This recipe, for a slooooow cooked shredded pork that will make your home smell alarmingly good. I mean that - alarmingly good. Especially if you're in and out of the kitchen or if you go outside to play in the yard and then you come in - zomg so so good. Kind of like when you cook down stew all day, but times about eleventy billion. (read)
There are times when I feel like spending the whole afternoon in the kitchen dicing, stirring, mixing and washing. This meal is for those afternoons when I don't - or when I can't. The sauce has just three ingredients (four if you count the black pepper) but sometimes that's all you need and in this case, these three ingredients play off each other so well it tastes like there is more to it than that. It's a little sharp but has a sweetness to it and is very juicy, it just falls apart with your fork. The best part about it of course is that you can pop it in the oven and get back to whatever else you need to do before dinner time! (read)
Chicken Pot Pie is one of those meals that pretty much all of us are happy with, though Wee One #2 still picks out the corn. What's with that? Corn is the hardly-even-a-vegetable vegetable that kids actually eat! Anyhoo, so she 'hates corn' but otherwise is happy with this and the rest of us eat it up. I try to make more than one at a time and stick one in the freezer so I can come to my own rescue a couple of hours before dinner and I'm not finished with the kid's school for the day and my husband is on his way home - insert your own dinner time stress here. (read)
This week's Menu Monday recipe is called Throwback Burritos because until I made them for these photographs I hadn't had one in about 13 years. Yes really, and it's not that I'm all that old really. These were the burritos I lived on with my now husband/then boyfriend and our hilarious roommate Ken. The background on that is that my husband and his roommate go waaaay back, and then I moved in as well years after the fact. No one but Ken ever made these either! I was always strictly on cheese grating duty while he worked his magic in the kitchen. (read)
I made this recipe for the first time with a friend who had just learned it from her aunt and it was so simple and so delicious, my kids and my husband were all about me making it at home. It's hardly even a recipe (with only two ingredients), but I find some of the best meals come from 'hardly recipes'. (read)
This spiced up version of the buttermilk fried chicken I made a couple of months ago was the perfect partner to these hybrid french fry/onion ring creations, which are really just a potato-ed up version of my favorite Leek Ring recipe. I was originally inspired by this post over at Spoon Fork Bacon but I ended up going in a totally different direction because we decided we wanted more of an onion ring base. I will eventually try the original recipe! (read)
A few weeks ago, I made mini chicken pot pies and ever since then the kids have been encouraging me to make mini versions of other dinners they love! So far I've made mini chicken hot pockets and these mini pizza bites. I served these with pizza sauce to pour over top or, as Wee One #3 chose to do, dunk in. Next time I will add some sauce to the mini bites before I cook them and see how that works out. This week I'm making Mini Shepherd's Pies! (read)
It's very similar to the chicken strips I make, except this is cooked in butter and there is shredded cheese in the bread crumbs. It's arguably much easier and faster than the strips because with this recipe you're working with half a chicken breast per person in a single piece instead of about the same amount of chicken, pounded out and sliced into eleventy billion smaller pieces. Both are now requested on the regular, so similarities aside, it's always nice to add another meal to the list of things everyone around here loves. (read)
This is one of those lunches that you MUST serve with a salad or else you're staring down the barrel of a seriously sad meal, nutrition-wise. Taste wise? I hear it's amazing! I'm going to defend myself a little here and say that when I do make something like this these days, all the ingredients are as healthy as I can get my hands on. So the chicken is local and grain fed, the bacon is low sodium, the cheese is local and rBST-free, the flatbread is all multigrainy and the ranch is homemade. The entire family gobbled these down and that pretty much never happens. (read).
Super simple to do, as long as you make sure your oil doesn't get too hot (but gets hot enough) and you have some patience with it. Everyone loved this meal, I served it with wedges! I will not be making this again this week, but it did rank really high with the fam so I will likely make it again soonish and thought it'd be a fun addition to Menu Monday! This week I will photograph all of the recipes as I do them so I can link back to them! (read).
This right here? Is husband food. Both the chicken wings and the potato wedges are far too spicy for 2/3 of the children, and I went ahead and made something different for all three of them anyway so my husband wouldn't have to share. He has his favorites that the kids and I like too, like stew and chili and lasagna and chicken ceasers and things like that, but this kind of meal, the kind of purposely greasy but still made from scratch food you only really find in old school pubs and family restaurants, is defo his hands down number one love. Not just the combo of wings and wedges, but wings that aren't off chickens that look like they starved to death and wedges that have been cut to actually resemble a wedge of some kind. (read).
With a Greek mother and a painfully Canadian father (my grandparents from his side are from Saskatchewan and Quebec!) who was more than happy to adopt as much Greek cooking as my mother liked, we ate a lot of pilaf growing up. There is still a lot of pilaf going on over there - and now that Wee One #2 has decided it's one of her most treasured things to eat, there is a lot of it going on around here as well (read).
There are those recipes for 11 layer cakes that wow a room full of friends or a seriously huge batch of stuffing with all the random stuff in it that makes your entire extended family reach for seconds on Thanksgiving, and those recipes are wonderful and certainty have a time and a place (you know, like a going away party or, um, Thanksgiving). But what about like, Wednesday night dinner?
Enter this recipe. This not only always pleases my crowd (all of them at once even!) but if you're feeling lazy short on time, you can make the filling over a bed of rice for a no hassle, no dough involved meal and make them just as happy. Wee One #1 loves this so much he requests it for lunch on the regular, and I always have to make a separate 'lunch batch' because there are never any leftovers. Never. (read).
I have made chili from maybe half a dozen recipes over the years, but I had never made cornbread before. These recipes made a heap ton of chili and cornbread. All five of us ate our fill and then the family of five next door ate their fill and there was still some left over! (read).
I mentioned a few days ago that I borrowed one of my neighbor's pro cook books and that I was overcome with joy at the concept of baking and cooking my way through a book he used in culinary school?! Insert dramatic gasping here. (read).
I have a bookcase full of cookbooks, binders full of recipes pulled from foodie magazines and an alarming number of pins and bookmarks of recipes to try. And yet? The very best pizza dough recipe I've ever made / eaten came from a grocery store flier! I know right?! Way to go Foodland! (read).
I'm not the only one that makes random fancy meals for my kids, am I? I mean, I make random fancy meals to enjoy with my husband after the kids are in bed, but I suspect that's less weird than cracking open the new issue of Food & Drink Magazine for inspiration for my kids' dinner. I know at least one other mommy who perfects fancy food on her little one before serving it to her husband. Oh Sammie, how I adore you so. (read).
This is a great little menu for when you have friends over and you'd rather spend your visit hanging out with them than prepping food. All of this can be done ahead, so you can be outside with your guests and manning the barbecue! (read).
I found this recipe over at Life as a Lofthouse forever ago and bookmarked it for 'later'. This recipe was originally posted in September of 2010! I finally made this for my dear friend Brigitte, her brother Mike and her husband Hal when they came for a visit around Christmas. Brigitte was with me in the kitchen when I made it (hilariously typical) while the guys were, where else? In the garage (omg what a horrible poster group for stereotypes ha). (read).