Food, family, and fun. Nothing goes better together and the more the merrier!
Welcome to my little home away from home in the blogosphere! I hope you have as much fun reading about my adventures in the kitchen and as the oldest sister in a large Catholic family as I have experiencing and blogging about them!
Remember, all humanity passes through the family so we might as well make sure they’re all well fed!
Is anybody else ready for summer? I am so ready! Warm weather, sunny days, barbecues, watermelon, swimming, and no school! Talking about school- I’ll actually be done before Easter so that’s part of the reason I’m so excited for summer is because it’s coming early!! 😀 I can’t get the chorus part of Mungo Jerry’s song “In the Summertime” out of my head!
Anyway… Summer always makes me think about grilling out hotdogs and hamburgers so then that thought led me to corn dogs! Who doesn’t love a good corn dog? We usually just get a box of the pre made ones at SAMs but I’ve been wanting to try and make our own. Well, let me just say that I have a feeling these will be a once a week thing in the summer time for us! 😉
Surprisingly they’re easier to make than I ever thought! This recipe makes almost 2 times more than it says it should so if you really only want 10 corn dogs I would cut the batch in half or do what I did and make 20 dogs and then some bite sized ones! 🙂
Summertime Corn Dogs
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups yellow cornmeal
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 cups buttermilk (regular milk works too)
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon honey
1 (10 count)* package Hot Dogs
10 wooden skewers or chopsticks
2 Quarts Vegetable Oil, for frying
Directions
1) In a medium or large pot, add the oil. Turn heat to medium and heat oil to 350 degrees F.
2) In a large bowl, add the cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Stir together. Then add the beaten egg, buttermilk, oil and honey. Stir until combined. (Batter should be a little thicker than pancake batter)
3) Remove hot dogs from package. Wipe them all dry with a paper towel (this will help the batter stick to them better) Insert one skewer or wooden stick into each hot dog.
4) Pour the batter into a tall drinking glass. Holding by the skewer, take one hot dog and dunk it into the batter, coating all of the hot dog. Slowly remove from batter and let a little excess batter drip back into the cup. Immediately place it into the hot oil, while still holding the stick. Turn as necessary to brown all sides. Cook for 2-3 minutes, or until all sides are a deep golden brown. Remove from hot oil and place on paper towels to drain grease. Repeat with all hot dogs.
5) If there is leftover batter I cut up a hot dog or two into thin slices and mix it in with the batter. Then I use a cookie scoop to scoop up little balls and plop them in the oil to fry for about a minute on both sides. And there you have bite sized corn dog balls! 🙂
*I found that one batch makes 20 hot dogs with leftover batter.
Here are the corn dog balls!
Wow! I can’t believe 2013 is over! It has gone by so fast! And I haven’t written in a while so let me tell you what we’ve been doing the past few months. We’ve had 3 birthdays since November. My younger brother had his birthday the day before Thanksgiving. So we’ve had a lot of parties! On Thanksgiving our priest offered Mass and that was awesome. At the end of Mass he was so funny and started asking us all if we were hungry and ready to celebrate and telling us “Smacznego” which is the Polish word for Bon appetite! Our Nana was here to celebrate with us and we also invited a friend from church. Here’s a picture of our table.
Then my birthday was the beginning of December and we had our annual gingerbread house making party that day. We invite all our friends and we have a huge party! Here’s a picture of my brother hard at work!
And here’s a picture of a finished house
We went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and it was beautiful. It was so peaceful that the little ones fell asleep in the pew! 🙂 Then we all slept in the next day and had a yummy breakfast of chipped beef and homemade cinnamon rolls while we opened presents! Oh, and I forgot to mention that our tree was 16 feet tall this year! We have a tall ceiling… 😉
In January we (the Sanctity of Life Committee) had a bake sale to help raise money for our trip to DC for the March for Life! There were all kinds of assorted baked goods! We made Caramel popcorn, fruit cobblers, and artisan bread. We bought an apple pie that our friends make that is delicious!
Next to Christmas the March for Life is one of our most favorite thins of the year! The SLC always gets two buses every year for the March For Life and we go up for the day! It was pretty cold but as Elsa likes to say in Frozen ” Let the snow rage on, the cold never bothered us anyway!” 😉 Here’s a picture looking back from where we were walking! This just gives you a little taste of how many people come from all over! It was also Mom and Dads 20th anniversary! ❤
And now that things have settled down we are getting back into the swing of school! Hope you all had a wonderful Thanskgiving, Christmas and are enjoying 2014!
This morning we had the first snowfall of the year! I’m so excited that winter is finally here!
Today’s recipe is a combination of a recipe for Cinnabon Rolls and a bread machine recipe for Amish bread! I really like using this recipe for the dough because it’s just a basic white bread recipe and it doesn’t have any crazy ingredients in it. Now, I know that the store bought packages of cinnamon rolls are easy and tempting to get but with just a few extra minutes you will get the best cinnamon rolls you (or your family) have ever tasted! Let me warn you though, once you make these, all other cinnamon rolls will never be the same!
If you want the ease of popping them in the oven in the morning, make the rolls the night before, put them in the fridge, then pull those babies out and cook them. If they’re in a glass pan, make sure you put them in a cold oven. You can even make the frosting the night before and just pull it out to soften while the rolls are baking. So yummy!
Last week I made these yummy pumpkin bars with the same frosting that goes on the cinnamon rolls. Check it out and let me know what you think! 🙂
Cinnamon Rolls
Ingredients
For the dough-
9oz warm water
1/4 cup olive oil
3 Tbs sugar
1 tsp salt
3 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast
For the filling
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 1/2 tbs cinnamon
1/3 cup softened butter
Directions
1) Combine all ingredients for the dough in bread machine and set to “dough” cycle.
2) When dough is done roll out on a floured surface to form a 16″ wide and 21″ long rectangle with a thickness of 1/4″.
3) Combine brown sugar and cinnamon in bowl and mix well.
4) Spread the softened butter all over the dough. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar mix evenly over the butter and dough surface.
5) Roll down jelly roll fashion along the 16″ wide side of the rectangle. Cut dough roll into 12 slices. Place the 12 slices into a 9×13″ baking pan.
6) Bake at 400 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until light brown on top. Allow to cool. Frost generously and enjoy!
Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients
4 Tbs. Softened butter
3 ounces cream cheese*
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
DIrections
1) Beat butter and cream cheese with mixer until combined.
2) Slowly add in the powdered sugar. Mix in the vanilla and salt.
(If too thick for your liking add a little milk until it is the consistency you like.)
*I don’t mind a little extra cream cheese so I just do 4 ounces to make it easy. 🙂
Hi everybody!
I am so glad that it’s turning into Fall! Cozy sweaters, cups of Coffee/Cocoa, and snuggling under the blankets. Oh, and all things pumpkin flavored! 😉
Let me just start by saying that I found this recipe because I was looking for something to use up a tub of homemade cream cheese frosting. Serveral days prior I had made cinnamon rolls. (Come back on Friday for that recipe!) And I also made The Best Cream cheese frosting. But I made a little mistake… I added a whole teaspoon of salt instead of an eighth of a teaspoon. So long story short, I ended up making 8 batches of frosting to balance out the salt! 😛 But having too much frosting on your hands isn’t really a bad thing, right? 😉
So to use up the frosting, I thought, what goes better with cream cheese frosting than pumpkin? One of the things that I love about this recipe is that you put it in a jelly roll pan. I like doing that because it helps make the cake go farther and the frosting to cake ratio is a little more even. 😉 I feel like any time you mix pumpkin with a cake mix you come out with the most moist and deliciously flavored masterpiece! Which is everything I want in a cake!
Pumpkin Bars With Cream Cheese Frosting
From http://selfreliancebyjamie.blogspot.com/2011/11/most-amazing-pumpkin-bar-recipe.html
Ingredients
2 cups Flour
2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups pure pumpkin puree
4 beaten eggs
3/4 cup melted butter
Directions
1) Preheat oven to 350 and grease and flour a 15×10″ pan.
2) Combine dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients and mix well.
3) Bake for 25-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Cool completely and then frost.
4) Serve with a glass of milk and watch it all disappear! 🙂
Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients
4 Tbs. Softened butter
3 ounces cream cheese*
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
DIrections
1) Beat butter and cream cheese with mixer until combined.
2) Slowly add in the powdered sugar. Mix in the vanilla and salt.
(If too thick for your liking add a little milk until it is the consistency you like.)
*I don’t mind a little extra cream cheese so I just do 4 ounces to make it easy. 🙂
So I have no idea when we started calling French Dip sandwiches “Special Sandwiches” but let me just say- this recipe deserves that title! We used to make French Dip sandwiches with a packet of au jus, Italian seasoning, and beef broth and it always tasted good but this knocks it out of the park.
One Saturday morning I was trying to find something to put in the crock pot so we would have dinner when we got back from Mass. I realized that I had a rump roast and rolls but no packet of au jus. So I did what I always do in a food emergency- turn to Dr. Pinterest. I found this recipe and checked all the ingredients and they were items that we always have in our pantry. What luck! So I threw it all in the crockpot and couldn’t wait for dinner to come.
We got back from Mass and the house smelled amazing. The boys could barely restrain themselves from picking the meat up with their fingers and eating it. We served it on rolls with a little mayonnaise and there were no leftovers! So I guess it was a hit! 😉 What’s really weird is that I don’t really like meat but this is one of my favorite meals now. Anyway enough about me, let’s get on to the recipe! 🙂
If you try it let me know what you think! 🙂
Special Sandwiches
Ingredients
1 (4 pound) Boneless rump roast
1 cup beef broth
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1 Tbs Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbs soy sauce
1 Tbs honey
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (adjust to your prefernece)
4 cloves chopped garlic
Directions
1) Lay the Rump Roast on the bottom of the crock pot.
2) Combine all other ingredietns in a bowl. Pour over rump roast and put the lid on.
3) If on low cook 6-8 hours and if on high cook 3-4 hours.
4) When done it should pull apart fairly easily. Then with 2 forks pull off as much as the fat as you can and discard.
5) Serve on rolls with some mayonnaise and a little bowl with the some of the extra sauce for dipping.
Hi Everyone!
Sunday was MG’s Birthday and my little sis turned 8! When she was born I remember being SO excited to have a little sister. Finally someone who I could play super girly games with! Don’t get me wrong, 4 brothers are AWESOME and my older brother is one of my best friends (and we had some pretty good tea parties) but it’s nice to have a sister who you can giggle with. 😉
MG loves spicy things like I do so I am in luck when it comes to her birthday foods! She wanted this deliciously spicy dip that I got from my Aunt Marcella and Uncle Danny that’s called Spicy chicken buffalo dip. It is so good and perfect with anything! I have made it as a dip, a grilled cheese sandwich and I even mixed it up with some egg noddles to make a yummy casserole. I might have to go in the kitchen and get some right now. 😉 Oh and did I mention it’s easy? The hardest part is cooking the chicken but you could use canned.
Spicy Buffalo Chicken Dip
Ingredients
4 boneless chicken breasts
1 Jar Frank’s hot sauce
1 Jar blue cheese dressing
2 pkgs. softened cream cheese
1 pkg shredded cheddar cheese
1 cup celery
Directions
1) Poach and shred the chicken.
2) In a small casserole dish mix together the cream cheese and the blue cheese dressing. Then mix in the cheddar cheese.
3) Sauté celery in the hot sauce until slightly soft.
4) Combine the chicken and the celery mixture with the cheese mixture in the casserole dish.
5) Bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Serve with crackers (and a glass of water;) and enjoy!
(Sorry about this lousy picture this dip was surprisingly hard to photograph…) 😛
Hello Everyone!
Thanksgiving is soon approaching so today I have an easy pie crust recipe! This recipe comes from my Grandmother and it is so versatile. We make pies, fruit pies, quiches, casseroles– anything that calls for a pie crust! But we have been craving pumpkin pie and at first I was worried that if we had it now we wouldn’t want it on Thanksgiving but really, who would get tired of pie?
What I love about this crust is that it has 5 ingredients and it requires NO rolling out!!!! Or chilling…. It’s so annoying when you want a pie and you want it now but the crust is holding you back because it has to chill for 2 hours…. the frustrations of a baker….. 😉 And when you make a homemade crust you always feel good about your pies!
Easy Mazola Pie Crust
Makes 1 9″ pie crust
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/2 cup oil
2 Tbs milk
Directions
1) Sift together the flour, salt, and sugar in medium bowl.
2) With a fork whip together the oil and milk. Then pour into the dry ingredients and mix until crumbly.
3) Press with fingers into 9″ pie plate.
4) Bake at 450 for 10-12 minutes.*
Here is the finished product with a yummy pumpkin filling!
*If a recipe calls for a baked pie crust then go ahead and bake it but if it calls for unbaked then it works just fine for that too. 🙂
Isn’t that a cute dollop of Whipped cream? Its so pretty….Here’s what my pie would really look like though if I was just eating it…. Equal parts crust, filling, and whipped cream…..
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Hello Everyone!
I can’t believe September is almost over! We have been pretty busy this month so that’s probably why… Dad’s birthday was the 16th so to celebrate it we went to Gatlinburg TN for a few days. It is one of our most favorite places to go! Whenever we go down there we always stay at a cabin which is so much fun (and easier than a hotel). My brother found us a cabin that sleeps 12 for $100 but in the end it was lowered to $78. So we were very excited about that. 😀 The 2 little girls (16 months and 3 years) had never been to TN before so I really loved seeing them experience for the first time all the sights and little things that we love!
Some of the places we like to visit while we are there are the Aquarium, WonderWorks (affectionately known to us as “the Upside Down House”, and on this last trip we discovered mini golf! We got several pictures from the first two places but with 10 people playing mini golf there wasn’t time to take pictures… 😉
Here are just a couple of pictures from the Aquarium!
This was a new exibit that we saw for the first time and it was really cool! It’s a penguin tank and they added these little tunnels where you could crawl under the penguins’ water that they swim in. The penguins all had cute little names too….
This was a really cool and huge fish that we saw in the shark tunnel! I can’t remember it’s name though…..
Thought this was a cool picture…
And here are some pictures from the “Upside Down House”.
Picture of the outside……
Leave it to the older boys to turn the rock climbing wall into a racing spot and competition. 😉 They even timed themselves……
MG on the Bed of Nails
This thing was new and it was really cool. There was a timer and a wall of little circles that light up and you have to see who can hit the most circles when they light up (kind of like that wack-a-mole game)….
This is their 4 story rope course. Yes, that’s right, I said 4 story high rope course. I don’t have an issue with heights but this thing was scary!
I was really happy to see that they added a few more little kid games. The 2 girls really enjoyed this “Lite Brite” sort of thing.
My little Pumpkin….. this face pretty much sums her up…. quite the character….. 😉
The bubble room.
Enjoying this giant play house!
They have this exhibit about the Titanic, and it has a bucket of water that is as cold as the water was when the ship sank and there’s a timer. Well, I got to around 9 seconds and my bother got up to 3 minutes!!! Then Mom made him pull it out…. The man who was working said the record for someone holding their hand in it was 25 MINUTES!!!! O_O
And here is everyone but Dad in front of our cabin.
I got this picture of Pumpkin making faces on the way home….
Well, there are some of the things that we did while we were down there! Hope your week has been Fantastic! 🙂
Greetings everyone! 🙂
Hope you all had a lovely weekend! Our priest was gone for the week showing some Polish friends of his around VA, so we asked our substitute priest over for breakfast on Sunday and my 4 brothers (each) had a lacrosse game so we spent several hours watching them. Then we ended the day with homemade Chinese food and White Collar. Have any of you seen White Collar? It’s a really good TV show that we have just gotten into!
So, tonight we had these delicious
French fries! What’s really interesting about this recipe (I think) is that you mix all the seasoning together with the vegetable oil. Also it calls for mixing cornstarch in with the oil and seasonings as well. All the other recipes for fries that I have, tell you to brush the potatoes with oil and then sprinkle the seasoning over them but they never are coated all the way, never truly crispy or just…. boring sometimes….
But this recipe really hits the spot! I remember the first time I made them- I was doing school and I had earlier found this recipe on Pinterest. Well, whenever that happens I have a hard time focusing on school because I want to try whatever new recipe I found, so I took a break and whipped these up as a mid afternoon snack. My whole family kept coming though the kitchen saying “What smells so good?!”. Needless to say, the whole tray was gone as soon as they were done! 😉
(My little sister walked through the kitchen tonight while they were cooking and saw them in the oven and yelled “We’re having those?!! I love those!!!) 😉
Garlicky Potato Wedges
http://foodraf.com/potato-wedges/
Ingredients
5-6 medium potatoes (1lb)
1/2 tsp Dried Oregano
1-2 Tbs cornstarch
5 garlic cloves chopped
1 tsp Red chili powder/Cayenne pepper*
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp black pepper
3 Tbs Veggie/olive oil
Salt to taste
Directions
1) Preheat your oven to 450.** Combine all the ingredients, except the potatoes, in a large mixing bowl.
2) Cut your potatoes into wedges. Dump them into the bowl with the oil/seasoning mix. Stir until the wedges are coated.
3) Spread them on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 30-45*** minutes. Sprinkle with salt and serve with ketchup! Enjoy!!
Notes
* Unless you know you can handle the heat, I would suggest using the chili powder and just a light sprinkle of the cayenne for a little kick.
** The blog where I had originally gotten the recipe and directions is not working for me, so that’s the temperature I cooked mine at.
*** As I said above , the blog i got the recipe from wasn’t working, so this is how long I cooked mine. But since I was cooking for 10 people, there were more potatoes to cook so mine were in the oven for an hour…. 🙂
Hey Everybody! Hope your week has gone well! Did any of you make it to Chick-Fil-A appreciation day? We were in MO at the time and couldn’t find any where we were. 😦 But the week before they had a cow appreciation day where you go in dressed as a cow and you got a free entree or meal. So we made costumes (even painted our noses black) and all day we counted down the hours until it was time to go.
But when we parked at Chick Fil A there was nobody else there dressed as cows. 😛 Imagine how self conscious we were as we realized we were all dressed as cows, about to go into a full restaurant. All the black noses turned to me and said “Are you sure it’s today?” I was positive it was Cow Appreciation Day but just to be sure Dad called our Chick- Fil-A and made sure it was. So we made or way in and tried to hide behind each other. With 10 people dressed as cows though, I’m not sure why we thought it would do us any good. 😉 Our herd made its way up to order and one of the employees had a bell and the tradition is to moo whenever you hear the bell ring. So we all mooed our hearts out. Everybody laughed and we started to relax and sat down to enjoy our meal.
Here’s an interesting tidbit for you– When they bread their chicken before frying it, they mix powdered sugar into the flour and they don’t use any milk. They just throw the chicken into the flour/sugar mixture.
Hahahaha… anyway back on track. Today’s recipe is a easy lemon shrimp! It’s great for meatless Fridays or if you’re just craving some seafood! One thing that I love about this recipe is that it cooks the shrimp perfectly. Before this recipe, our preferred method of cooking shrimp was steaming them. But I always had trouble figuring out exactly how long to steam them and they never came out cooked the same way. This solved my problems. Just throw them in the oven, set the timer and then forget about them.
Also, this is my revised version. We use one more lemon than the original recipe called for and I rewrote the directions so they are a little more clear. 🙂
Easy Lemon Shrimp
Ingredients
1 stick of butter
2 lemons
2 lbs of shrimp fresh or frozen*
1 packet of dry zesty italian seasoning mix
Directions
Set the oven to 350. Put the stick of butter on a cookie sheet (that has edges) and put it in the oven to melt.
Slice the lemons thinly and lay them over the butter, trying to cover the cookie sheet as best as possible.
Lay the shrimp in a single layer over the lemons. Sprinkle the packet of italian seasoning over everything.
Put in the oven and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Serve over crusty bread, noodles or with a side of rice and veggies. Enjoy!!
*If the shrimp was frozen thaw them by running them under cold water until they do not feel frozen when you squeeze them.
Maddeelicious 