...candy corn sugar cookies... just for fun

You can see the idea HERE

So this isn't in the cookbook, but I thought I'd add it here anyway. These are just about the cutest little cookies I've ever made!! And severely delicious. On their website, they suggested two different sugar cookie recipes. Either theirs, or Williams Sonoma's. Since I've made theirs before, I chose the other. Which I'm glad I did. Best sugar cookies I've ever tasted!

They were WAAAAY tinier then I thought they'd be. But they were perfect little bite size morsels...

...spicy honey chicken... pg.119

You can find this recipe HERE
This is what the kitchen looks like when I keep having people come in and ask when dinner will be ready...

So I completely underestimated how long it was going to take to make this recipe, and the Thai Peanut Noodles. But then after chopping the ginger, cutting the fat off the chicken, rinsing the chicken... and getting all my ingredients together... whew, time flew, and I was starving..... and so was my family apparently! :)

Have you ever bought meat from the butcher counter before?? I have NEVER. I always thought that meat was special in some way, and waaaaay expensive. Well I was looking for boneless, skinless chicken thighs (which I've never bought before), and I couldn't find any out where all the normal people buy their meat. So I asked the butcher. He lead me to some very expensive Foster Farms chicken. And then he mentioned that he would have some at the counter. So I went over there, and to my surprise, it was HALF the price! This is going to sound so silly, but I liked it when the butcher handed my meat to me in the brown paper!

This chicken was very tasty. The glaze gave it a nice "crust", and it was just a very nice balance of spice, and sweet. On their website, they rave about their spicy honey chicken salad... i want to try that next time!

...thai peanut noodles... pg.165

You can find this recipe HERE

I love peanut noodles. So I've been wanting to make this for a while. I was a little confused when I was stirring up the sauce, and it wasn't thickening... Anytime I've ever made peanut sauce, it's been creamy. I was a little hesitant. Once you mix the sauce with the noodles though, you don't even think about the sauce anymore! The sauce just seeps into the noodles, and it's sooooo yummy! My friend makes this all the time, cause her boys love it. So I was excited that it would be something my kids would eat. However, when I was trying the noodles, they were WAY too spicy to feed my kids. :( I might have put a little too much Sriracha sauce. So they got grilled cheese sandwiches that night! :)

It was fun chopping the ginger... sadly, that was my first time ever cooking with fresh ginger! The smell itself will make me use it more!
Make it...

...white chicken chili... pg. 102

You can find the recipe here

I was making dinner for a dear friend, and thought of this recipe. I have a recipe that is almost identical to this one. And I LOVE that one. I make it allll the time. So I was nervous making this one, just because I love the other one so much. But of course, this did not let down! I love the very faint taste of the lime in the soup.

The lesson I learned with this recipe... which isn't a big one, but still... I learned I can chop chicken with my food chopper! Silly, I know! But I've never done it! And sometimes when I see a recipe for chopped chicken, I cringe, cause cutting up lots of chicken takes FOREVER!! Not this time! I mean I know sometimes bigger chunks are needed... but for soup, this is awesome! And it took hardly any time!!

My daughter LOVES my mom's rolls. I swear she could smell them a mile away. Here she is going to work on them! Just helping herself! :)

You can add a whole bunch of different toppings, but I really just like it the way it is! A little shredded cheese, and I'm good to go! Try it, you'll love!

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P.S. Just a tip with the leftover soup! Make it into a quesadilla! Seriously! Tortilla, cheese, then use a slotted spoon to scoop the soup onto the quesadilla. This, I'm not kidding, is so good, if not better than the soup itself! :) In fact, that's what I'm having for lunch today!

...spinach-chicken stromboli... pg. 160

This was not only delicious, it was fun to make! I want to do more "roll up" type meals! This was seriously soooooo good. In the recipe, it says to have alfredo, or marinara sauce available to dip. I was kinda being lazy, and didn't. Towards the end of my serving, I kinda thought it would have been nice to have. No one else agreed with me. They thought it was perfect the way it was! :) Sweet family I have...

 

Seriously.... so good.

And I LOVED the parmesan cheese on top. Just that one simple thing, that adds so much.

...cheddar-broccoli soup with potatoes... pg. 95

Soup sounded good for dinner, so this is what I chose. I LOVE cheddar broccoli soup, and I consider myself kind of a snob about it. If you're a soup snob too... MAKE THIS. Usually when my husband takes a bite of something I make, he'll say, "this is fantastic!" This time, he was pretty quiet. So after a couple minutes, I asked what he thought of it. He said, "that is fetchin good!" And continued to devour the bowl. In fact, I fed this to my daughter who is almost 17 months old, and she shoveled it in her mouth so fast! First time feeding herself soup too! :)



This was really easy to throw together. I chopped the broccoli and the onion with my Pampered Chef food chopper. I didn't put a potato in the soup... Reason being, I thought we had potatoes at home... But we didn't. I definitely want to try it again with potatoes in it. Also, the recipe called for 2 cups low-fat milk. I didn't have that. We had non-fat (only 1 cup left) and 2%... so I mixed them.

So yummy, either way!

...grilled taco chicken... pg. 114

This was pretty darn good, for how easy it was! I L.O.V.E mexican food. I honestly think I could eat it for every meal, for the rest of my life... and I'd be thrilled. So mixin' it up with this chicken was a plus! It was easy to throw together too!

marinating in the juices for 6 or so hours.

Now this is going to sound silly... but I LOVE how they talk about how long to grill for! I always under-estimate how long to grill for... so that was fun learning.

Voila! So yummy! I sliced the chicken and put it on one of those tortillas from Costco... ya know, the ones you have to heat on a skillet before you eat them... (so GOOD) then layered green cabbage {like they suggest in the book}, cilantro, homemade salsa, oh and my homemade refried beans!

I would definitely make this again. I would have liked to try this with corn tortillas, but I forgot to get them at the store. Oh, and I have never used cabbage on tacos before! I've eaten it at restaurants like that... but never thought to do it at home. It was actually quite good! Try it!

...giveaway results...

Thank you to all those that entered! I'm excited that I have people excited about my blog!

I LOVE doing it.

...THE WINNER OF THE $20.00 AMAZON GIFT CARD IS:

#15 comment belonging to:


Congratulations Christal Houghtelling! Contact me at copycatchef@gmail.com and I will get you your gift card! :)

...cooking night...

I was in need of some girl time, so my friend, Mary suggested we cook up a few things from the cook book! Great idea! So we picked three recipes, and got to work! It was so much fun! I didn't have to worry about getting it on the table at a certain time, or anything! We just cooked, and talked, and laughed! I will definitely be doing this again! Thanks girls for the company!
From left, Me, Mary & Jennie

{and all the yummy-ness that was prepared that night!}

One of the best parts... The girls cleaning the kitchen while I put my feet up!

...puffed french toast... pg.64

You can find this recipe here

For this cooking night, we had to have something sweet. Once I got to this page in the cookbook, I stopped. I recommended it to my friends and they were all for it! Super easy to throw together... and

oh-my-gosh so good.
With sweetened whipped cream on top...

...or strawberry sauce with the whipped cream!

Either way, THIS will happen:

If it wasn't 10 at night, we probably would have eaten the entire batch. It was incredible! My husband liked it as is. So you can try any variation. We froze the remaining pieces, and then put them in a ziploc bag in the freezer for future use. Not so far future.... :)

...sweetened whipped cream... pg.252

You can find the recipe here

My friend, Mary thought it was a little silly to put this type of recipe in a cookbook. My friend, Jennie and I didn't think so. Jennie and I measure everything to a T. I follow a recipe EXACT. Mary eyeballs measurements... Mary is a cooking *expert*! Ha ha... Just kidding Mary... I hope that I too, will be at a point in my cooking talents, that I will be able to just eyeball a measurement!

This is my friend mary, blending the perfect whipped cream! Look at those peaks!! ;)

We put this on the puffed french toast. And it was DE~LICIOUS!

...cheesy garlic bread swirls... pg.33

You can find this recipe here

These were not only AH-MAZE-ING... they were SO fun to make!! Who seriously comes up with this kind of thing! Oh my, they were delicious!

Here I am cutting the dough with dental floss. I had NEVER done that before, it was so fun! :)

I wish I took a picture of what the tray looked like BEFORE we baked them. The tray weighed nothing short of 20 lbs, I swear!! So we were pretty excited to eat them.

Aren't these pretty?? Oh my gosh, you have to make this sometime.

One thing that we thought: making smaller ones and bake them in mini muffin pans. I want to try that next time.

My husband told me (after looking through the whole cook book) that these were the ONE things he wanted me to try the most. And let me tell you, they did NOT disappoint him!

We put the extras in a Ziploc bag in the fridge, and ate them the next day after church! Yummmmmmmmmmmy.

...black bean and mango salsa... pg.13

My friends and I made this together. We made this first so it could chill for an hour. To be honest, it wasn't our favorite. We just ate it with chips. I feel that if it was paired with Chicken, or tacos or something, it would be pretty good. AND, it doesn't help that I'm not a total fan of black beans by them self.

It was really easy to mix up, so that's a plus!

...chicken broth...

you can find the recipe here

This isn't in the cookbook. But I wanted to do something with my leftover 'fauxtisserie' chicken I made the day before. So I went to Our Best Bites website, and found this recipe! I let it sit for a few hours though (they say just an hour). Because my mom says, "the longer it simmers, the better the taste"! I put the broth in containers, and the next day I made homemade chicken noodle soup! I didn't use a recipe for that. Just added carrots, celery, onions, leftover chicken from the day before, oh and I added a can of cream of chicken soup (to make it a little creamy!). I added the noodles about 10 minutes before serving. Paired the soup with yummy rolls, and we had our self a yummy dinner!

Can I just say how proud I am of myself for making a homemade chicken, then using that chicken to make homemade broth?! And then yummy homemade soup! Very proud.

...fauxtisserie chicken... pg. 110

you can find the recipe here

So I have never made a whole chicken before. Scared? yes. Grossed out? yes. Okay, so I did this a few months ago. And I wish I had pictures of what I looked like when I stuck my hand into the chicken and pulled out all the guts. I was gagging... to say the least. This time I used a spoon to get rid of the insides... hence the picture. Still grossed out.

loosening the skin, and stuffing with ingredients:

In the cookbook there are different variations of ingredients you can use. I did the lemon-rosemary. but added garlic. It was so good. And now looking at how they do it on their website, they used WAY more seasoning salt than I did! Still tasted amazing! And this whole meal was SUPER easy! After the de-gutting of the chicken, you pretty much just leave it for 6 hours. Then I threw some red potatoes and carrots in a bag with olive oil, and lipton onion soup, then stuck them in the oven for 45 minutes. Such an easy, yummy meal! AND, after dinner, I took all the meat off the chicken, and stuck the remaining stuff in a pot with other ingredients and I've got myself some homemade chicken broth (which I've never done before!)! WOOHOO! So stay tuned for that one!