Hamburger Goulash

Here is a yummy meal from Freezer Pleasers! :-) It was pretty easy to make, so you can make it for dinner, or it's a great make-ahead meal. Enjoy.


Ingredients:
1 to 2 pounds of lean ground beef
1 medium, chopped & diced
2 cups water
3/4 cup ketchup
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground mustard
1/4 tsp garlic powder
2 tbsp all-purpose flour (I only had wheat flour)
1/4 cup cold water
Additional cooked noodles or mashed potatoes (optional)



Directions:
Cook beef & onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink.
Drain, if necessary.
Add the 2 cups of water and ketchup, worcestershire sauce, paprika, sugar, salt, mustard, & garlic powder.
Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine flour and cold water until smooth.
Stir into the meat mixture and bring back up to a boil.
Cook for 2 minutes until thickened.
Serve over noodles or potatoes immediately.


Feel free to eat immediately or freeze up to 3 months (do not include noodles/potatoes in freezing). To thaw frozen goulash, place in fridge to defrost, then place in a small saucepan and heat through.


(Does not include noodles or mashed potatoes)

Servings: 6      Calories: 202      Fat: 6      Points: 4      Points Plus: 5

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Twice-Baked Ranch Potatoes

I've fallen in love with twice-baked potatoes. (See my original post on twice-baked taco potatoes.) These ranch-flavored ones were just as good and equally easy to make. This specific recipe is from Freezer Pleasers. (I consistently rave about this book on a handful of my blog posts, so I still recommend trying it out.)


Ingredients:

4 to 5 large baking potatoes

3 oz. of fat-free packaged cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup skim milk

1 envelope ranch salad dressing mix

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Directions:

Heat potatoes in microwave for about 15 minutes.

Let stand so they cool before handling them.

Scoop out pulp leaving a thin shell, but not TOO thin. 

Combine cream cheese and milk with the mashed potatoes.

Then blend in salad dressing mix completely.

Use a hand mixer to blend completely.

Scoop into the potato shells.

Top with cheese.

Place in microwave again (2 at a time) and cook for 3.5 to 4.5 minutes in a microwave safe dish. 

You can also freeze them to eat later. To defrost cook on 50% power for 8 to 9 minutes. Do not freeze for more than 3 months. 

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Make-Ahead Breakfast Sausage Casserole

Ingredients:

2-3 cups seasoned croutons
• 1 pound spicy pork sausage
• 6 eggs
• 2 1/4 cups milk
• 1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of broccoli soup
• 1 (10 ounce) package frozen chopped spinach - thawed, drained and squeezed dry
• 1 large zucchini, chopped and quartered
• 1 cup shredded Monterey Jack or Cheddar cheese
• 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard

Directions:

Spread croutons on the bottom of a greased 9x13 casserole dish

Cut sausage and heat in a medium skillet until brown

Spread over croutons

In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, soup, spinach, zucchini, cheese, and mustard. Mix really well.

Pour egg mixture over sausage and croutons. 

Refrigerate overnight.

The next morning, preheat to 325 degrees.

Bake in preheated oven for 50 to 60 minutes until set and lightly brown.

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Purple Cow Smoothie

Our cooking club recently did a challenge where everyone had to bring a dish (we break it down into appetizer, salad, soup, entree, dessert, drink, etc) that contained the same main ingredient and we picked VANILLA as our special ingredient. There are lots of great recipes out there that include vanilla and with the help of All Recipes Ingredient Search you can find a lot of them.  I got to do the dessert beverage and went with a smoothie/milkshake. It was delicious!



Ingredients:
1 cup grape soda
4 cups vanilla bean ice cream
20 ice cubes
1 tbsp vanilla extract
milk


Place ingredients in a blender, add enough milk so that it blends smoothly. Feel free to change the ice cream or purple smoothie amount depending on the taste. I liked just having a hint of the grape flavor and more vanilla flavor. 


What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

April Fool's Cupcakes!

They may look like mashed potatoes! But they are REALLY chocolate cupcakes with lots of vanilla frosting. YUM!!! For more on cute cupcake tricks see my Meatloaf Cupcake post. 


This is a great idea even if it isn't April Fool's Day! But it was April Fool's so I had to come up with something. There are lots of great ideas out there. Some of the easy ones are the pound cake that looks like grilled cheese, the cupcakes that look like corn on the cob, and the fake fried egg. 


After tossing around different ideas, I finally settled on this one and I'm so glad I did. So cute!

Here's how it works...bake cupcakes (they can be from scratch or you can jus use cake mix from a box). I would recommend a light color that you can't see through vanilla icing. However, I used chocolate because it just tastes better! 

Once they cool cover with vanilla frosting. I used Pillsbury Dough Easy Frost which certainly made the process easy but did have maybe a different texture than regular mashed potatoes. So it's up to you. I think homemade frosting would probably look the best (but I'm all about he short cuts!) if you have time for that and know a good recipe.

Use a spoon to make a circle in the frosting in the middle of each cupcake. Fill each with caramel topping.

Meanwhile, in the microwave, place unwrapped yellow starburst candies and heat for about 10 to 20 seconds. You don't wan them to actually melt, just to soften. You take them and press them down so that they look more like butter. Place in the middle of the caramel puddle. It's ok if it oozes and overflows. Then drizzle with additional caramel giving the impression of gravy. 

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Meatloaf Cupcakes

For April Fool's my cooking club had a get together and I decided it would be fun to make one of those April Fool's Desserts (google it). I went with the whole mashed potato cupcake thing. It was great.

However, one of my friends (Hi Jess!) was really disappointed when the she found out the mashed potatoes were chocolate cupcakes & frosting, she actually WANTED the mashed potatoes instead. So as a treat, when I knew she was coming over for dinner, I decided to make mashed potatoes for real. I wanted to keep with the cupcake theme though, so I decided I would do meat cupcakes instead with mashed potato icing. So cute! It might sound gross, but it's actually quite delicious.

There are a bazillion meatloaf recipes out there and anyone will do. I'm a no-thrills kind of meatloaf gal. I don't like bbq sauce or brown sugar or too much of anything else. I like a little bit of seasoning and some veggies. I also want the meatloaf as healthy as possible. That's why I'm really happy with this recipe. I did a 50/50 combination of ground turkey and extra lean ground beef. 

I also put in shredded carrots, diced onions, and diced celery. Normally it would be a pain in the rear end to dice, chop, and shred all those veggies and try to get them small enough to mix into the meat mixture. But with the help of Darrenkamp's and my small food processor it was very easy.

Ingredients:
1/2 lb lean ground beef
1/2 lb ground turkey
1/2 cup shredded carrot
1/2 cup onion, diced
1/2 cup celery, diced
1/3 cup skim milk
3/4 cup italian-style breadcrumbs
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan
2 eggs
salt & pepper
Box of instant mashed potatoes and all the ingredients that goes with it or homemade mashed potatoes.


Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Prepare the instant mashed potatoes, directed by the box. (See end note on why to do the mashed potatoes first).
Next, start to prepare the meatloaf.
In a small bowl mix in the breadcrumbs and milk.
Saute the veggies until soft. (You can use oil, but I chose to just use fat free olive oil spray).
Transfer into a food processor once the veggies have cooled and mince on a low setting until the veggies are very tiny.
Mix the meat, eggs, breadcrumbs/milk, parmesan, parsley, salt & pepper together in a large bowl. Use your hands or a spoon, make sure it's mixed well.
Place meat mixture into muffin pan. (I use the bendable, non-stick muffin pans and the meatloaf pops out easily at the end.) You should fill up each muffin cup about most of the way.
Bake in oven for about 20 to 25 minutes.
Makes about 12.
For the mashed potato topping you will use about 4 oz. of instant mashed potatoes. Follow directions on box.
(for pink icing mix in beet juice!)
Use a star tip and pipe the frosting or use a plastic bag and cut a whole in it. [You might want to do the mashed potatoes first, then do the meatloaf because it's hard to pipe the mashed potatoes when they are still really really hot.]

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Cooking With Maddie

My niece, Madelyn Paige is 2 and she's A LOT of fun. For starters, she adores cake pops. So much so, that when she was over and I was making them, she pushed a kitchen chair over to the counter, climbed on up and insisted she needed to help. All the while yelling, "Cake Pops! Cake Pops! Cake Pops!" in her adorable 2-year old voice. LOVE HER!!!

She also helped me make the s'more cookies that are in the previous post. They didn't come out so perfect, but my company did not seem to mind. The best part of cooking with Maddie is that she doesn't care how beautiful the desserts come out, she'll eat it anyway! Looks like the s'more cookies were Maddie-approved!

It was a lot of fun cooking with her. She even helped me dip the cake pops in chocolate and just like her Aunt, she is a sucker for sprinkles! Yeah Maddie Girl!

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

S'more Cookies

My husband loves making s'mores around the campfire and his favorite dessert is warm chocolate chip cookies, so when my mom showed me this recipe, I just knew I had to make them. 

My brother-in-law came to town and I got together with some of my in-laws and my awesome nieces and we decided to try these out for dessert.


What you do is you construct a s'more. (half size)

Then you encompass the s'more in cookie dough. And bake it.

It was delicious, but it turned out to be a hot mess. They kind of just fell apart. Check out the pictures on this blog to see what it should have looked like. 

I think the strategy is to use A LOT of dough or to make homemade dough. I tried just using a big container of cookie dough. I think you actually need 2 containers to make about 8 cookies. As you can see, because we didn't have enough dough, some of the s'mores weren't completely covered and I think that might have been where this recipe went wrong. The chocolate and marshmallows need enough time to melt without the actual cookies being burnt.

I'm anxious to try this recipe again sometime soon, but for now it at least tasted good though it didn't look too pretty.

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

BBQ Pizza Bake

This recipe is from Pillsbury dough. It's delicious and feeds a lot of people for a short amount of work.


Ingredients:
1 pound of extra lean ground beef
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tsp of onion powder
1/2 cup to 1 cup of barbecue sauce
1 can pillsbury refrigerated crescent dinner rolls formed into 1 flat collection of dough or just use pizza crust or seamless dough
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese


Directions:
Heat oven to 375 degrees.
In a large skillet cook beef and onion over medium heat until cooked through, stirring occasionally.
Add onion powder.
Stir in barbecue sauce. 
Reduce heat, simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally.
Meanwhile, prepare the dough. Place in 13x9 pan.
Press into bottom and 1 inch up the sides.
Spread hot meat mixture over dough. Sprinkle with cheese.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes until edges of crust are golden brown.

What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Slacker

I know, I know I haven't posted anything lately. I've been busy training for my upcoming half marathons (plural) not to mention the marking period ending. But enough with excuses, I promise to post a bunch this week.


Here are some upcoming recipes to pique your curiosity and hold your interest...(check back this week!)


Twice-Baked Ranch Potatoes
April Fool's Mashed Potato Cupcakes
Meatloaf Cupcakes
Cookie with Maddie (my niece!)
S'more Cookies
Mexican Pot Pie
Barbecue Pizza Bake
Purple Cow Smoothie
Healthified Chicken Tortilla Casserole
Hamburger Goulash
Make-Ahead Breakfast Casserole
Peanutbutter Baked Oatmeal
Broccoli Calzones

And of course...Pi Day Cake Pops (I know it's already April!)


STAY TUNED!

Hot Couscous For Breakfast

This was surprisingly good. It was also easy to make. Not too many ingredients needed. I already had the all the ingredients in my cupboard, including the couscous. So major bonus points if you don't have to run out to the store and pick up any supplies. I made a batch of this over the weekend and then portioned it out for breakfast all week. I hear this is a great meal for a camping trips.  



It may be unusual to think of eating couscous for breakfast. For some, eating couscous in general might be out of their comfort zone. But honestly, this meal smells & tastes JUST like cinnamon oatmeal. So if you like oatmeal, you'll like couscous for breakfast! Who knew?


Ingredients:
3 cups skim milk
2 tbsp honey
3 tsp ground cinnamon
2 cups dry couscous
1/3 cup dried fruit such as craisins or apricots
1/2 cup slivered almonds or chopped walnuts


Directions:
In a small sauce pan over medium-high heat combine milk, honey, and cinnamon.
When it comes to a boil pour in the couscous.
Turn off heat, cover, and let stand for 5 minutes.
Stir in fruit & nuts. Fluff with a fork.


What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Turkey Meatloaf

I used the ingredients feature on AllRecipes.com to find this recipe. I had an extra package of lean ground turkey and rosemary that I had been using for a couple of recipes. Plus bread crumbs too. I wanted to find a recipe to freeze. I wanted to use this stuff before it went bad. So I just typed in the ingredients I had and it found several recipes for me. I knew that meatloaf was easy to make and it was perfect to freeze. The recipe also used everything I had, so it was more than perfect. I kept this recipe real simple. No tomato-sauce topping, etc. However, I did see one recipe for turkey meatloaf that mixes in fresh spinach. I bet that would be really good. If anyone tries making that let me know how it goes. 


Ingredients:
1 lb to 1.25 pounds of lean ground turkey
2 cups of bread crumbs
1 egg
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 cup of skim milk
1/4 cup of worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup of vinegar
salt & pepper
2 tbsp of rosemary


Directions:
In a large bowl combine ground turkey, beaten egg, bread crumbs, garlic, milk, & onions.
Add vinegar and worcestershire sauce.
Season with rosemary, salt & pepper.
Press into greased loaf pan. 
Bake in preheated oven at 350 for 1 hour. 


What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)

Mini Chicken Parmesan

I was in the mood to make something Italian for my small group. I know that I enjoy making Chicken Parm, but I needed something that would be easier to make for 14 people. So I wanted something "smaller" or really just simpler. I started doing some research online. I found some really creative ideas out there (google: mini chicken parm) but then finally settled on making Miniature Chicken Parmesans with already cooked chicken nuggets. It was listed as a Fun For Kids recipe but I decided it would be perfect for a group of adults too. It was delicious! Chicken nuggets were on sale @ Darrenkamps so I bought two big bags. Just make sure you have plenty of cheese & sauce and you are good to go. My small group always pitches in and brings stuff to share. We served with a side of multi-colored rotini, plenty of sauces to choose from, garlic bread, & a delicious salad with avocado slices. Then ended the night with an Oreo Torte! YUM!



Here is a recipe that will serve about 8 people.



Ingredients:
1 large bag of frozen chicken nuggets.
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup onion, diced
6 cloves garlic, minced
3 cups of pasta sauce (may need additional for pasta)
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 tbsp italian seasoning
1 tsp oregano
2 tbsp of fresh parsley, chopped
pasta, any kind
salt & pepper, if desired


Directions:
Preheat oven and cook nuggets according to directions. (remember to flip halfway through)
Meanwhile, in a large sauce pan, heat oil over medium-high heat.
Stir in onion & garlic and cook until tender. 
Stir in pasta sauce, parsley, and seasonings.
Bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, cook pasta according to box directions.
Mix parmesan & mozzarella together in a medium bowl.
Top each nugget with a spoonful of pasta sauce.
Spring with cheese mixture.
Return to oven and cook for another 5 to 7 minutes until cheese is bubbly and melted. 
Serve with cooked pasta. Use excess sauce on pasta.

Evelyn is still too young to enjoy mini chicken parm, but some day she will enjoy the food that her Auntie Jilly cooks her  (ok, so i'm not really her Aunt)

Mixed Berry French Toast Bake

My friend Nicole sent me this recipe and insisted that I make it. I'm so glad she did! It's a great treat when making breakfast for a group of people. 


Ingredients:
1 loaf of French Bread, cubed -- very small
6 egg whites
3 eggs
2 cups fat free milk
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1 package frozen unsweetened mixed berries
2 tbsp cold butter
1/3 cup packed brown sugar


Directions:
Place bread cubes in a 13 x 9 baking dish coated with cooking spray.
In a medium bowl combine egg whites, eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and salt.
Pour over bread. (I suggest fully emerging the bread into the liquid mixture).
Then refrigerate overnight for 8 hours.
The next morning, remove the berries from the freezer 30 minutes before baking and set aside.
Also remove the baking dish from the fridge.
Bake, covered, at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. 
In a small bowl, cut butter into brown sugar until crumbly. 
Sprinkle butter mixture over French toast. Top with berries.
Bake, uncovered, for 15 to 25 minutes.


If you want more details and tips for this recipe see Nicole's blog.


What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? I would love to know that you visited my blog. Please leave me a message letting me know you were here! Did you try out a recipe? Let me know! I would love to hear from you :-)