Monday, July 26, 2010

Recipe Favorites

A friend of mine asked for a few recipes lately, and while typing them out to her in an email, I figured I might as well post them on my blog :)  So here are 4 of my very favorite recipes that I know by memory anymore, since I have made them so many times :)

Goulash


1lb ground beef
½ white onion, diced
1lb elbow macaroni
2 cans diced tomatoes
2 C V8 or other tomato juice
1 C ketchup
1 Tbsp chili powder (or more)
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper


Fry up the ground beef and onion together until browned.  At the same time, cook the macaroni in a pot of boiling water, following the directions on the package.  Drain macaroni, then add meat and other ingredients.  Simmer on medium for 20-30 minutes.


I like to eat it plain, or over buttered bread.


Taco Salad

1lb ground beef
½ white onion, diced
1 pkg taco seasoning
½ bottle French dressing (there are also recipes with Thousand Island, which are good)
1 large tomato, diced
¼ head of iceberg lettuce, shredded (also could use a package of shredded lettuce)
½ bag Doritos, crunched up
1 C shredded cheddar cheese

Fry the ground beef and onion together until browned, then drain and put in large mixing bowl.

Mix together the dressing and taco seasoning and stir into the ground beef/onion mixture.

Add remaining ingredients except Doritos and mix together.

Refrigerate until chilled.

Immediately before serving, add Doritos and stir in.

If it gets a little dry on the second serving, just add a little more French dressing (not too much!) to bring it back to life a bit.

You can eat this in a bowl, or you could put it in a tortilla shell too.


Chili



1lb ground beef
1 white onion, diced
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 can light red kidney beans
1 can chili beans (I sometimes will add another if I feel like it)
3 Tbsp chili powder (less if you like it less spicy, more if you want it more spicy)
½ tsp ground cumin
1 can whole kernel corn, drained (optional)
2 C ketchup
½ large bottle of V8
1 tsp salt
½ tsp pepper


Fry ground beef and onion until browned, then put in large crockpot (this makes a big crockpot full, so you need a big crockpot!)

Add remaining ingredients and mix together.  Put on low (or the 8-10 hour setting) for the day in the morning, and it’ll be ready when you get home from work.

I usually have either rolls or corn bread with my chili.  We make this almost weekly in the cool fall and freezing winter months.

Millionaire Macaroni Salad

1lb Rotini (curly) noodles, cooked, drained and cooled  (really, any noodles will work, but these are best)
1/2 C (or half) green pepper, diced
1/2 C (or half) red pepper, diced
1/2 C (or half) white onion, diced
1/4 C celery, diced (apprx. 1 large stalk)
2 C shredded cheddar cheese


Sauce:
2 C mayonnaise
1 can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk
1 C granulated (white) sugar
1/4 C white vinegar


Combine all noodles, peppers, onion and cheese (make SURE the noodles are cold or the cheese will melt).


Combine all sauce ingredients in at least a 5C bowl.  Pour over noodle mixture and stir until blended.  Refrigerate overnight.  Makes a very large batch, and is GREAT for a summer barbecue.

Watergate Salad


1 regular container Cool Whip, softened
1 can crushed pineapple (with juice)
1 pkg instant pistachio pudding mix
1/2 C mini marshmallows


Combine crushed pineapple and pudding mix together until blended.  Add softened cool whip and mini marshmallows and stir until blended.  Refrigerate until set, at least 2 hours.  Great addition to a meal for both holiday meals and summer barbecues - I seldom if ever have any of this left over!

Enjoy!  If you have any questions, feel free to ask!  I'm hoping I haven't forgotten anything, but they're pretty great :)

Breakfast Greats

I tried my very first attempt at a new breakfast food in quite some time this Saturday morning - Swedish Pancakes.  Remember in my "welcome" post where I said that the things I make don't always turn out so great?  Well, this was one of them.  This time, Google failed me!  Rather, Google presented the thinnest recipe imaginable and while they tasted great, they were less than aesthetically pleasing.  We had them with some of our Schumaker's freezer strawberries heated up (that I froze a couple months ago) and they tasted delicious! 

Here is the recipe I used:
http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/easy-swedish-pancakes/Detail.aspx
Which looked like this (actually, they looked MUCH worse):


And here is the recipe I should have used:
http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Swedish-Pancakes
which should've looked like this:


Other wonderful breakfasts that I have made in the past include the following (although I will have to search for the recipes in my box in the future to post them):

Pecan Crusted French Toast

Remember when I said that some of the stuff that looks AWESOME isn't as awesome as it looks? This was one of those. It wasn't really bad, but Mark said he'd rather have the stuff below (which is WAY easier to prep!)


Caramel Rolls (recipe from Aunt Sharon!)

This one, I actually know by heart :) Put 18 dinner rolls in a prepared bundt pan and sprinkle cinnamon and pecans over them. Melt together 1/4 C brown sugar, 1 stick butter and 1/2 package butterscotch pudding and pour over mixture. Cover with foil and let rise overnight. Put in the oven at 350 for 20-30 minutes (keep an eye on it, because it isn't so awesome when the top gets burnt). A breakfast favorite!

My "Fall Back" Recipes

To be honest with you, I'm pretty sure I can't even call this a "recipe" because it's just so EASY! Mark and I had Thursday afternoon off, so I decided to throw in a pork roast for supper. It truly is one of my favorite things, and it's just too easy to not make every couple weeks. My newlywed friend, who is always looking for something yummy to try out for her new hubby asked how exactly you make pulled pork sandwiches. And to be honest, I just "learned" how to make it last summer from my younger brother, Josh. So get ready - this is going to be a long one!

Pulled BBQ Pork Sandwiches

  • Buy a pork loin of whatever size you want.
  • Rub garlic salt into it.
  • Put it in your dry crockpot and cover with the lid.
  • Let it cook in the crockpot for 8-10 hours on low.
  • It will fall apart if you just shred it a bit with a fork.
  • You can either put it on a sandwich with your favorite bbq sauce, or google recipes for other sauces you can make with such ingredients as molasses, honey, brown sugar, ketchup, etc...
  • If you're on a diet, I kid you not - this stuff is just phenomenal even without any sauce and not on a bun.

I'm no kitchen diva, but Google is one of my very best friends :) I've found many a great recipe with my old friend, Google :)

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Welcome!

While I'm sitting here waiting for my fresh Rhubarb pie to finish baking in the oven, I was thinking to myself, "Why don't you have a blog about all the yummy stuff you make?" And so...here it is!

I guess the point of this blog is to showcase my baking and cooking adventures - and I promise to showcase my failures right alongside my successes.

It's no surprise to my friends and family that I know my way around a kitchen. What they know is that the food tastes good: What they don't know is that not everything I make turns out that great.

My secret is simply that I learn from my failures. Not every recipe always turns out, and not everything that turns out tasting yummy actually looks that fantastic. (And sometimes the stuff that turns out looking phenomenal is just alright) But I am learning as I go!

I hope to post pictures and recipes, and hope to try new things at least once a month (and hopefully more often than that)! So enjoy, and bon appetit!