In the Kitchen Archives | Page 22 of 28

No-Bake Peanut Butter Pie – To Eat or Not to Eat? {UPDATED}

October 17, 2012 by Laura 28 Comments

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I found this recipe for Easy No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie over at Diva Entertains (which is a great blog if you haven’t checked it out already). I was super excited that I could make the recipe just as it stated. No adaptations necessary. (Although I did use sucanat instead of brown sugar – no biggie.)

Matt loves chocolate and peanut butter, so I’m excited to surprise him with this when he gets home from soccer tonight.

Easy No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie

The question is, do we sample it before he gets home – you know, just to make sure it’s good? Or should we wait and enjoy it together once he gets here?

It may be a reallllly long afternoon if we choose to wait. And depending on how late the game goes, we may all need to go to bed before he gets home. And what if the game goes into overtime? That will make it even later.

Maybe we could each just take a small slice. And we’ll save him a really big piece. I promise.

Don’t you just love being privy to the wrestling matches inside my head? What to do, what to do…

*UPDATE* (approx. 4 hours later)

Hi.

I thought maybe I should inform you of my decision, so that you weren’t all worried about me crying beside the fridge trying to stay away from the pie until Matt got home.

But don’t worry. We saved not one, but three pieces for Matt.

This pie was so incredibly good that we all almost passed out. (I’m sure the sugar had nothing to do with that.)

And we have also ruined our dinner, so I think we will be waiting to eat until after church tonight. ;)

Speaking of Diva Entertains, they are having an awesome giveaway right now for a Silhouette Cameo Electronic Cutting Machine. Head on over and enter for a chance to win. Owning one of those would just be too much fun!

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Food Pictures From This Week and Some of My Scattered Thoughts That May or May Not Make Sense

August 15, 2012 by Laura 18 Comments

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Below you will find a random assortment of pictures for the past three days of feeding the YC Ladies’ Soccer Team. I wasn’t able to take pictures of everything, simply because there wasn’t time. But here’s what I was able to capture:

Sunday night I made a big roaster oven full of roast and carrots. This container was empty at the end of the night. :)

Here we have an almost overflowing pot of Cream Cheese Corn. This is always a hit when I feed a crowd. Although with this and the mashed potatoes and the rolls, it was a compete carb overload. Not sure what I was thinking!!? Especially since the team had to run three miles a few hours after eating this meal. ;)

But speaking of rolls…uh…funny story. I made these during the afternoon, but got the “brilliant” idea to put a lid on them and put them into the fridge to stop the rising so that I could bake them later at meal time. This plan didn’t quite go as I intended it to go. The rolls didn’t stop rising in the fridge like I told them to. Therefore, when I pulled them out at 5:00 to bake them, I saw, much to my dismay, that they had all grown up together and “burst” at the top of the lid. I baked them anyway, hoping for the best. The girls walked into our house, smelled the rolls baking and got ever so excited. I gave them a half grin and told them not to get their hopes up because the rolls were quite…scary and that they were having severe issues. Well, one pan turned out not looking so bad (the pan on the right in the pic below) – but then they sunk when I pulled them out of them oven and were very doughy in the middle. Sad. The others (the ones on the left) looked like a big 9×13 cake. Good grief. I ended up slicing them like corn bread and the girls gobbled them up. They even gobbled up the doughy rolls. Wow, they are the sweetest girls ever. Love them.

Look at these pitiful rolls…

Here, would you like a little peak at these delightful girls of whom I speak? I love them all and am so thankful to have this opportunity to get to know them and to treat them to home cooking.

We served the meal at our house Sunday night, and they overflowed into our yard and porch. (Monday and Tuesday we fed them in our church fellowship hall so I’d have more oven space.)

Well now, speaking of the ovens in our church kitchen/fellowship hall (and of my cooking goof-ups this week)…

It is never fun to try to use a new oven for the first time when you are feeding 35 people. But alas, I decided to try the cool convection oven at church for the first time, supposing it to be an efficient way to make four pans of Crunchy Ranch Chicken.

The meal was to be served at 6:00. The chicken, according to my calculations, should have been done at 5:59. I stared at it. I glared at it. I screamed at it. None of these tricks helped it to cook quickly enough. But hey, you can see my picture-taking-reflection in the oven, so that’s kinda fun, even if I was mad at the oven for taking so long to bake my chicken.

The girls were very sweet and patient while they waited for the meal to be served, munching on grapes and relaxing their tired muscles. I believe we were finally able to serve the meal at 6:25. They felt like it was worth the wait and came back for seconds and thirds.

I was excited to discover that Rice and Veggie Stir Fry is a very easy dish to make for a crowd. I had made the rice that afternoon at home. I had also stir-fried the veggies that afternoon at home. I simply rewarmed it all together with soy sauce once I got to the church kitchen. SO easy. And it’s a perfect dish to serve with the (slow cooking) Crunchy Ranch Chicken.

Here are the Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies I made for the gal who can’t eat gluten.

Tonight I made a double batch of Butterscotch Bars which are a favorite of the team.

The girls were thrilled to see all the loaves of homemade bread to go with tonight’s Lasagna, Italian Salad, and Green Beans.

I loved every minute of cooking for these girls and I can’t wait to watch them play ball in a couple of weeks. Go Lady Panthers!!

And now I’m going to put my feet up for a while, maybe sleep in a little in the morning, and enjoy some leftovers while I take a day off from cooking. :)

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Finishing the List…Almost

August 4, 2012 by Laura 17 Comments

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Today was a beautiful, cool day – something we’ve not had for a long time! It was the perfect day to spend in the kitchen, and as my husband pointed out, it was the last Saturday until November that we will have free to be home getting work done. Ready or not, soccer season – here we come!

I sent two of the boys outside with the shop-vac and some old rags to clean out the van. Wow, did it ever need it! (Pictures not included. It was too scary and I was too ~~embarrassed~~ busy to snap a shot.) Matt sent the other two boys outside with a bucket with instruction to bring in as many peaches as they could from our tree. We were blessed with a beautiful crop this year! (Amazing, since we’ve had such little rain.)

Matt then spent quite a bit of time slicing the peaches for the freezer. For lunch today, I had peaches, leftover chicken, peaches, and a side of peaches. Best lunch ever!

In the meantime, I was making several rounds of Homemade Peanut Butter. Remember how I said that typically, when I make one batch of peanut butter, I make three or four – just to be efficient? Yup, the food processor got a work-out that’s for sure.

Instead of putting the last round of peanut butter in a jar, I used it to make a double batch of Chewy Granola Bars. These are now individually wrapped and ready to grab to take to games for snacks.

I then made some Corndog Muffins. I often get lazy with these – so they always turn out ugly. Truly, the dog is not supposed to be showing, but there they are, in all their hotdoggy glory. We’ll eat them just the same. But it sure would be nice to have a pretty picture to show you instead of well…this one.

I did not quite finish all the tasks on my Getting Ready for Fall To-Do List. I never got around to the Whole Wheat Graham Crackers or the Whole Wheat Calzones . Why? Because I did everything else on the list and now I’m tired. That’s the simple truth. I just decided to be done. My freezers are full. My jars are re-stocked. My kids’ books and assignments are ready for school. My house is clean (relatively). And several days after we finished organizing it, the Lego Room is still in good shape. It’s a miracle!

Thanks for coming alongside me this week as I worked through my list. School, soccer, gardening/canning season? Bring it on! I’m ready.

Just as soon as I clean the kitchen….

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Making Kefir with Powdered Starter

June 5, 2012 by Laura 89 Comments

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How to Make Kefir

I had never heard of Kefir until about six years ago. (It’s pronounced “kEE-fur”, by the way.) And then, while learning about kefir, I heard that there were these things called “kefir grains”, which of course made me immediately picture a wheat field.

FYI – kefir and wheat fields have nothing in common – except for maybe the fact that both can be used to create consumable products. Therefore, if you are having a conversation with friends and the subject of kefir comes up – (and you know it will, because a lengthy kefir conversation is what friendship is made of) – smile, look smart, and for the love of probiotics, don’t ask something silly about what a kefir field looks like.

Not that I ever asked anything like that or made myself sound silly in front of friends during a kefir conversation. Nor did I ever pronounce the word like “keh-fur” which rhymes with heifer, which makes me think of a cow, which sort of relates because at least kefir is a dairy product. But anyway…

I finally learned what kefir is, and I also learned to love it. Kefir is a probiotic beverage, similar to yogurt, only not quite as thick. This cultured dairy product is excellent for your digestion as it is full of healthy bacteria that can heal the gut. You can drink it plain, and will find that it is rich and tangy. We prefer to drink it in smoothies, blended with lots of frozen fruit to sweeten it up.

Kefir grains are reusable, allowing you make batches and batches of kefir for years and years. But with my busy schedule, I find that keeping up with making sure my kefir grains are alive and healthy is very overwhelming. That’s probably silly, but that’s where I’ve landed.

By the way, kefir grains are not a grain at all, so I don’t know why they are called grains. They are simply little grain sized live bacteria that, when placed in milk, culture the milk so that it becomes kefir. (I am so incredibly unscientific in my explanations.)

Instead of using these grains to make kefir for my family, I have found that using a Powdered Kefir Starter Culture is a much easier way to go. Then I use my homemade kefir to make more kefir. It’s awesome. Here’s how I do it:

Begin with a quart of milk and a packet of Powdered Kefir Starter Culture. I use raw, organic milk, but this it not necessary if you don’t have access to raw milk.

Pour contents of the packet into the milk. This step is so very difficult that I took a picture of it to show you how to do it. ;)

After you have poured the contents of the packet into the milk, it will look like this. Aren’t you glad I took a picture of this for you too?

Okay, that’s all of the obvious pictures I took, even though I’m sure you would have loved pictures of me digging through my drawer for a lid, putting the lid on, and shaking it up furiously.

Oh shucks, I guess I gave away the next steps in your kefir making process. Indeed, you need to put a lid on the jar, shake it up, and leave it on your countertop for about 24 hours – more or less – depending on how long it takes for this to “kefir-fy”. You will know that your kefir has formed once the contents in your jar have thickened. At this point, you can put your kefir in the fridge to chill.

Just a note: The instructions in the packet are likely to tell you to heat your milk and do a few extra steps beyond what I have told mentioned here. You can do that if you wish. I skip the other steps because I prefer to keep my milk raw, plus I have found that cold milk works just as well as warm milk.

VERY IMPORTANT!!! When using your kefir, keep about one cup at the bottom of your jar. Pour this cup of kefir into a quart or half gallon of milk, leave it on the counter for 24 (give or take) hours, and allow the milk to thicken into cultured kefir.

Isn’t that cool? You use your kefir to make more kefir. Therefore, your kefir starter packet will make eight or more batches of kefir! So easy!!

P.S. I just did a little internet research and see that another way to pronounce kefir is {keh-FEER}. I think that sounds a little funny, but what do I know? I’m the one who thought kefir grains grew in fields. ;)

Ever made kefir? How do you pronounce it?

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Healthy, Inexpensive Lunches – What Are Your Favorites?

May 22, 2012 by Laura 38 Comments

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Making 36 sandwiches yesterday got me to thinking about lunch ideas…

In the past, I’ve shared with you that our family does not eat many sandwiches, unless we’re on the road. Why? Because my family of six knows how to put away a large amount of food three times a day. By the time I purchase a decent quality lunch meat, whole wheat bread, and mayo I feel good about feeding our family, I can spend between $15 and $20 just on sandwiches for one meal. I could spend less if I bought cheaper lunch meat, but I don’t wanna and you can’t make me. ;) Thinking about how lunch meat is processed, and knowing what is added to the meat makes my face curl up in unattractive ways. It is best if I don’t go there.

Instead of sandwiches, our family enjoys much less expensive, much healthier meals during lunchtime each day. In an effort to share my ideas and get new ideas from all of you too, I thought it might be fun for us to talk about our favorite healthy (and quick) lunches.

Look through my archive of menu plans to read through lunches we fix regularly. As long as I have a plan, I can typically get lunch on the table very quickly. Don’t assume that sandwiches are faster to make than other lunches. Be creative and have fun. And take advantage of these Make Ahead Meal ideas which make warming up a pre-prepared healthy lunch a snap.

In case you don’t have this yet, we’d love for you to download our FREE Healthy Lunch List. Just click, print, and place this list on your fridge (or another handy location) to give you lots of fun lunch time inspiration!

Here are a few of our family’s favorite healthy and inexpensive lunches:

Taco Corn Fritters with fruit

Easy Noodle Stir Fry

Tuna Casserole with a veggie

Corndog Muffins with raw carrots and fruit

Healthier Chip Dip with organic corn chips and fruit

sloppy_corn_muffins_4

Sloppy Cornbread Muffins with fruit or veggies

What are your favorite, healthy lunches? Load up the comments section with ideas for us to draw from!

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Raspberry Almond Muffins from Deliciously Organic

May 15, 2012 by Laura 6 Comments

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Yesterday’s new recipe try-out from the Deliciously Organic cookbook was Raspberry Almond Muffins.

How did my family like them? Well, the recipe made 18 muffins. I pulled them out of the oven, left to go take a walk, got back, and there were only 5 left. I guess we now know how my family liked them. ;) At least they left some for me to try. (I loved them too, by the way!)

Be sure to read more about Deliciously Organic here and take advantage of the great deal Carrie Vitt is offering us here for just a few more days.

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Freezer Cooking During the Week of the Chicken

April 4, 2012 by Laura 43 Comments

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If you had any doubts that this truly was the Week of the Chicken, after this post, you will know for sure and for certain that I have encountered chicken madness at my house. I kind of had a hard time letting go of the fact that the chicken was such a good price at the store. Thus I kind of had a hard time not going back to the store multiple times to buy more chicken. Which means that I kind of had a big chicken party in my kitchen for several days in a row, working up some chicken recipes for the freezer.

In the meantime, we’ve been eating a lot of chicken too. So chicken crazed have I been, that when for lunch one day this week I actually fed my family something with leftover hamburger meat in it, my husband – supportive guy that he is – paused before taking a bite and said, “Wait! It’s the Week of the Chicken! Are you sure we’re allowed to eat beef this week?”

Ha! I love living with comedians.

Speaking of comedy…Why did the chicken cross the road?

I can’t even finish it. That joke is totally over-used and not at all funny. Oh, but my family made this one up a couple of years ago: What do you get when you cross a brick with a chicken?

Bricken Nuggets!!!!

Okay, I’m done now. I’m sure I’ve got you all completely worried that I’ve lost my head this week while cooking and prepping pounds and pounds of chicken for the freezer, but truly, you can relax. I’m fine. I promise. And also, I’m out of chicken. It’s all socked away in the freezer. Now I’m planning to move on to asparagus!

Yes, next week will be the Week of the Asparagus.

Except for not really. ;)

Okay…chicken. I’m here to tell you about my Week of the Chicken.

Right after getting back home with my first round of chicken packages, I made loads of Chicken Nuggets. I cooked some up for lunch…

But more importantly, I put together oodles of pre-made chicken nuggets for the freezer. See – here’s my chicken-nugget-assembly-line. I filled cookie sheets with nuggets, froze them, then baggied them up to pull out in the future.

The following isn’t very exciting, but the next day, I cut chicken into bites, cooked it in olive oil, and baggied it up for salads.

Day Three: Chicken cooked in bbq sauce. That will be great for sandwiches next week.

I grabbed one more round of chicken from the store (about 9 more packages), and put together several pounds of Crunchy Ranch Chicken. This is probably our favorite way to eat chicken. The recipe is not featured here on the site, but it is in the What To Do With the Chicken in Your Kitchen ebook – which can still be purchased for $1.50 if you hurry.

I am now officially ready to chicken out. What I mean is…I’m tired of chicken. I don’t want to look at chicken again for a long time.

Or at least until tomorrow.

Hey, leave a comment on this post for another chance to win one of our Week of the Chicken $10 Heavenly Homemakers Gift Certificates!

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Should You Invest In a Toaster Oven? If So, Which Toaster Oven?

March 1, 2012 by Laura 60 Comments

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toaster oven

To invest in a toaster oven…or not? After 16 years of marriage, a choice had to be made. To clarify, our toaster hadn’t been married for 16 years. Matt and I had been married for 16 years. We had been given the beloved toaster as a wedding gift. It lasted for precisely 16 years, four children, and 5,702 pieces of toast. Then, it decided to retire and its heating coils failed to ever turn orange again.

Thus we found ourselves faced with this very difficult decision about whether we should simply buy another regular toaster, or if we should invest in a nice toaster oven. This ranked right up there with other decisions we have faced over the years like, “should we purchase a house?” and “should we home school our offspring?”.

Okay, totally not really. Not even close.

But we did have to figure out how, pray tell, we were going to make toast. Grim reality hits when you’re standing in the kitchen with your butter knife and jelly, and you are suddenly faced with absolute toastlessness. Emotions can run amok.

Okay, totally not really. Not even close.

In actuality, our family doesn’t really even eat very much toast anymore. But shucks, wasn’t it fun to picture my husband and me standing sadly with our un-toasted bread in the kitchen, heads bent over in deep contemplation, as together, we looked through toaster catalogs?

We finally did decided to go ahead and purchase a toaster oven to replace our regular ol’ toaster. Because we no longer use a microwave, we have found our toaster oven to be a wonderful addition to our kitchen for warming up leftovers quickly. In addition, we chose a toaster oven that was big enough to bake a small pan of brownies or cookies, bake a small pizza, or warm up several burritos at once. We use it all the time and absolutely love it. I would not want to go back to regular toaster now that I’ve experienced how great and versitile a toaster oven is.

Many of you have asked which toaster oven we have and recommend. Well, it would appear that the toaster oven we own, a Euro-Pro Convection 6-Slice Toast R Oven, is no longer available at Amazon (which is where we purchased it a year ago). It seems that the Oster 6-Slice Convection Toaster Oven is comparable to what we purchased, and if I needed to buy one for my family at this point, that is likely what I would choose.

So how about you? Do you use a toaster or a toaster oven? If you have a toaster oven, in what ways do you use it?

Oh, and in case I forgot to mention it and in case you were wondering, our toaster oven does also make toast. Yes indeed. We are no longer toastless.

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Getting Ahead in my Kitchen

January 15, 2012 by Laura 32 Comments

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It is a fact that participating in an occasional cooking/baking marathon is very therapeutic for me. (It is also a fact that I had no idea how to spell therapeutic, which is why I am very thankful for spell check options. You should have seen how I spelled it when I sounded it out. Let’s just say that I can cook better than I can spell.)

My spelling issues aside, I receive great pleasure from mixing up four or more recipes at once, getting most of my dishes dirty all at the same time, and covering every inch of counter space with a cooking project. I failed to take a picture of the kitchen chaos. Sorry about that. ;) But I did manage to take a few pictures of what I accomplished during my baking day. Looking at pics of chocolate chip cookies is much better than looking at pics of my crusty cookie sheets, so let’s focus on the chocolate, shall we?

I made a double batch Chocolate Chip Cookies to serve at high school huddle. Our family also did a little taste testing because quality control is our specialty. :)

While the cookies were baking, I mixed up a double batch of Honey Whole Wheat Bread.

While the bread was rising, I started cooking a double batch of Taco Corn Fritters. These refrigerate or freeze well and reheat easily in the oven or toaster oven.

And last but not least, I made a big batch of Sloppy Joe Meat and some Sloppy Cornbread Muffins.

Although we’ve already eaten a good portion of the food I made to try and get ahead for this week, I do feel much better having a few extras on hand to warm up quickly for meals. Healthy convenience foods rock. :)

What are your favorite healthy convenience foods to have on hand?

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Fun {healthier} Holiday Baking

December 10, 2011 by Laura 15 Comments

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What with all the butter I hear you’ve been going through lately, it sounds like there’s a lot of fun Christmas baking going on out there! I actually haven’t even started doing my baking yet, but I will start soon. Oh yes, the butter and sucanat are going to start flying around here.

As I began to make my baking plans, I put together a list of some of my favorite holiday cookies and treats. All of these are made with healthier flours and sugars (usually honey or sucanat). I won’t be making all of these treats, but I’m really hungry right now, so I just kept adding to the list.