Recipes and Cooking Ideas for Homemakers and Amateur Cooks
 

Month: November 2006

Snacks

Delicious! Licked clean! A winner! Must have! Double the recipe! Fans are everywhere!

Posted on November 26, 2006
Filed Under Snacks

That describes this new recipe. It comes from a ’95 Taste of Home magazine. My mom-in-law planned dinner and supper for T-giving Day, then assigned us to bring stuff. This Hot Pizza Dip was one of my things to bring for supper. She had never tried it before, but thought it looked good. And it was!!!!! It’s so easy to make too. I don’t have progressive pictures because I was hurriedly putting it together because people were already in the kitchen snacking and it still had to bake for 20 min.   Then, while it was baking, I thought, ‘Hey, that’s a new recipe’. So the only picture is after I took it out of the oven.

s pizza dip

  Hot Pizza Dip

1 package (8 oz. ) cream cheese softened

1 teaspoon Italian seasoning

1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

2 cups (8 oz. ) shredded mozzarella cheese

1 cup ( 4 oz. ) shredded cheddar cheese

1/2 cup pizza sauce

1/2 cup finely chopped green pepper

1/2 cup finely chopped sweet red pepper

Tortilla chips or bread sticks

In a bowl, combine cream cheese, italian seasoning and garlic powder;

spread on the bottom of a greased 9-in. pie plate. This was easier AFTER I greased my spatula. Otherwise, it sticks to the cheese mixture.

Combine cheeses; sprinke half over the cream cheese layer.

Top with the pizza sauce and peppers. Sprinkle with the remaining cheeses. I saved some peppers to sprinkle on top, just for looks.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

Serve warm with tortilla chips or breadsticks. We used tortilla chips.

Yield:  about 3 1/2 cups.

The “hot” in the title means because it was in the oven… it has no ‘zip’ to it. When (yeah, when ) I make it again, I’m going to try adding some chopped pepperoni, jalepenos, or crushed red pepper seasoning to it. When we were talking about making supper, there were some groans and comments about still being full from the main meal. But, it still got licked clean and raved about anyway! Just delicious! Definitely going in my not-so-blank-anymore cookbook!

Comments

One Response to “Delicious! Licked clean! A winner! Must have! Double the recipe! Fans are everywhere!”

  1. Beth on December 18th, 2010 12:29 am

    I was thinking about making a pizza dip for our family Christmas & found this in your recipe file. I realized that you posted this one before I even knew you. :) You didn’t join the board until December 13, 2006 (I looked). You have TONS of recipes on here…my goodness, girl. I’m going to need to come here for inspiration some more. Why don’t you just give me a meal plan for a month? hehe. jk. I have no clue if you get this comment from such an old post, but I’ll submit it anyway.

Tidbits

Grilling

I won’t be featuring a new recipe right now. I’m just going to throw a couple pictures up here and put a new recipe or 2 up later.

GRILLING

s grilling This is Shannon and his brother Preston making Shannon’s baked beans on Thursday morning. My mom added them to our T-giving menu this year. Yes, it involves the grill… that’s a bunch of steak chunked up to throw in and a couple other meats. I can’t feature that recipe. Why? Shannon’s answer to people who ask for the recipe is: “I could tell ya, but then I’d have to kill ya.” …he is, of course, just kidding… I think.

I know the ingredients, but not quantities. I’m pretty sure Preston knows the recipe by heart, but he won’t tell you either. He’s Shannon’s grilling buddy. You know, the whole concept of men and food in the same sentence was always a very common one to me, but the concept of men and helping make food was foreign… until I got married. Shannon and I have lots of fun together making meals. There’s something very attractive to me about a man who likes to cook, especially grill. Besides, it’s so fun to work in the kitchen with a guy, and just watch him… if I’m chopping up a green pepper into a million teeny little pieces, what do I use? A small knife or a food chopper. What does Shannon use? A huge clunky knife! But I must say, he must have good coordination because I tried it Thurs morning and nearly cut my finger holding the pepper several times …yeah, peppers go in the baked bean recipe, and jalepenos too. Ok, no more ingredient give-aways on that.)

After Shannon and Preston got done making the beans, they got a bar-b-que cookbook (we have pretty many barbeque/grilling cookbooks, including “The Barbeque Bible”) and sat down with it at the bar and were making comments like, “We should try that sometime” and “This says to smoke the brisket for a minimum of 8 hours”.

s pork chops This is a picture of the pork chops on the grill Wed evening when we had our open-faced pork chop sandwiches. Shannon said that sometime he himself would do the feature on here for those sandwiches.

Well, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! I want to put a couple new recipes up on here tomorrow afternoon.

Cookies and Bars

Tried and True

Posted on November 21, 2006
Filed Under Cookies and bars

The feature this time is not a new recipe. It’s a cookie recipe that you all just gotta have!!!  It’s the BEST cookie recipe in the world! Oh, you say, “My mom makes the best cookies”, well I’ll bet these are better! You say, “My cookies could win a blue ribbon”, well these could win a bluer one! You say, “I’m just not a cookie person” or “I don’t see how people can eat more than 4 cookies at a time”, well you’ve obviously never tasted these cookies! Ok, maybe that was a little over-rated, but let’s just say I LOVE these cookies!!!!!

This recipe comes from the Magnolia Cookery cookbook, compiled by the Magnolia Mennonite Church. What first tipped me off several years ago that these cookies may be worth trying is that there are 5 names behind it in the cookbook… Mary Ellen Knepp, Mrs. Miriam Lichty Graber, Mrs. Henry Yoder (Irene), Mrs. Edward Beachy (Gertie), and Mrs. Chester (Mary Ann) Miller. So, with the credits given, let’s get on to the recipe… my 2 cents are in red.

Monster Cookies

12 eggs                                    (6 eggs)
2 lbs. brown sugar                    (2 cups)
2 lbs white sugar                       (2 cups)
1 T. vanilla                                (1 1/2 tsp.)
8 tsp. soda                                (4 tsp.)
1 lb. butter or oleo                     (1 cup, I use butter flavored Crisco)
2 lbs. peanut butter                    (2 cups)
18 c. oatmeal                             (9 cups)
1 lb chocolate chips                     (* see below)
1 lb. M & Ms                             (*see below)

Mix in order given. (I beat it with an electric mixer after each addition till I get to the oatmeal, then switch to a wooden spoon.) 

making monster cookies

Drop by spoonfuls, then flatten.
s monst3
Bake @ 350 for 12 minutes. Do not overbake. Cookies may want to crumble when first out of the oven, but become more firm when they cool. This is a huge recipe. It turns out fine divided in half or quartered. Yields approx 200 cookies. (I have never made a whole batch… I usually make half, those amounts are written in red beside the regular recipe.) You can press M&Ms on top of cookie after on the cookie sheet. (I think it’s easier to mix them in the dough.) Can use pecans instead. Also can cut back on peanut butter. (That just seems like a bad idea to me.)

*In my cookbook, I have written “For 1/2 batch, put in a 12 oz bag of choc chips and most of a 14 oz bag of M&Ms… gotta save some for eating!”

The finished product.
monster-cookies.jpg

s monst4 The tasters, with cookies and milk.

No new recipes for supper tonight… we had pizza. This evening we put pork chops from the freezer to the fridge to thaw for grilled open-faced sandwiches for Wed eve supper. Again, not a new recipe (I’m kinda falling in a ‘tried and true’ rut!) I don’t think I’ll feature those tomorrow night though and save them for another time instead. We have them fairly often and this is kind of a busy week and it takes kinda long to post stuff on here. I wonder about copyrights on cookbooks… if it would be legal to scan recipes in. I seriously thought about it this time, but I didn’t want the Magnolia church to come after me!  

BUT… we still got the cinnamon rolls coming up for Thurs morning brunch (since our T-giving dinner with Shannon’s family isn’t till early evening). AND also Thurs morning, Shannon (and his bro Preston will probably come help him) is planning to make a double batch of his wonderful baked beans for our T-giving get-together on Friday with my family. I’ll try to get a picture of the process, but I can’t feature that for reasons I’ll tell you on Thursday. I’m pretty sure I won’t update until then… so happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Beef, Main Dishes

Mozzarella and Beef Puff

Posted on November 20, 2006
Filed Under Beef, Main dishes

My first entry WAS going to be some for exotic yummy-lookin’ entree or dessert… to impress you all , but 5:00 this evening found me staring in the cupboards, fridge, and freezer. Then, I spotted the “Jiffy all purpose baking mix” box with recipes on it. So, I scanned them and thought the Mozzerella and Beef Puff sounded good.

There won’t be all that many casserole-type dishes on here. Neither Shannon nor I like them… but for different reasons. His reason: the same taste the whole main course, and the throw-everything-in-the-trough effect. My reason: I never know what else to put with it… all the food groups are in there, so do we go double on the veggies or the bread? In my mind, a meal should have at least 3 things on the table. So, if there’s a casserole, I need to come up with 2 more things!

Mozzerella & Beef Puff

Crust:
1/4 cup butter or magarine
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup JIFFY baking mix
3 eggs

Filling:
1 lb. lean ground beef
1 can (7 oz.) mushrooms
3/4 cup onion (chopped)
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 can (10 3/4 oz) cream of mushroom soup

1 to 1 1/2 cups shedded mozzarella cheese (I did 1 1/2)

Preheat oven to 425. Grease 10″ round baking dish. Brown ground beef, onion, and mushrooms. Drain, add seasoning and mushroom soup, and set aside. For crust, bring water and butter to a boil. Add baking mix all at once, beat with wooden spoon until mixture is smooth and forms a ball. Remove form heat. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Spread dough onto bottom and up sides of pan.
s puff crust
Fill w beef mixture. Bake 25 minutes until golden brown and puffy. Sprinkle with cheese and bake 5 minutes more. Yeild: 4 – 5 servings.
s puff baked Mine got baked a little longer because my Mom called and I was talking to her when I should’ve got it out. But it turned out good because the cheese got nice and brown around the edges. It’s VERY filling.

My take on it: I’m not going to cut it out of the box to add to my blank cookbook (which isn’t so blank anymore). It was VERY good, but nothing exceptional. The garlic added some pizzazz. A huge plus for it is that it takes very common ingredients and is very easy to make short notice… like, you can grab frozen hamburger out of the freezer and have it fried up in 15 minutes.

To round out this meal, I cooked frozen broccoli (there were no veggies in the main dish) and then we topped it off with banana splits for dessert.
s banana split We don’t always have dessert, but the toppings and bananas and ice cream scoop were some more things to help fill up my ’empty’ table problem, what with having casserole and all!

I should add somewhere on this site, that Shannon is a better cook than me! When Tiffany was born, he worked from home some for the first week and made alot of the meals, and we ate some good stuff!!! Much better than when I’m in charge! Where he shines most is the grill. He grills year-round, but of course more in the summer. He has a baked bean recipe that is just awesome, and he’s famous for those beans among our family and friends. My sister Jan requested them at her wedding and my mom just called me this evening (remember overbaked puff above) and asked if he could make them for our T-giving dinner this year. He also makes a killer pork chop open faced sandwich. I will ask him make a ‘guest appearance’ on here once in awhile!

There are some things in the comments from my last post that I want to come back to sometime, but I’ll leave it at this for now. I’ll most likely be updating before Thanksgiving, so I won’t wish you a Happy Thanksgiving yet! If I don’t make anything before, I plan to make a cinnamon roll recipe that madisonsmom2 messaged to me. I’ll make it for brunch since our T-giving dinner is an early supper (I think to accomodate the hunters). This is not just any cinnamon roll recipe… it’s got a couple ‘surprise’ ingredients in it.   …That was all just to whet your appetites.