Joy in the Kitchen!

A few years ago I had fun tricking my family with this fun April Fool's Dinner.   The recipes aren't critical, you can use any meatloaf recipe and any mashed potatoes/gravy mix.   It was so much fun to prepare and the kids had fun eating this silly dinner! April Fools 2013 Dinner Meatloaf Cupcakes with Mashed Potato Frosting Mashed Potato Sundaes Jello "KoolAid" Wormy Dirt Pudding Meatloaf Cupcakes:  Bake regular meatloaf recipe in large muffin tin and pipe mashed potatoes on for frosting.  Place in a cupcake liner. Mashed Potato Sundaes:   Layer mashed potatoes and a caramel colored gravy (chicken works good) in Sundae glasses. KoolAid:   Mix KoolAid colored Jello and pour into glasses.  Set straw in and put in refrigerator to set. Dirt Pudding:   Mix 1 package chocolate pudding as directed.  Add a cup of whipped topping if desired.   Fill individual bowls or cups with pudding....

Zippy Pizza Rolls! My 12 year old daughter has been requesting pizza a lot lately.  Today I made bread and decided to combine that with a pizza type dish to satisfy her craving.     I generally make 4 loaves of bread in a batch.  Today I saved half of that dough for the pizza rolls.   I keep shredded mozzarella and pepperoni in the freezer so every thing I needed was right on hand!  I love being able to keep a stocked pantry and freezer!  I can't tell you how much money that has saved me over the years! The bread recipe I used is found HERE .  You could use your own favorite recipe or frozen bread dough that is thawed and ready to work with.   You'll notice at the bottom of my recipe I have the ingredients for just 2 loaves.  That size will fit in a regular sized Kitchen-Aid mixer. Zippy Pizza Roll 2 loaves worth of bread dough 1 can spaghetti sauce small package of pepperoni sliced 2-3 C. shredded mozzarella ...

This bar cookie recipe comes from Grandma Evelyn, my husbands grandmother.  She sure had the best cookie recipes ever!  These are actually on the healthy side of cookies.  The base is mainly oats, sugar, and butter.  (And if you count the butter as a dairy serving, all the healthier, right?!)    These are quick and easy to make.   My sister makes a similar cookie but hers has a different name.   I would venture a guess that these are as healthy as your average chocolate covered granola bar and MUCH tastier! O'Henry Bars 6 C. quick oats 1 C. melted butter  1 1/2 C. brown sugar 1 tsp. vanilla Mix together well and press into an 11 x 17 inch pan.  Bake 15 minutes at 375. Mix in double boiler or carefully in microwave: 3/4 C. corn syrup 1  1/4 C. chocolate chips (I like semi-sweet) 3/4 C. chunky peanut butter Heat and stir until melted, spread on hot cookie bar crust.    Cool, cut, and serve!

Dinner meals when I was a child most often consisted of four items on the dinner plate; meat, potato, vegetable, and a salad.  Very seldom did we have casseroles or dishes like spaghetti or rice.  (My Dad ate a LOT of rice while he was in the Navy during WWII and Mom rarely cooked it because of that.)  Mom made meals from things we had on hand, meat that we raised or vegetables that we grew. Sometimes cream, butter, and eggs that were produced at home were available to use as well. This vegetable dish, Green Bean Spanish, was a fun accompaniment for the meat, potato and salad that was so common. I was going through my recipe cupboard a few weeks ago and came across a newspaper article I had saved that featured my Aunt Lois's "best recipes".   She had included this recipe of Green Bean Spanish with those.  Though she called it String Bean Spanish. Rumor has it, that this recipe was handed down from my great-grandfather who lived in Mexico for a while as...

My Favorite Guy and I decided to stay home for Valentine's Day this year.   It just doesn't seem as romantic having an intimate dinner for two..... with 75 other people in the restaurant!  Not to mention waiting in line, waiting to be seated, waiting to order, and waiting for your food.   We banned the kids to one of the bedrooms upstairs with a movie, chicken nuggets, apple slices, pop, and sugar cookies.  They seemed happy enough.  Their steak and crab days will come.  Right now the 6 year old is as happy with chicken nuggets as we are with steak and the 12 & 14 year old girls understand that we want space to ourselves and they got to pick the movie. I set a small table in the living room by the fireplace. Rounded up a yard of Valentine'y fabric someone gave me a few years ago and set the flowers Favorite Guy had given me earlier in the day there to enjoy.   A nice Pandora station of Harry Connick Jr. gave us some nice background music....

I just LOVE Valentine's Day!   I love baking and doing nice little things for my husband and the children. I bake and do nice things throughout the year, but it is fun to have a theme for it once in a while!   Some years I have more time than others to do treats and sweet things.   This year I found this cute candy/cookie mold on clearance and thought I'd give it a try.  How can you go wrong with chocolate and Oreo's?  I mean really?! You can order one of these on the Wilton website.   Hearts Cookie Candy Mold   is what it's called and it's very inexpensive.   The mold does 8 cookies at a time.  It takes maybe 45 minutes to chill them enough to turn out and do the next set. I used some red candy melts to add the accent colors and then I just melted some of my 10 lb chocolate block I got for holiday candy  making and melted for the rest.  Candy melts are easy to use, but I love the dipping chocolate best if I need plain, del...

This week I've had some banana's that look like this sitting on my counter.  They were screaming at me to be used! This stage of banana ripeness usually turns into banana bread.  NOT TODAY!   I found a few that looked okay but the one I followed closest was this one:   Banana Cookies  at Simply Recipes.    I changed it up a bit for my own tastes (and because it's hard for me to leave a recipe alone) and these cookies turned out delicious!  (I'm curious to see if my banana despising daughter will eat them when she gets home from school today - they do have chocolate chips in them to tempt her!) As you mix this you'll notice it is more of a batter than a dough.  I used my 1 oz. cookie scoop to place them on the parchment paper.  I love my cookie scoop!   I have a few.  I like the one on the left best because I love the squeezey handle rather than the thumb squeeze,  and my girls like the one on the r...