a little potato with your salt?

Meal planning is not my forte. I make dinner every Thursday night. And most Thursdays roll around without my having planned anything. Like this morning. I was thinking potatoey thoughts, probably because we had some on hand, so I looked up "potato casserole" on foodnetwork.com. I found a promising dish with the simple ingredients of potatoes and cheese. Feeling adventurous and thinking culinary thoughts, I made some changes to the recipe to spice it up (and to substitute for what we didn't have). Cream of chicken instead of cream of celery, less sour cream, more cheese, corn flakes instead of potato chips...etc. I started extra early and rocked out to TobyMac's new cd as I grated potato and cooked chicken (something substantial to add in).

Finally it was dinner time: the casserole came out smelling devine. I heaped my darling family's plates with large spoonfuls of casserole yumminess. And then I took a bite. It tasted like...salt. I took another bite just to make sure: yup, it tasted like salt, with a hint of potato and a whole lot of corn flakes on the side. My dreams of becoming the next Food Network Star vanished before my eyes. Paula Dean had deceived me. Or maybe it was just that I forgot to consider the salt I put into the cooking chicken, and the salt in the cream of chicken soup, and the salt in the extra cheese while I was pouring in what the recipe called for. Thank goodness we had loads of delicious home-made applesauce to eat.

And I'm sure the dogs enjoyed their well-seasoned dinner.

Happy Birthday to Mom

Last night we celebrated Mom's birthday with king crab legs, chicken parmesan, a delicious trifle, and a game of Loaded Questions. The trifle was made with homemade (from scratch) angel food cake (which took an insane amount of egg whites) and chocolate pudding topped with strawberries. It was quite delicious. Birthdays are a great excuse to pig out!

Homemade French Fries

Sometime last week Dad made french fries. I was rather proud of him. And they tasted awesome!

The uncooked potatoes.

Frying away.

And wa-la!

Christmas Cookies

Ah, yes. The time of year has come for eating far too many Christmas cookies. Last night Emily had a Christmas party here and everyone brought cookies, and not very many got eaten. We brought most of them to church today and are trying to give more away at every opportunity.
Any takers? :)

Chocolate Pudding Parfaits

A couple of nights ago we made chocolate pudding and then put fruit and whipped cream on top. It was so good! Looking at these is making me hungry, I think I'll go eat some lunch...

2 Dinners

Saturday night and tonight we had some pretty sweet dinners. Jordon was over and him and Sarah made fettucine/seafood stuff with a Greek salad that had really yummy homemade dressing on it. After getting back from the store.

The shrimp was really good and they also got scallops that were amazing. I don't usually like seafood, but I liked it then. :)

If your wondering who cut the bread, it was me. :P That was pretty much the only contribution I made to the dinner, besides finding the salad dressing on food network.

The table all set. Isn't it purdy?

And then Emily made a taco ring thing tonight for dinner from this Pampered Chef book we have. She made up the middle part, isn't it amazing? It was really fun to eat, not to mention delicious.

canning tomatoes

Yesterday and today we have canned tomatoes. We got around 42 quarts. I used to really not like them but now I don't really mind. It is not hard to do its just messy. You have to where an apron because sometimes it splatters. You feel accomplished after you can anything. Looking at all those rows of fruits and vegetables. It makes you thank God for all he has blessed you with.

Interjection by Abigail:
I wrote this poem four years ago about canning tomatoes. :D

We canned tomatoes today,
When we were done we shouted, "Hooray!"
In all the jars, romatoes are packed,
Thirty-five jars to be exact.

On the counter the jars stand,
Looking at them makes me feel grand;
And then we give a cheer
For we won't do them again until next year.

The diet spoon

Today Anna was attempting to serve herself some yogurt. I say attempt because the spoon she grabbed was slotted. It was really funny!

Last night I was supposed to make dinner for Dad, Anna, and I. Well, it didn't quite work and Dad fried up some steak and potatoes instead. It was pretty sad. But the steak and potatoes were good!

Farfalle with Broccoli

You may ask, "what the heck is farfalle?". It sounds pretty exotic, but it's really just bow tie pasta. :) I made this recipe last night for dinner for the first time and it was really good. It called for anchovies and red pepper flakes, which I didn't do, and I put in some fresh basil and tomato.
I got the recipe off of foodnetwork.com. I wanted to make something with the broccoli we were getting from our garden and found this.
So here's the recipe:

1 lb farfalle pasta
2 heads broccoli, trimmed florets
1/4 c olive oil
4 T butter
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 c Parmesan cheese
1/4 c tomato, diced
1 T basil

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook 5 min. Add broccoli and cook 4 min. Drain pasta and broccoli, reserving 1 cup of water.

Meanwhile, in large skillet, heat olive oil and butter over medium heat. Add garlic and cook 5 min. Add broccoli, pasta, salt & pepper, tomato, and basil, and toss. Add some of reserved pasta water, if necessary to make light sauce. Transfer to serving platter and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

And wall-ah!

A Delight

If you have never had Refreshing Lime Delight, you have had very sad life. :) Ok, maybe not, but you really should try it. We had it last night and it's so good, plus it's really easy to make.

Refreshing Lime Delight

1/2 gallon vanilla ice cream (softened)
1 medium can lime-aid (frozen)
2-8 oz. containers cool whip
(you can also put a couple drops of green food coloring in, but we didn't)

Work the above ingredients together in a large bowl. Line a 9x13 in. pan with graham cracker crumb crust (graham cracker crust, sugar, and melted butter)
Put the ice cream mixture in the pan on top of the crust. Keep in freezer.

And that's it!

Peaches

We canned 28 jars of peaches today. We'll do more tomorrow.

Blueberry Time!

We've gone blueberry picking three times so far and have frozen 35 pints. Mom uses a lot of berries for making smoothies in the mornings, so we go through them rather quickly. Usually when we go it's extremely hot, but this year it's been really nice. The first time we all were freezing! But the last two times have been warm but nice and breezy too.


Next up: peaches!

Fruits From Our Garden!

These are the some of the vegetables from our garden!

The dogs looked so cute I just had to take a picture!

Lots of food

Dad and Mom went to Sam's Club yesterday and brought back some food. Actually a lot of food. No, this isn't how much we eat in a week, but Emily is having a graduation party this Saturday.
I'm pretty sure we won't run out of beans or salt potatoes, but you never know...
...and the other half.

Finding vanilla...

It's always interesting when you bake and don't know where any of the ingredient are. Today Anna and I went to Betsy's house (baby Emily's mom) to babysit instead of her bringing her here. Betsy left a list of things to do just in case we got bored while Emily was sleeping, and one of the things was to make a dessert. I reverted to chocolate chip cookies since I didn't think I could go wrong with those. I got the butter out to soften found the flour, sugar, salt, eggs, everything...except the vanilla extract. I searched high and lo, in every cupboard, on every shelf. They had about five different almond extracts, and orange extract and a few others, but no vanilla. How can you not have vanilla? I even went down into the scary basement and looked through the freezer down there, but no vanilla extract.

I decided I'd use almond since they had an abundance of that, and then I saw that it also called for walnuts. And no, I couldn't find those either. I though we could live without the walnuts, and we'd see how the almond worked out.

Betsy happened to come home early while I was still in the midst of making the cookies, and found me both. The vanilla was in a dish soap bottle in the way back of a cupboard, and the walnuts were in the upstairs freezer!
The cookies actually turned out pretty good, besides the fact that I burned the first batch...

Yumminess

Yesterday I rode bikes in the rain, ate tuna, cleaned out a closet, ate quesadillas, took pictures, and made lemon bars. A lot of eating went on. Natalie and I made the lemon bars, and they were SO good.

Bistro Chicken Twist

I got this recipe from a Pampered Chef recipe book and just made it tonight. It is so yummy! The recipe called for frozen French bread dough, but I made my own bread from a recipe off of allrecipes.com, and it was really good! I made the dough around two and let it rise for 2 1/2 hours, so the dough was huge by the time I had to make the actual twist.
I coated the top of the twist with egg white which made it really crispy on top, I'd never done that before. I had a big salad and two slices of the twist, and now I am stuffed!

Singed Granola

Every morning for breakfast I have the same thing: cherios and granola with honey on top. For some reason I never get sick of it! So I end up making the granola every few weeks even though other people do eat it. So this week I was talking on the phone while the granola was in the oven. When the timer rang I turned it off and happily finished my conversation and hung up. Awhile later I came back into the kitchen and noticed that the granola was still in the oven! Thankfully it wasn't burned, it was only singed. :) It still tasted good, and we all had some.Some had a bigger serving than others. I guess that comes with being the cook. :)

"An Orange a Day"

Mom has been buying these really good oranges lately. So I just realized that I have been eating an orange a day! They are really good. So I was cutting an orange a little before dinner, and then mom had the idea to use some of the orange for a garnish on the plates! I then cut some of the orange slices in half and put them on the side of the plates. Personally I thought that the "plating and presentation" would make food network jealous! (Just kidding!) So here is the beautiful plate. We had imperial chicken, strawberry romaine salad, and sweet potatoes.

Yummy Cookies

Tonight we had some friends of ours, Kevin and Will over and told them they had to make dessert. :) So Kevin went into our pantry and got out some cake mix (I'm not sure where that came from). I thought that it was cheating, so we made cookies out of the mix and added some more stuff. Walnuts, chocolate chips, and peanut butter chips to be exact. They were so yummy! I think I ate too many, but I couldn't really help it.

I think Emily liked them too. Just a thought.