April 1st Recipe

Hi All.....

I have chosen the Spinach Mandarin Poppy Seed Salad (Pg. 76) with the Poppy Seed Dressing (Pg. 90). For a lighter dessert (well not light in the calories....maybe I should say Spring time dessert) the Key Lime Tarts (Pg. 228). I didn't choose a meat, but the book suggests grilled chicken. I think a rotisserie chicken would compliment nicely as well.

Happy Cooking.....

Dana

Leslee’s Catch Up

I have been slacking a bit with my cooking, and not just with the blog recipes:) I do have a few I haven’t posted about yet though.

The first was a long time ago but I made the cream cheese filled strawberries one night.  They were a fun little treat and Sean and I especially liked them. The strawberries I used weren’t super big but they ended up okay. I made it really easy on myself and just drizzled them with Hersey's syrup straight out of the bottle!

 

Next I made the apple cinnamon bread. I made a lot of changes to make it gluten free and I thought it tuned out pretty good.  I will try in with the pastry dough sometime though because it sounds much easier! No picture, it wasn’t too pretty!

Last, I finally made the mint brownies last weekend.  I used a gluten free brownie mix for the brownies themselves but followed the frosting recipe.  They were really good and everyone in the house enjoyed them! I will definitely make these again!

Audrey's Rosemary-Balsamic Pork Tenderloin & Carrot Cake

Here's the tenderloin ready to marinate.

Here's dinner ready to eat!

I paired it with Sweet & Savory Coconut Rice, as I hadn't cooked it earlier on. I thought that the tenderloin had good flavor & was easy to fix. Like Jacki, I did have to cook it longer than what it said. The rice was very tender & also had a nice flavor. I also cooked some fresh asparagus, yum yum :) & had a fresh salad.
Here's the carrot cake. I decided to make it into big cupcakes & gave them to Dana for her birthday cake. We both thought that they were very tasty. Since I didn't know if she liked coconut & raisins in cake, I omitted those ingredients. I would like to try it with both of those items the next time I fix the cake.

I really liked all three recipe's and plan on fixing all of them again! Hope that you get a chance to fix these and post them. I miss everyone posting their recipes ;)

Audrey & Dana's Pineapple Bacon Burgers, Sweet Potato Fries & Stuffed Apple-Cinnamon Bars

We decided to fix some of the recipes that we hadn't done to make a meal & then we used the cinnamon rolls for our dessert!

Here's our Sweet Potato Fries seasoned & ready to go in the oven.
Here's our fresh Pineapple ready to grill up for our burgers ;)

Dana with her patty mixture ready to make into the patties ;)

Here is my plate. Everything tasted great! We did decide that the next time we cook the sweet potato fries, to cut them a bigger size & to watch then closer in the oven :(

We thought that the burgers had a really good flavor & we really liked the flavor of the BBQ sauce(head country) & pineapple & bacon.

Here are the Stuffed Apple-Cinnamon Rolls fresh out of the oven. We had a little trouble getting the roll in the center of the pan cooked enough, so the outer ones cooked a little too long.

Here they are with the Glaze & ready to eat. I was really surprised at how good these tasted. We all liked them. We will cook all of these recipes again!

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.