Kitchen Tip Tuesday...

Love cookies?  Want to make the yummiest sugar cookie you have ever eaten?  Use a yellow cake mix, an egg, half a cup of oil and mix well, adding a bit of water (maybe a fourth of a cup, I usually just fill up the empty egg shell twice) and drop by spoonfuls and bake until done (about 7 or 8 minutes) THE best cookies ever!!!  And when you can catch cake mixes on sale, stock up!

Don't forget to check out Kitchen Tip Tuesday At Tammys Recipes.com

Traditions

  What are some holiday traditions of your family?  Do you have special movies you watch together every year?  Do you all put the tree up together?  Please share your traditions with us. 


One of our traditions is decorating the trees together, we put Christmas music on and drag the trees (yes plural, we put up 3 trees) and put them all up.  I usually remember where each ornament came from, who gave it to me, for what occasion, and we talk about holidays past.  When the boys were small we always bought a toy with them for the toy drives in the community.  This year is our first without John and I am trying to think of a new tradition to start that will make our holiday a bit easier. 

Snacky foods..

ok, for Thanksgiving we are having a ham (for sandwiches) and snacky type foods so share some of your favorites..

I am taking a block of cream cheese with jalepeno jelly and some crackers.. and a cheese ball and a dessert

share a favorite snacky food

Crockpot cooking

If you have never seen the blog about a year of cooking in a crockpot,  A Year of Slow Cooking you need to see it.   She cooked all sorts of things in her crockpot, it even got her on the Rachel Ray Show. 

I have 3 crockpots, one HUGE one, and two small one quart or one and half quart ones.  I use them all the time.  In my house, we dont care for a green bean that isnt cooked DEAD!!  I mean it needs to be nearly mush..and no liquid UNLESS it has been cooked for a long time, it can have liquid, at holiday time, I load up my little crockpots with canned green beans and cook over night, and all day on low...PERFECTION!! Now I know some of you just gagged...but it is how we eat them...your green beans can crunch all you want, ours are dead and slide down easily. 

My crockpots are used to meeting cold things, I am the queen of putting meat straight out of the freezer into the crockpot.  Turn on high and cook all day and presto it is done.  I rarely remember to thaw things, since I am not the best menu planner, actually I can plan menus great, I just dont stick to them...ROFL
Like I said yesterday Minute steak with a jar of salsa is great in the crockpot.  I cook hamburger in my crockpot for tacos, it is easy and you dont have to stand over a pan stirring.  I just toss in the ground beef frozen and season it and leave it, at the end of the day I drain the grease off and crumble it up, super easy and dinner is ready. 
Beans, and soups also are something I cook alot in my crockpot...
Share some of your favorite crockpot meals..

So I have been talking food lately...ROFL

I must be hungry....Last night for dinner we had a "easy" supper, not healthy but easy.  We had chili dogs with  fritos, it was super quick and it was what I wanted, it sounded good to me, and it was good.  The chili had been on sale for 88 cents a can and it only took a can for us 3, and hot dogs were on for 1.00 a package, all in all it was a fairly inexpensive meal and quick...so what is something you make when you want a quick dinner??

Another thing I make for quick dinners is chicken fried steak sandwiches, I roll minute steaks in flour and fry them up, they fry up super quick then we eat them on bread as a sandwich.  Super fast. 
Something else I do with minute steaks is dump them in the crock pot with a jar of salsa, and cook on low all day, then serve over rice topped with cheese.  A favorite at our house....in case you have not figured it out, we are a salsa eating family.  I only made 10 jars of salsa this year and it is nearly gone...bummer.  Last year I made 24 jars I think, I did give my family some for Christmas but we ate every drop of it..My son John loved salsa and he also loved flour tortillas he would roll up anything he ate in a tortilla or in a peice of light bread...every once in a while one of us will roll something up and laugh and say John would have loved this.  Miss that boy...

Please share your quick super fast meals and your easy meals...tomorrow we will be talking crock pots..

More hamburger cooking

Just sharing some favorites from our home, made with hamburger/ground beef.

Cowboy casserole is a favorite, it is like a chili (dry, not a juicy chili) that you put in a pan, you mix corn in with it, and then you top with a can of cream of mushroom soup, shredded cheese and then cover with a mix (mixed up) of cornbread (jiffy is a favorite for this in our family) It is delicious and there is rarely left overs. 

Another favorite for my husband is hamburger gravy, where I cook usually a half pound of hamburger, all scrambled up in a pan and then make a gravy with the drippings and keeping the ground beef in, we eat this with biscuits and mashed potatoes usually. 

Share your favorite uses for hamburger....tomorrow I will add more!!

Designer Meatloaf

Back in the good old days, when you could buy ground beef for under a dollar pound, I used to cook with it alot...ROFL...I created some recipes of sort.  I love meatloaf, but this was a bit of a different take on meat loaf...There really isnt a recipe per se, just some adding and mixing in things with a meatloaf recipe. 

So here is what I would do, I would take my ground beef and add an egg, and then some oats or crackers for filling and binding purposes, then I would add garlic powder, onion powder and Italian seasonings, like oregano, basil, etc.  then I would pat this out on a large cookie sheet and lay a couple of cups of grated mozarella cheese down the center then I would bring up the sides and roll it jelly roll style and bake..DELISH!! 

Of course you know me, I don't stop there, then I toke the same concept, but rather than Italian seasonings I added taco seasoning and cheddar cheese, or I sometimes added chili powder and cheddar cheese.  The ideas are endless, you could add things like olives, mushrooms, onions, peppers, all sorts of things to this concept. 
Take it and make it your own!! Let me know what you did to make it your designer "meat loaf"