Apple Tart

This is a very quick, easy and yummy dessert.  I was wanting to stray away from the normal cookies that I make nearly every night after dinner.  I was really wanting something fruity, but couldn't desert dessert.  I love sweets.  So, I found this recipe, modified it a little and then indulged in this apple-y goodness. 

The recipe calls for:

2 pastry sheets

4 apples

1 c. brown sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

I used:

1 pastry sheet

2 apples

1/2 c. brown sugar

pinch of salt

I still had a lot of apples left over, so it's probably smart to only use one apple unless you want to make both sheets of the pastry.  You can find the pastry sheets, by the way, in the freezer section next to the pies.

You need to lay the pastry sheet out on a pan for about 20 minutes to let it thaw before you unfold it.  It's folded in thirds, so you can either cut it down the middle for more on the sides (like my picture) or cut it into three sections for less puff (I'll probably do that next time).

Preheat the oven to 415 degrees.  While the pastry is thawing, begin slicing the apples.  Slice them as thinly as you can without cutting your fingers.  When you do cut your finger, call your husband in the kitchen to finish.  Or just don't cut your finger.  Once all the apples are sliced, throw them in a bowl.  You can squirt lemon juice on them if you want.  I didn't.  Then add the brown sugar and salt and mix it all around gently.  Let the apple mixture sit for a few minutes to let the ingredients become friendly with each other.  Next, unfold the pastry and cut in halves or thirds.  Layer the apples in a straight line, overlapping as you go.  Pop the pan in the oven and cook for 18 to 20 minutes. 

Remove the pastries from the pan immediately and find a creative way to "style" them.  I just added sifted powdered sugar.  I think I'll mix it up tonight and top it with caramel and pecans.  The simplicity of it was so good and the apples were just perfectly tart.  The extra puff around the edges was a little too flaky for my liking, which is why I'll cut it into thirds next time. 

Three Cheese (No Bake) Ziti

I ran across this recipe yesterday while trying to find inspiration for dinner.  As soon as I read it and saw the picture, I immediately started craving it.  I'm not a tomato fan, but the acidity and tartness was definitely appealing to me.  So, on my way home I stopped by the trusty old Apple Market and picked up a few things I needed to make the ziti. 

I would have taken a picture, but the pasta disappeared as soon as it came out of the oven.  Here's the picture from the person who posted the original recipe.  I have to say, though, that my pasta actually did look better than it does in this picture.

Ingredients:

3 Garlic Cloves

3 tbsp. Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1 can Crushed Tomatoes

1 can Whole Tomatoes

Basil
1 lb. Ziti (I used Rigatoni)
2 tbsp. Butter
2 tbsp. Flour
1 c. Milk
1 c. Half-and-Half
1 pinch Nutmeg
1/2 c. Shredded Asiago Cheese
1/2 c. Shredded Parmesan Cheese
1 c. Sliced Fresh Mozzarella
Salt and Pepper

Instructions:
Put pasta water on to boil in a large pot.  In a sauce pan over medium heat, saute finely chopped garlic in olive oil.  Add crushed and whole tomatoes (break apart with your hands before adding to pan).  Add salt, pepper and basil to taste.  The recipe called for 1/2 cup of fresh basil, but I used dried basil and just sprinkled it in the tomato sauce until it looked right.  Simmer over low heat for at least 10 minutes (the longer the better). 

Add salt and pasta to boiling water and cook 8 minutes.  You want the pasta to be a tad undercooked.  While the pasta cooks, melt butter in a small pot over medium heat.  Whisk in the flour and cook for 1 minute.  Add the milk and half-and-half, or just milk if that's all you have, to create a bechamel sauce.  Add salt, pepper and nutmeg to the sauce.  Whisk until bechamel sauce thickens.  Take sauce off the heat and whisk in the asiago and parmesan cheeses. 

Drain pasta and pour the tomato-basil sauce on top.  Toss until pasta is evenly coated with sauce.  Then, pour the pasta into a greased 13x9 casserole dish.  Pour the bechamel sauce over the top of the pasta.  Top the dish off with the sliced mozzarella.  Broil the dish for 3 to 5 minutes until the cheese is brown and bubbly. 

No lie, this is the best pasta I have ever had.  That includes restaurants, too.  I didn't think anything could top my lasagna, but this is a definite contender.  Serve it up with some garlic bread and treat your taste buds to a fabulous meal.  Enjoy!

Easiest Ever Peanut Butter Cookies

This past week was Fall Break and I spended some much needed time at home cleaning and lounging around and not doing a whole lot of anything.  Come Friday afternoon, I was starting to get the baking bug.  Tate has been on a diet and refused to let me bake or even cook a normal meal.  All we have eaten the past three weeks is talapia and grilled chicken salad.  Anyway, I decided was going to make some sugar cookies, but didn't have enough flour or sugar.  What has happened to me that I didn't even stock up?  I always have an abundance of all kinds of flour and sugar!  I scoured my cookbooks looking for a tasty recipe that didn't call for anymore than two cups of flour or one cup of sugar.  Finally, I came across this recipe for peanut butter cookies.  Peanut butter cookies were always my favorite growing up, but they got pushed aside when I discovered snickerdoodles and oatmeal crispies.  This recipe, unlike any other I had ever tried, only called for three ingredients.  THREE INGREDIENTS!  I must admit, I was skeptical.  The recipe didn't even call for flour.  So, of course I had to try it out.  Prepare to have your socks blown off.

Ingredients:
1 egg

1 cup sugar

1 cup peanut butter

*** The recipe called for creamy peanut butter, but I used crunchy.  It's the rebel in me.  And the fact that I don't own creamy peanut butter. 

Basically, you dump all the ingredients in a big bowl and mix 'em up.  Use a spoon or cookie scoop to drop them on the baking sheet and then do the signature fork thingy to press them down. Pop them in the oven and bake at 350 degrees for approximately 18 minutes.

Warning: these cookies are addicting.  They are not chewy, but instead ultra crumbly and melt-in-your-mouth lip lickin' good.  If you are lucky like me, your husband doesn't care for peanut butter cookies and you get to have most of them all to yourself.  That's until your mother comes over and sneaks the rest of them.  But, that's another story. 

Breakfast Pizza

As you'll recall from my BBQ Chicken Pizza recipe, the dough makes two crusts.  I'm always trying to come up with new pizza recipes to try out.  So a week or two ago I made some dough and started to pick my brain for an idea.  I looked in the fridge and found some Blue & Gold sausage and some Real Bacon Bits for salad.  I covered the pizza dough with a small amount of pizza sauce and a lot of fresh mozzarella.  I browned up the sausage and piled it on the pizza.  I mean piled.  I'm not even a huge fan of sausage, but I held nothing back.  Then I sprinkled on the bacon.  Mind you, these are not normal crusty bacon bits, these are real pieces of bacon just like you would fry up and cut.  I popped the very heaviliy ornamented pizza in the oven for about 12 minutes until it was absolutely perfect.  When I took the pizza out, I sprinkled on some parsley and ground parmesan and then served it up.  The first bite was pure delight, as was each bite after.  This was by far my favorite pizza.  Tate named it breakfast pizza.  I tried it for breakfast the next day.  It was still delicious. 

The next night I made a normal pepperoni pizza.  It was pretty good, but not as fun.  I'm still looking for new pizza ideas, so if you have any, let me know!

Oatmeal Crispy Cookies

I'm absolutely addicted to these cookies.  Seriously.  It's bad.  All my weight gain will definitely stem from these little oatmeal crispy cookies.  I grew up making oatmeal cookies and they were always pretty good.  I discovered this recipe and threw my old one out.  They are super easy to make and I actually keep some dough in the freezer so I don't use it all at once.  The recipe makes around 55 cookies or so, so you may want to put half the dough up for later use, too. 

Okay, they aren't the prettiest cookies.  But, who cares when they are complete and total bliss in your mouth?

Ingredients 

1 cup Shortening (Crisco)

1 cup Packed Brown Sugar

1 cup Sugar

2 whole Eggs

1 teaspoon Vanilla

1-½ cup All-purpose Flour

1 teaspoon Salt

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

3 cups Oats

½ cups Chopped Pecans

Preparation Instructions

In a large mixing bowl, cream shortening with both sugars until well combined.

In a separate bowl, beat eggs together. Add vanilla and stir to combine. Add to the shortening/sugar mixture and mix well.

In a separate bowl combine the flour, salt and baking soda. Mix carefully into the egg/shortening mixture until well combined. Now add the oats and mix well again. Finally, add the pecans and mix well to combine.

Divide the dough in half and place each half of the dough onto a sheet of waxed paper. Roll the dough into a log, about 1-1/2" in diameter, and then wrap it tightly in the waxed paper. Now you can either chill or freeze the dough until later or you can go ahead and slice the dough evenly into cookie rounds.

When you are ready to bake them, place them on a cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes until they are golden brown.  If they are frozen, don't worry about thawing them out first, just bake them and extra minute or two. 

BBQ Chicken Pizza

For the last couple of days, all I could think about was how much I wanted homeade pizza.  I'd never made it before, but I wanted it and I was determined to find an awesome recipe to make into my own.  I found a recipe for BBQ Chicken Pizza and it was a definite success!  Here you go:

Crust Ingredients

1 teaspoon Instant Or Active Dry Yeast

1-½ cup Warm Water

4 cups All-purpose Flour

1 teaspoon Kosher Salt

⅓ cups Olive Oil

 Toppings

2 Chicken Breasts

BBQ sauce

Fresh Mozzarella

Shredded Parmesan

Parsley (dried or fresh)

Preparation Instructions

Sprinkle yeast over 1 1/2 cups warm (not lukewarm) water. Let stand for a few minutes.

In a mixer, combine flour and salt. With the mixer running on low speed (with paddle attachment), drizzle in olive oil until combined with flour. Next, pour in yeast/water mixture and mix until just combined, and the dough comes together in a sticky mass.

Coat a separate mixing bowl with a light drizzle of olive oil, and form the dough into a ball. Toss to coat dough in olive oil, then cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and set it aside for 1 to 2 hours, or store in the fridge until you need it.

Note: it’s best to make the dough at least 24 hours in advance, and 3 or 4 days is even better.

When you are ready to make the pizza, grab HALF the pizza dough (recipe makes 2 crusts) and squeeze the dough toward the bottom to form a nice, tight, pulled ball. You can roll out the pizza with a rolling pin if you’d like, but sometimes it’s just as easy to throw it around and pull and stretch till it feels right. And when the crust is nice and thin, lay it on an oiled baking sheet or pizza pan. Drizzle a little olive oil on the dough and spread it with your fingers. Very lightly sprinkle some salt on the crust.

While this is going on, coat the chicken in BBQ sauce and put in the oven for approximately 25 minutes.  When done, chop into small pieces. 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Top crust with BBQ sauce, mozzarella slices (can use shredded) and then the BBQ chicken.  Bake for 15 to 17 minutes, or until crust is golden brown and toppings are bubbly.  After removing the pizza from the oven, finish it off with parsley and parmesan.  Yum. 

I still have half the crust dough left and Tate is begging me to make Buffalo Chicken Pizza.  It doesn't sound very good to me, but if that's what he wants, that's what he gets . . . on half the pizza.  I'm going to make the other half a regular cheese pizza.  I'll let you know how it turns out!

Blonde Brownies

A couple of nights ago after Tate and I had finished dinner, he asked me to make some dessert.  I was running a little low on groceries, so I scrounged my cookbooks to find something I could make with the ingredients I had on hand.  In the box of recipes my mother-in-law had given me I found a card for Blonde Brownies.  I thought they would definitely be perfect, and they were.  After they came out of the oven, Tate and I inhaled them.  So, be warned, you can't have just one!  Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

2 cups flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 cup margarine

2 cups brown sugar, packed

2 eggs

1tsp. vanilla

1 cup chopped nuts

Preheat oven to 350 & grease a 13"x9" pan (If I'd been smart, I would have used my "perfect brownie" pan.  If you don't have one, definitely look into that investment.).  Combine flour, baking powder & salt.  Melt butter, remove from heat.  Stir in sugar, eggs & vanilla.  Mix in dry ingredients & nuts.  Spread into pan & bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Enjoy!

Meatball Sandwiches

If Tate read my blog, I would not be posting this story and/or recipe.  However, because he doesn't feel the need to know everything about my life, I absolutely have to share this. 

A few weeks ago I made meatball sandwiches, and oh my gosh were they good!  I made more meatballs than I could cook at once, though, so I threw the extras in the freezer for a later date.  Now, since then, these meatballs have come up in conversation more than once, and each time I mentioned that they were uncooked.  So, a couple of nights ago I went to dinner with some friends and didn't make it home to cook for Tate, but I told him the meatballs were in the fridge and they needed to be cooked. 

When I got home Tate asked, "Why didn't you tell me the meatballs were raw?"  Are you catching on to how poorly he listens, yet?  I went on to say that I had in fact told him multiple times that they still needed to be cooked, but it's not that hard to fry them up. 

Here's where the story gets really hilarious.  Tate proceeds to explain that he made himself this awesome meatball sandwich with all the trimmings and it was not until he bit into it that he realized the meat was raw.  Can anyone say "Goooooo!"  Common sense, which I'm discovering is not so common, would have told me as soon as I saw the meatballs which were not brown or smellin' all fatty and good, that they were still raw.  It would not have taken me biting into them to get that.  Everytime I think of biting into raw meat I cringe, and gag a little.  Poor Tate, what would he ever do without my cooking?  I'm sure he'll stick to cans of chili when I'm not around from now on. 

In light of this story, I'm going to share this awesome recipe.  When actually cooked, this has become a household favorite and is super easy.  The meatball recipe is actually my mother-in-law's (I think grammatically correct it should be mother's-in-law, but who cares?), and they are awesome even eaten alone! 

Ingredients

1-1/2 pouds ground beef

1/2 cup milk

salt and pepper to taste

1 cup cracker or bread crumbs

1/2 tsp garlic salt

2 eggs, beaten

2 Tablespoons Olive Oil

1 jar (large) Marinara Sauce

optional spices -- I use parsely, basil and thyme

1 pkg. hamburger buns (you can use rolls for mini "slider" sandwiches)

Sliced Provolone Cheese

Preparation Instructions

Mix meat with beaten eggs, bread crumbs, garlic, salt, pepper and milk. Form into 2" balls and fry slowly in a skillet with olive oil. 

Once cooked thoroughly, pour in jar of marinara and add selected spices; shake pan gently to mix. Put on lid and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.

When ready to serve, place a slice of Provolone on the bottom of each roll. Spoon about three meatballs with the sauce onto the bottom bun; top with the top bun.

Serve immediately and enjoy!

Lazy Chile Rellenos

I made Lazy Chile Rellenos for dinner last night, even though they are suited better for breakfast.  I had them again for breakfast this morning and it was the perfect way to start my day.  If you have a picky eater in the house, like my husband who won't eat peppers, half the recipe so you don't have so much left over.  Here's it is:

Ingredients

8 whole peeled green chiles (I get mine at WalMart in a can)

1-1/2 cups Montery Jack cheese, grated (more as needed)

5 eggs

2 cups whole milk

salt and pepper to taste

1/2 tsp. paprika

1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.  Mix together eggs, milk, salt, pepper, paprika and cayenne.

Cut chilies in half and remove the seeds.  Add a single layer of chilies on the bottom of a 9 x 13-inch baking dish.Top chilies with half the grated cheese. Repeat with another layer of chilies and another layer of cheese.

Pour egg mixture all over the top.  Place into a larger baking dish or rimmed baking sheet. Pour in 1/2 inch of water and bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until completely set.

Cut into squares and serve with warm corn tortillas!

Chicken Parmigiana Recipe

A couple of days ago I wrote about the dream with my favorite dish, chicken parmigiana. Just for kicks, I thought I'd share the recipe. The mere thought of this meal makes me, and my husband, salivate and I'm sure once you make it, you will understand why. Here we go:

Ingredients:

4 to 6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1/2 cup All-Purpose flour

Salt & pepper to taste

1/2 cup Olive Oil

2 tbsp. butter

1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

1 pkg. spaghetti

Start by placing chicken breasts in large Ziploc bag and pounding them out with the flat side of a meat mallot to about 1/4 to 1/8 in. thick. Next, mix flour, salt, and pepper together on a large plate. Dredge the flattened chicken breasts in flour mixture and set aside.

At this time, you can start a pot of water for your pasta. Cook spaghetti until al dente.

Heat olive oil and butter together in a large skillet over medium heat. When butter is melted and oil/butter mixture is hot, fry chicken breasts until nice and golden brown on each side, about 2 to 3 minutes per side. Remove chicken breasts from the skillet and keep warm.

Now, you can make your own spaghetti sauce in this same pan, or you can be lazy and use jarred spaghetti sauce. I use Lovera's, which is made locally and sold at Wal-Mart, but you can use your favorite sauce and it will still be wonderful! Just pour sauce into the drained pan that you fried the chicken in. Carefully lay chicken breasts on top of the sauce and completely cover them in grated parmesan. I once substituted the parmesan for cheddar and it was still wonderful! So, if you don't have the suggested cheese on hand, feel free to use whatever kind of cheese you have available.

Place lid on skillet and reduce heat to low. Allow to simmer until cheese is melted and chicken is thoroughly heated.

Place cooked noodles on a plate and place chicken breast on top, but to the side of the pasta (if that makes any sense). Top off the spaghetti with the extra sauce and sprinkle the entire dish with parsley. Serve immediately and brace yourself for some serious compliments!