Audrey & Dana's Glazed Pork Chops with Apricot-Ginger Sauce & Strawberry Cheesecake Bars

I forgot to take pictures while we cooked, but managed to remember to take some while we were eating.

Here's the finished meal. Since the asparagus has been on sale & looking good, we went with that instead of the green beans. We followed the pork recipe and thought that it turned out really well.
I will certainly keep this recipe marked, since it was pretty simple to put together & just adding rice & a veggie, you have a very nice meal.
We also fixed the Strawberry Cheesecake bars, but I forgot to take any pictures. Everyone really liked them, but next time, we plan on baking the cookie, butter crust mixture for a bit before adding the cheesecake mixture. We also made the strawberry sauce & that was very simple to do also. Mine didn't look as nice as the picture in the cookbook, but they ate it anyway. They also tried it on ice cream & liked that also.

Audrey & Dana's Pork Tacos with Chili Verde, Soft Flour Tortillas, Pico De Gallo & Guacamole

Here is the Pork cooking in the Chili Verde. It was pretty straight forward to fix & we followed the recipe. I will have to say, it did help that there were two of us fixing these recipes ;) While one of us was cutting up the onions & pork mixture & then sauteing in the pan, the other was putting together the Chili Verde mixture. We only added around 2 cups of the broth & that was perfect. We didn't have to add any to the Verde mixture when it was blending. We did cook the mixture for awhile, while we finished fixing the other 3 dishes & that worked out good.

Here's Dana & Johnny working very hard cutting up all the veggies for the Pico de Gallo & Guacamole. She fixed the Pico de Gallo & then when she fixed the guacamole, I couldn't find good avocados, so we just used the pre mashed that you can find in the produce section. I think it tastes better with the fresh avocados though. Also, instead of chopping more onions, garlic & tomatoes for the guacamole, she just added some of the Pico de Gallo & that worked really well.

Here's Dana fixing the flour tortillas. She had fun fixing them & they weren't hard to make ;)
Here's the tortillas cooking. They cooked quickly and they had a good flavor. We thought that they were worth the effort to make them.

We really liked all 4 recipes & will fix these again. They do take a little time if you are doing them all that evening for dinner. I think that it would be a good idea to make the Chili Verde the day before or that morning. That would really help with that dish. That will leave you with more time for the fresh dishes. Also, the tortillas could be made earlier & then warmed up when you are ready to eat. I forgot to take pictures of our plates, but everyone liked the meal, yeah!!

Jacki’s Roasted Pork Tenderloin, Carrot Cake

We both thought these recipes were VERY good!   The carrot cake was delicious – moist, flavorful, and the frosting was  perfect.  I added all the goodies – coconut, walnuts and raisins.  I made half the recipe since there are only two of us and put it in an 8x8 inch glass Pyrex baking dish.  I cooked it for 45 minutes and it was plenty done.  It would have been fine with a few less minutes.  For the frosting I added vanilla but omitted the almond extract.  It was a quick and easy recipe for a nice dessert.  For the Rosemary-Balsamic Pork Tenderloin I used a 1.2 pound tenderloin and marinated it for about 5 or 6 hours.  The recipe said it would take about 20 – 25 minutes of cooking to reach 160 degrees but it took my tenderloin 45 minutes to reach that at 400 degrees.  I let it rest for 5 minutes as directed then sliced.  It was very moist, flavorful, and tender – cut like butter.   Very easy recipe for a nice dinner.  Sorry my pictures didn’t turn out better.

Kim's catch up

I forgot to take a picture of the mint chocolate brownies, but they were AMAZING!! By far the best mint brownies I have had, and one of the best dfesserts I've had as well. They were gone in about 2.2 seconds at my house.... I ate most of them :)

This was a really yummy meal. The roasted tomato pasta thingy. The picture is a little nasty because it was my third helping, yes, THIRD! I was surprised I liked it so much, but it had great flavor and it was even yummy the next day cold from the fridge.


The spaghetti and meatballs were probably my favorite meal so far!!! My family went CRAZY over them. The kids ate them like candy, and so did my husband! It was a HUGE hit at my house. I also made the garlic bread from the cookbook and it went really well with the spaghetti.


We made these on Valentines and thought they were a fun little treat! I wasn't flying over the moon for them though.


The orange chicken salad was delicious. I was pleasantly surprised! My entire family ate it and wanted seconds!


We thought the meat had a really yummy flavor and was very tender and good! The potatoes were fun because they were different, but the flavor wasn't amazing for me. I could have used more of a kick.

Tarin's Stuffed Apple Cinnamon Rolls

I had some extra time on Saturday and an extra apple so I thought I'd catch up with these. I also only made half a batch of the breadstick recipe and it was perfect. It filled up a whole pie pan so I'm glad I didn't make more. I used a red apple, actually it might have been a gala apple, not really sure though. I only used one and it made plenty filling, next time I'd like to try a green apple like they recommend though because felt like I wanted a more "apple" flavor. I tried using some almond extract for the glaze and didn't really like, the flavoring was just too overpowering.  Everyone really liked them though and they were the perfect size and something just different enough from cinnamon rolls that everyone was interested.

The recipes for this week are: Rosemary balsamic pork tenderloin Carrot cake on page 238

Jacki’s Stuffed Apple-Cinnamon Rolls

I made these rolls for breakfast this morning and I thought they were delicious.  Something just a little different.  I used the breadstick recipe on pg 30 for the dough.  I made a full recipe of the dough but I only needed half for use with the filling so I saved the rest of the dough to make pizza tonight.  For the filling I used Pink Lady apples because that is what I had.  I ended up cooking them for about 20 minutes but I think 18 would have been perfect.  They were really yummy with the apple filling.  This would be good with regular roll dough too.

Quick Recipe for this week of March 11th

Since it is late in the week I will post just one recipe for us to try that doesn’t look too difficult and I actually have all of the ingredients!

Stuffed Apple-Cinnamon Rolls       pg 66

Jacki and Leslee’s Glazed Pork Chops and Strawberry Cheesecake Bars

Leslee and kids are still visiting and we made these two recipes the other night for dinner.  I doubled the recipe for the Pork Chops and everyone loved them – even the little ones!  The only change I would make is I would add less chicken broth for a thicker sauce.  It was a pretty easy recipe to put together.  I served it with brown rice and broccoli.  The Strawberry Cheesecake bars were tasty but a lot of work.   We halved the recipe and put it in an 8x8 inch pyrex baking dish so it took a bit longer to cook.  We used gluten free shortbread cookies for the crust.  Even though we halved the bar recipe we made the whole recipe for the strawberry sauce and we used every bit of it. 

New recipes for the week of 3/4

Let's try the Glazed Pork Chops with Apricot-Ginger Sauce (page 145) and Strawberry Cheesecake Bars (page 216). I am also going to try the Caramelized Green Beans (page 188)with the pork chops; but I think that recipe has already been picked. Enjoy!

Jacki and Leslee’s Pork with Chili Verde, Guacamole, Pico de Gallo.

Leslee is here visiting us and we made this meal a couple of nights ago and it was a big success.  The Pork with Chili Verde was rather fun to make and very good.  The only odd thing to me was there was so much sauce for the amount of meat.  I used a 2 # pork sirloin roast and just put it in the crock pot whole and let it cook all day in the sauce and then shredded it and put it back in to soak up the sauce.  Next time I would not add as much chicken broth – maybe only 2 cups.  We ran out of time to make the flour tortillas and just served it over rice.  We will complete the tortilla challenge soon though!   It was really good over rice because the rice soaked up the sauce.  The Pico de Gallo was very tasty as well as the Guacamole and they both went well with the pork verde.  We served it all with shredded lettuce and grated cheese.  It was a fun and tasty meal to make.   Our picture of the meal is on Leslee’s camera so a photo will be forthcoming soon but for now a pictureless review will have to do. 

Audrey's Pesto Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes & Fruit dip

Here is the Fluffy orange fruit dip. Very easy to make and it also tasted very good with different kinds of fruit. Its nice to have another dip to use. I made two batches and took one of them to a basketball get together and it was a hit!

Here's the Pesto pasta ready to eat!

This was a very easy meal to make. I followed the recipe, except I bought my pesto as I couldn't fine fresh basil in my local grocery stores.....

I really liked the flavors of the different ingredients together in this dish. I forgot to add my pesto to the pasta before adding the veggies, so it isn't as pretty as the photo in the book, but it still tasted very good! I think this also makes a nice little side dish. We had the leftovers later in the week with some rotisserie chicken and asparagus. I will make this recipe again ;)

Hope that you all get a chance to try these recipes if you haven't already.

New Recipe's for February 26th

As always it was hard to decide... Let's fix;
Pork Tacos with Chili Verde pg. 146
Soft Flour Tortillas pg. 37
Pico De Gallo pg. 48
Guacamole pg. 50
I know that's 4 recipe's, but I threw in the tortilla recipe for those who want the challenge ;)

Audrey & Dana's Ribs & Grilled Potatoes & Onions & Cream cheese-filled Strawberries

Here's our Grilled Potatoes & Onions ready to go into the oven. We weren't able to use the outside grill, so we just cooked them in the oven, which worked great.

Here's the ribs out of the oven. I think the hardest thing about this recipe was putting the ingredients together for the cooking sauce ;) I followed the recipe & I will have to say, that I was worried about cooking them in the crockpot. They did not look too appetizing when I took them out, but as you can see, once you brown them under the broiler with the BBQ sauce, they look very good!
Here's Dana fixing the Cream Cheese-filled Strawberries. It's nice to have her back cooking with me!

And for the final product! Everything tasted great! We will be fixing these recipes again. Everyone liked them & its a nice way to cook them inside. We are partial to our son(&Dana's hubby) Brandon's smoked ribs & they are still our favorite, but these will get us by till he cooks them again for us :) Great recipe picks!

Audrey's Spinach & Feta Pasta & Sugar Cookies

Here's the pasta cooked up and the sauce part of the ingredients simmered up. I just used canned mushrooms from my food storage instead of fresh. I want to try it with the fresh mushrooms next time.

Here's the pasta added into the sauce. I had shredded Romano cheese that needed to be used, so that was instead of the feta.
Here's the final plate. I thought that it was very tasty. I will make this again and it was a nice simple quick meal :)

Cookie dough rolled out.

Sugar cookies ready to eat. I thought that they were very good! I like sugar cookies at Christmas time :) I just used my own frosting recipe.

Audrey's catch up!!

Here is the Cookie Sundae Cup. I mixed up some chocolate cookie dough & followed the recipe for baking it. Once they were cooled, we put the ice cream in & then the hot fudge sauce & regular chocolate sauce. I didn't make the caramel sauce. Brock and I really enjoyed these!

Next is the Chicken & Dumplings. I followed the recipe, but used canned chicken instead of the fresh cooked. It worked out just fine, but you want to wait to add it till a bit later, since its already cooked. Good way to use the canned chicken from your food storage! Brock and I really liked the dish, but Doug, not so much ;)
Here's the Pineapple-Ginger Flank Steak. I opted to slice it up and put it in a salad & I thought that it had a good flavor. I followed the recipe, but cooked it under the broiler, since no one wanted to grill :)

Next is the Natchitoches Meat Pies. They were kind of fun to make, as I hadn't ever made these before. I followed the recipe and it was pretty straight forward. I would say to make sure that you want to make sure that the liquid is cooked out or drain the mixture on a paper towel before putting it on the pie dough. Brock, Dana & I, thought that they were very good!

Here's the Orange Chicken with Snow Peas. As you can see I used Beef instead of Chicken, as my hubby isn't a fan of chicken. Other than that, I followed the recipe and I thought that it was very good! I know that I would like it with the chicken also :)
Here's the Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Chimichurri. I think that I actually used a pork roast instead of the tenderloin, because they had them on sale. It took much longer to cook, but still tasted good. In fact, I ended up having to put it in the oven wrapped in foil after grilling it in my grill pan. Other than that, I followed the recipe. Doug and Brock had theirs with potatoes and salad.
Here is the final product for me. I had the stir fryed rice and veggies already cooked, so I just added the pork & it really had good flavor in the dish.
Here's the Spaghetti & Meatballs. We thought this was very good, though I will cut back on the onions for me ;) I will fix this again. Very handy to have the sauce and meatballs frozen in the freezer. I really liked the pinch of soda in the sauce to help with the acidity. I will remember that for other red sauces!

Jacki’s Fluffy Orange Fruit Dip, Mint Brownies

Yesterday I made the Orange Fruit Dip and Mint Brownies and they were both delicious.  The fruit dip was very easy to put together.  I served it with pineapple, strawberries, and bananas.   I also made the other fruit dip in the book a couple of weeks ago and it is really good also.  Just don’t use Walmart brand of cream cheese – it doesn’t mix very smoothly.  With the orange fruit dip I used Whole Foods brand and it mixed up perfectly.  The brownies were pretty easy to make as well and really tasted good.  I forgot to add the green food coloring but that was fine.  I halved the recipe and cooked it in an 8x8 inch glass pyrex dish  for 25 minutes.  Next time I think I would decrease the time to 22 or 23 minutes.  I served both of these dishes to the YW leaders at a luncheon/meeting at my house and they all loved them.  I also served the BBQ chicken Cobb salad from the book and they liked that as well.  (at least they said they liked it all:)  I am planning on making the pasta salad soon and will let you know how that goes.

New Recipes

For this week let's try:

Fluffy Orange Fruit Dip on page 9
Pesto Pasta with Roasted Tomatoes-170
Mint Brownies- 218

Jacki’s Spaghetti, Meatballs, and Sheet Cake

I made all three of the recipes the other night for dinner and they were good.   I followed the recipes pretty much as directed and none of them were too difficult or time consuming – good, solid recipes.  I really liked the idea of using the cookie scoop to form the meatballs although they were not the prettiest.  I also thought cooking them under the broiler was genius – very fast and easy.  I liked the tomato sauce but I think I would try diced tomatoes next time instead of crushed.    The Texas Sheet Cake didn’t turn out so great but it was my fault.  I halved the recipe and put it in an 8X8 inch pan and it was a little too thick plus I overcooked it just a bit and then I didn’t beat the icing long enough so it wasn’t smooth plus I think I added too much powdered sugar.  I added walnuts.  It doesn’t look too appetizing but it is what it is I suppose.  I think it is a good recipe though and I am sure you did better with it than I did:)

 

Ribs and Potatoes

This ribs and potatoes were really good! This was the first time I have ever prepared ribs and it was really easy since we just had to throw them in the crockpot.  Before we ate them I broiled them in the oven for a few minutes instead of grilling.  The potatoes were tasty as well and I think I cooked them a bit longer than the recipe called for.

New Recipes!!

Lets make the Spaghetti and Meatballs on page 162 with the Italian Meatballs on page 163 this week! And in case you need a chocolatey dessert for Valentine's Day the Texas Sheet Cake pg 238. Sounds like a delicious dinner to me!

Jacki’s Baby Back Ribs, Grilled Potatoes and Onions, and Cream Cheese-Filled Strawberries.

I made all three of these recipes yesterday and they were all fantastic!  The ribs were absolutely perfect and so easy to make.  I used 2.75 lbs of ribs and followed the recipe exactly except instead of grilling them outdoors at the end for a few minutes I stuck them under the broiler on low –perfection.  They were melt-in-your-mouth delicious. I used Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce.  For the grilled potatoes and onions I again followed the recipe as directed.  I used red potatoes and sweet onions.  I sliced them in the food processor so it was fast and easy.  I cooked them in the oven but for longer than stated in the recipe because I was distracted doing something else – so not sure how long I cooked them for but they were plenty done.  The ribs and potatoes/onions went well together.  For dessert I made the strawberries and they were really good as well and easy enough to make.  I quartered the recipe and used semisweet chocolate chips for the drizzle.  Be sure and try these recipes and let us know what you think.

Recipe for Week Feb. 5th 2012

I am posting my selection for this next week a little early in case you want to make it on Sunday.  It would make a good Super Bowl meal.

Baby Back Ribs      144
Grilled Potatoes and Onions   184
Cream Cheese-Filled Strawberries

A few updates from Kim

Wow, my life has been all over the place for the last 3 months because of this little girl:


But, I have been cooking and here are a few reviews.

Last week I made the orange chicken. I forgot to take a pic of it. We thought it was good, but I agree it was a little heavy on the orange flavor. I actually liked it a lot better heated up the next day.

I made the BBQ pineapple Burgers the other day. They tasted really yummy but it wasn't anything too special. It was really simple though and will be easy to make again. It was my first time grilling burgers by myself and I was happy it turned out successful. We also made the sweet potato fries. They tasted good but they were REALLY soft. I think I might have added too much olive oil. If I try them again I will add less oil.


We made these as a family one night and they were a HUGE hit with the kids. We ate them for days and days. We even made them again a few days later.

YUM!


A few days ago I made the taco chicken soup. I forgot to take a picture of that one too. It tasted really good, but it was REALLY liquidy. If I were to make it again I would add way more chicken and less chicken broth. Other than that it was pretty good.

My favorite thing I've made in a while was the Chicken and Dumplins. I took a picture of it but I can't find it now. I am really big into textures of things, so I didn't add the biscuits to the soup to cook. I baked them and put them on everyone's plate. You could just tear your biscuit up and add it to your soup. It was DELICIOUS!!! My husband was in heaven. We will make that again for sure.

Jacki’s Cranberry-Orange Chicken Salad

I made this yesterday and thought it was tasty. The best part was I had most of the ingredients already with a few substitutions noted below.  It was easy to put together once the chicken was marinated and grilled.  For the chicken I marinated it in some of the leftover Honey-Citrus Vinaigrette and then grilled it on my stove top grill pan – yummy.  I was short on mayo so I followed Tarin’s suggestion and used half olive oil mayo and half plain Greek yogurt.  I also used Dijon mustard in place of the coarse grain mustard and walnuts in place of the pecans.  I actually preferred the salad just plain rather than on bread.  I am looking forward to the leftovers for lunch today.

Leslee's Orange Chicken

I made the Orange Chicken last week for dinner.  It wasn't too difficult to pull together and made for a pretty dish! The orange flavor was a little strong for our tastes but it tasted fresh and the veggies were a nice addition.