time just before Christmas, right?) and need a show-stopper dessert for a party, give these Whoopie pies a try!

And so it begins...

I started my Christmas baking last night with two batches of Chocolate-Peppermint cookies and one batch of Mint Surprise cookies. It felt so, so good to bake something Christmas-y...and now I am full of holiday spirit.  And cookies.  

I made my Chocolate-Peppermint cookies as I have for the past several years.  My cookie is based on Hershey's Double Chocolate Mini Kisses Cookies recipe.  I simply decrease the amount of vanilla to one teaspoon, add one teaspoon of peppermint extract, and substitute the Mini Kisses for Andes Peppermint Chip Baking Bits.  Heaven!

I tried a new recipe and combined chocolate with mint to make these Mint Surprise cookies, which is based on Hershey's Triple Chocolate Cookies. I added one teaspoon of mint extract to the batter, omitted the chocolate chips entirely, and used Hershey's Mint Chocolate Truffle Kisses for the top. 

These were absolutely delicious!  The bag of Kisses contained twice what I needed for the recipe, and at the rate these are going, I'll need to make another batch soon. And next time, I might throw in some mint chocolate chips in the batter (instead of the mint extract--or maybe in addition to?) to turn the mint flavor up to full-blast.  Seriously, you should make these--they are amazing!

Then, because the oven was on and I needed to use up some pumpkin puree leftover from Thanksgiving, I made pumpkin doughnut muffins.  Because I can't live on just cookies, you know?

Actually, I could live entirely on cookies.  My health would be dreadful and my teeth would rot out of my head, but I could make it work for several years before being claimed by scurvy.

My holiday baking is now 15% complete.  That is, if I don't eat all of these cookies myself. If so, then it's back to the drawing board kitchen for me.  And I am completely fine with that.

Desserts for dinosaurs

So I'm still working on the whole fancy-pants dessert table concept (see anything featured by Amy Atlas) so there's no cutesy backdrop for my sweets. 

The cake and cookies more than make up for the lack of backdrop, however:

The cake is chocolate with buttercream frosting and features a volcano.  A cookie Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops standing around the "4" candle complete the scene. 

To go along with the cake, I made chocolate-frosted pretzels covered with Dino sprinkles from Karen's Cookies Shop.

I put out a dish of M&M's flanked by dinosaurs.  I tried to use the Little Guy's dinosaurs throughout the house for decorations. 

This Spinosaurus is either really scary as he guards the cookies...or really happy to be so close to the cookies.  I'm not sure which!

Take a look at the cookies, and you can be the judge of his demeanor.

All of the dinosaur cookies were made with cutters from Karen's Cookies.  For anyone looking for specialty cutters that you just can't find in a store, I highly recommend them!  I baked all the cookies (with help from my family, of course!) and the Big Guy and Handy Freddy helped flood the cookies after I outlined them.  The frosting is Karen's meringue powder buttercream recipe, and I've been using it for years. 

The Dino footprint cookie was Handy Freddy's idea.  I had an egg cookie cutter, and I had planned to do speckled dinosaur egg cookies.  Freddy suggested cutting a "M" shape into the wide part of the egg to turn it into a footprint to match the chalk footprints outside the house.  Isn't that brilliant?

For a dramatic presentation of the cake, I put 6 trick sparkler candles into the volcano part of the cake.  Grouping them so close together gave me a huge flame rather than sparks, but since no one was burned and the house didn't catch on fire, I'm declaring it a success.

And that's how we do things for a Dino-riffic 4th birthday party!

Have a great weekend, everyone! And Happy Veterans Day!