A Math Equation Fer Ya:

What do you get when you take an oatmeal cookie:

With pair it with a luscious, creamy filling?

Answer: You get what Little Debbie only WISHES she could be!

I made these Oatmeal Sandwich Cookies to take to a friend's house for dinner.

This is a Taste of Home recipe, and the website says that they would be great for bake sales - I agree! When I was putting them out at my friend's house, her husband, Bob, stopped mid-sentence and said "Are those.....homemade Little Debbies?" Needless to say, he was intrigued! And they were very tasty. The filling is light and not overpowering, complimenting nicely with the cookies. Bob (and Jennifer, too, I'm sure!) was happy to keep the leftovers I brought!

Oh and by the way, when I searched for this recipe on the Taste of Home website, I also came across a recipe for Chocolate Oatmeal Sandwich Cookies........hmmmmm......

Fish and (kind of) Chips

I was able to get my hands on some Icelandic cod, so we decided to try Alton Brown's Fish and Chips recipe for dinner. Mike handled the frying, as usual. He's the fryer in the family!!


We didn't notice that we were out of potatoes until we had already decided to make the recipe, so we made some tater tots instead. Everything was so good, we kept sneaking bites before we sat down!


Wow what a great meal! Better than anything I've had in any restaurant! The tater tots were good, but next time we'll definitely be trying the chips! Plus the salad balanced out all the fried foods, right........right!?!

Things I Love....

Mike had a great idea the other night: Coke slushies!!

All we did was pour some Coke into our ice cream maker and let it churn for about 10 minutes. Genius!!

Mmmmmmm......the perfect treat for our rapidly-getting-hot-as-blazes Florida weather!!

Bad Dog!!!

Mollie is such a michevious little dog! I am not used to having to put food out of reach of the animals, because Sophie would have never dreamed of snatching even the most tempting foods off the table or counter. Not so with Miss Mollie! I turned my back for two seconds and she managed to wolf down two of my homemade chocolate chip cookies.

"It was totally worth it!!"

I can't believe I've never posted about these cookies! They are an all-time family favorite and my go-to cookie recipe. They have instant pudding mix added to the batter, which makes them the ultimate soft cookie. It's also not a very fussy recipe - none of this mixing the dry and wet ingredients seperately! I should have known to double this recipe in order to feed both boys!

Valentine's Day Dinner

We kicked Nils out of the house for the night and took a special trip to the Fresh Market for some free-range beef, salad greens, and herbed yeast rolls. We've been so busy lately that it was nice just to go shopping and make dinner together.

The final product: steaks cooked on the Big Green Egg, mashed potatoes, salad, and those yummy yeast rolls!


For dessert I made Homemade Chocolate Pudding, a Taste of Home recipe that I've been meaning to try for a loooong time. It was good with the strawberries and whipped cream on top, but since it was a lower-fat recipe it wasn't very good the next day.

It made for a pretty picture, though! And we enjoyed the time spent together. Hope you had a nice Valentine's Day!

Sour Cream Chocolate Cake

I saved this recipe from a Taste of Home magazine a while back and finally decided to give it a try when my mom asked me to bring a dessert to a family dinner. I made sure the butter was room temperature before I started - I'm always glad when I do that! It makes the batter even lighter and more fluffy. Adding the sour cream only makes it more so!


I used dark chocolate cocoa powder for the cake - go big or go home, right?!?

I almost decided to make a cream cheese icing (my favorite!), but since this cake has three layers I was concerned about having enough to cover the whole cake. I made the icing that the recipe called for and had just enough. It was mild, which went well with the rich taste of the cake.
I thought that the icing went on beautifully - I covered it first with a very thin layer, then let it harden in the fridge. This seals in all the crumbs so the second layer goes on nicely.

Three layers of chocolate-y goodness!

Note: As I have previously mentioned, Blogger has been acting up for me recently. It is not uploading pictures (as opposed to just flat-out refusing!), but some of them are coming out sideways. I have decided to just keep blogging and ask you to turn your heads ninety degrees when the occasion calls for it to properly view the picture!



Anniversary Dinner: Meat Loaf Wellington

This week Mike and I celebrated our third anniversary, and I wanted to make a special dinner to celebrate. Meat Loaf Wellington is one of Mike's favorites - it does have a lot of steps, but if you follow them closely it's not particularly hard, but the result tastes and looks like it's very complicated!!

I decided to try using ground buffalo, which my local Publix recently started carrying. I was using a little less than the recipe calls for, but I mistakenly used the original amount of cheese, so you will later see that it came oozing out a little! Otherwise I was very happy with the buffalo.
With the meatloaf ingredients mixed in. Ground buffalo does have a bit of a different feel to it - it's less "granular" feeling, more....moist, maybe? I think the finished result is also a little more moist than beef.

You put down a piece of aluminum foil (that Reynolds Release nonstick foil stuff works especially well if you have any) and form the meat into a rectangle, then sprinkle the cheese to within one inch of the edges.

This is the tricky part - using the foil, you have to roll up the meat like a jelly roll. If you go slowly it'll be fine, it's very forgiving. I usually have to fix some bare spots after I'm done!

You put the loaf in the oven to cook almost all the way, then pull it out to drape crescent roll dough over it.

This new prodcut from Pillsbury is perfect for a recipe like this - it's crescent roll dough without any seams! I draped it over the meatloaf and tucked over the edges, but next time I will probably trim it to fit with my kitchen scissors.

Twenty minutes later, THIS beauty comes out of the oven! Fair warning: this smells absolutely wonderful while baking, so keep a cattle prod around to drive away any husbands or animals you may have in the house.
I paired the meat loaf with roasted garlic green beans.
The finished product!* This is an excellent treat - the buttery crescent rolls, paired with the cheese and meat.....yum!! A great anniversary meal!!

*Note that the original recipe calls for topping the meat loaf with cheese and parsely, but I don't do this.

White Cupcakes

Blogger has been misbehaving for the last several days, but we appear to be back to normal. I have a lot to catch up on! First, I made another Lemon-Curd Trifle with Fresh Berries to bring to a friend's house for dessert, which only uses egg yolks. Well, the cheapskate in me can't stand to waste anything, so I had to find a use for all those egg whites...enter Taste of Home's Berry-Topped White Cupcakes! Using only egg whites creates a very delicate, smooth tasting, yummy cupcake that goes perfectly with the cream cheese icing.


I got REALLY adventurous and decided to try making some of them in my new mini-bundt cake pan. As you can see, they rose quite a bit, which was great for the regular cupcakes, but I had to trim it off the mini bundts so they would sit flat.

I piped icing right into the middle of the mini bundts, and since I already had the pipe bag out, I did the regular cupcakes, too. The cream cheese icing was the perfect consistency to do this! I have absolutely no experience with piping, whatever I do is the result of me plodding my way through figuring it out.
I think it makes the cupcakes so special looking! It really was worth the extra time, plus it was a lot easier than it looks! You just have to go slow and turn the cupcake in your hand, not the pipe bag.
I decided to top the mini bundts with blueberries at the last minute because I thought they needed a little extra something, but the cupcakes were so pretty as they were I decided to leave them alone. I think I liked the cupcakes a little better than the mini bundts, but that's just because they had more icing and I LOVE me some icing! If you're not a big icing fan, using mini bundts would be a great way to enjoy more of the cake with less icing.

I love this recipe - it's so unlike any other cupcake! Nery said it was the best cupcake she's ever had....I don't know about THAT, but they are very tasty!!

Fried Chicken

I grew up hearing stories of my grandmother's legendary fried chicken. I've been trying to convince her to make some, but so far haven't succeeded. So I decided to give it my own shot!



I started with chicken pieces (everything but the thighs, which were saved for another recipe) and seasoned flour. Mike was the one who did the actual frying - he usually lets me do my own thing in the kitchen, but he likes to fry. I guess he enojoys handling oil hot enough to burn your face off!

The cast iron skillet is from his grandmother. We both love using it!
Mike also decided to make hush puppes. I decided to steam some broccoli and green beans to offset the rest of the meal :)
The chicken, in all it's shiny, crispy goodnes.

The chicken was very good, but the hush puppies...oh, the hush puppies! I could have eaten a whole pile of them. But I'm glad I didn't, because what I DID eat has been sitting heavily in my stomach ever since. Was the heartburn worth it? Probably, but I doubt we'll do this again. Now we can say we tried it, but I don't understand how people can stomach eating fried food more than once in a blue moon.

Heaven on an Egg...

The grocery store had a steak sale last week, and I took it as a sign. You see, ever since we got the Big Green Egg, I've been wanting to try a filet mignon. However, I'm just too darn cheap to buy them full price...really I'm too cheap to buy ANYTHING full price, but that's another story. But they were cheap enough for us to indulge, so indulge we did! I found these directions at Naked Whiz's web site, who is kind of a hero in the Egg world.

On the Egg.

This is after the searing, which seals in all the juices. After a rest, you're supposed to roast the steaks to get them to the done-ness you want.

This just might be my new favorite picture of Mike. We also had the first sweet corn on the season, also on the Egg.

The finished product. Along with the steak and corn, we had some mashed red potatoes and the carrots from our garden.

The steak was good. REALLY good. But I gotta say that this meal as a whole was really satisfying, too. Everything was very high-quality - home-grown carrots, potatoes from St. Augustine (3 hours away), corn from Zellwood (1/2 hour away). I LOVED this meal.

Everything except this disaster. We got some locally grown peaches from an employee, and I decided to make a mouth-watering cobbler in a Dutch Oven to try on the Egg.

Beautiful, isn't it? You should have seen it once it came off the Egg! It was burned almost completely black. We forgot (okay, I forgot) to put the Dutch Oven on what is called the Indirect Method. Kinda important. Oh well...live and learn.

Mint Julep Ice Cream

I recently checked a book out of the library called Crescent City Cooking by Susan Spicer, a restauranteer in New Orleans. I thought I didn't care much for Creole cuisine, but this book intrigued me, and I was pleasantly surprised. So far I've tried two recipes, both of which I've been happy with. This is called Mint Julep Ice Cream, and I decided to make it in honor of the (rather depressing) Kentucky Derby this past weekend.


First, we start with fresh mint from the porch. This is already an improvement on the Fresh Mint Ice Cream recipe I tried before, because it doesn't call for stemming the leaves, which saves a LOT of time. Plus, I didn't have to steam and cool multiple times - only once. I must say that there was slightly less mint taste to this recipe than the other one

While the mint and cream/half-and-half mixture is cooling, I whisked the sugar and egg yolks together.

Here's the mint and cream mixture, ready to be strained and have the sugar concontion added.

Now the hardest part: you have to cook the custard until it coats the back of a wooden spoon, watching it carefully to make sure you don't overcook and wind up with minty scrambled eggs.

Ready to go in the ice cream freezer...almost there!

The finished product, with shaved semi-sweet chocolate mixed in the last few minutes.

The recipe description states, "My rule of thumb is, 'If something tastes good, it will taste even beter if you turn it into ice cream.'" I tend to agree! Homemade ice cream tends to get even better as it ripens in the freezer, but I'm afraid it will disappear before it reaches its' peak! The bourbon gives it a wonderful flavor and keeps the ice cream soft, but next time I may reduce it just a bit to make it firm up a little more. And I should also mention that I halved this recipe to make 1 quart, because I don't know anyone who has a home ice cream maker that makes 2 quarts. Mmmmmm...