Home again, home again...

Happy bacon found here

...jiggety jig!

It really is nice to be home again.  

However, my absence has not changed my children's opinion of my cooking.  They still like pancakes, bacon, and hate spinach.

My husband was nice enough to make the pancakes and bacon for their breakfast, which they loved.

I should mention...I'm a vegetarian.  I still serve meat to my kids, but I don't generally cook it.  Sure, I'll bake chicken nuggets, but I draw the line at frying bacon.  Which of course makes my husband much more popular at breakfast time.

For dinner tonight, I thought I'd try a twist on something that had worked before, by making spinach-bacon pinwheels.  I included the bacon for two reasons: 1. There were two pieces left over from breakfast.  2. If I made the pinwheels with bacon, I wouldn't eat all of them!

Here is my recipe:

Spinach-Bacon Pinwheels

1 tube crescent rolls 

1 pkg frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained

4 oz cream cheese

1/4 cup cottage cheese

1 shake of garlic powder

2 shakes of italian seasoning

2 pieces cooked bacon, cut into small pieces

Heat oven to 400 degrees. 

Mix cream cheese, cottage cheese, garlic and itailian seasoning.

Spray cooking sheet with cooking spray.

Roll crescent rolls out onto a cooking sheet, pressing seams together.  (Or cheat like I did, and buy the seamless dough roll!)

Spread cheese mixture on dough.

Spread spinach over cheese mixture.  (Alternatively, mix the spinach with cheese mixture, and spread together...I think this would have helped the end result go over better, since the spinach wouldn't have been quite so obvious, or so easy to pick out!)

Sprinkle bacon over spinach.

Roll into a tube.

Cut into 8 slices.

Bake 14-16 minutes.

Finished product:

The verdict was mixed!  #2 (of course!) was the one picking out and avoiding the spinach.  The littles sorta ate theirs.  My husband was the one that really liked them, probably because I included the bacon!  

The official tally:

A Week without Kids: Day Five

Knit pizza found here

After last nights complicated recipe, and a rather long day, mom and I decided to take a break from cooking, and just put a frozen pizza in the oven and open a bottle of wine.

Only problem with that plan? The bottle we chose to open was without a doubt the driest Pinot Grigio ever. Yech.

What to do with all that wine? My solution:use it in recipes! One of my favorite recipe search sites is AllRecipes.com. You can search by ingredients you have on hand, which is BRILIANT!

I searched for "dry white wine" and "spinach" (because I had a teensy bit left over from last nights recipe), and found a couple of recipes for spinach salad. I took the bits I liked, skipped the bits I didn't, and here is what I came up with:

Spinach Salad

Dressing:

1/2 cup white wine
1/2 cup basalmic vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp paprika
2 tsp diced onion

Toss spinach with 3/4 cup slivered almonds and one cup of cranberries and/or golden raisins. (I used a mix of both, it was what I had on hand.)

Pour dressing over salad, toss, and serve.

By the way, you may notice that the dressing only calls for 1/2 cup of wine. Since I hate waste, looks like it's spritzer time!

Of course, since there isn't any club soda in the house, and I'm not venturing out in almost 90 degree weather, I did improvise...again. So here is a bonus, second recipe, that I don't expect anyone to try, ever:

1 part white wine (even the driest stuff you have)
1 part Blueberry Pomegranete Propel Fitness Water

I just invented the Blu-Pom-Fit Spritzer, think it will catch on? (Surprisingly tasty, by the way!)

A Week without Kids: Day Four

Swiss cheese scarf (and pattern!) found here

Do you know that feeling, when you're on vacation, and you not only lose track of time but you forget what day it is? Yep, I'm there. I sat down to write this post, and I couldn't remember what day it was, three or four. Hopefully I got it right...

We spent the day helping my sister reorganize her kitchen (someday we'll help her on a remodel, but not this trip), which was perfect, because I really needed to know where everything was to cook today's grown-up recipe.

Here's a link to the recipe (which I found on Pinterest):

Greek Macaroni and Cheese




Now, keeping in mind that I am in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, Nevada, so I did have to make some substitutions and omissions.

The recipe calls for a Greek cheese, Graviera, which I don't know if I could even find in the fabulous cheese bins at Central Market or Trader Joe's. So, I did a google search, and found a website that had cheese substitution recommendations. They suggested either Gruyere or Jarlsberg. The local grocery store only had smoked Gruyere (yech!), so, Jarlsberg it is!

Also, I couldn't find shallots or scallions (seriously, what the heck is a shallot??), so we used green onions instead.

The only other change I made was to reduce the amount of spinach. The recipe calls for two pounds of baby spinach! I only used about 9oz (one and a half packages of bagged stuff), and that was more than enough.

Seriously, that's a lot of spinach!

The result? YUM!!!

And, I can't tell you how nice it is to be appreciated, not only for the end result, but for the effort put into a complicated recipe. Thank YOU, Mom and sister, for all of the compliments. *sniff*

Edited to add PICTURES!

Day 2 of blueberry madness!

Popsicle buttons found here.

So, what do you do with a pile of blueberries?  Today, I made popsicles and cupcakes.  The popsicles were my own wacky creation, but the cupcake were a recipe from "Deceptively Delicious".

And what have we learned about my cooking so far?  That's right, I can't resist trying to stick something green in almost everything!  With the success of the spinach-blueberry bars last week, I thought it was safe to try the spinach-blueberry cheesecake-filled cupcakes.  After all, according to the recipe, "Kids love the surprise creamy center!"

Unfortunately, this may be the first "healthy" recipe that I am too disappointed in to even serve to my children.

First, let's talk about success!  Yesterday, I mentioned the kale-blueberry chewy smoothie fiasco.  I probably should have mentioned that I can't throw food away.  So, I decided to make another attempt at popsicles.  This time, I made fruity rocket pops!

I'm afraid I didn't measure much, but here's the rough recipe:

Red layer:  Strawberries, yogurt, ice, splash of cranberry juice, about 1/8th cup of sugar

White layer:  Bananas and yogurt (I use Stonyfield Farm Organic Whole Milk Vanilla...after all, my kids are not on a diet!)

Blue layer:  Blueberries, yogurt, handful of kale, ice, about 1/4 cup sugar.  (As I mentioned yesterday, this mix came out chewy.  If I do it again, I'll either cook the kale, use my mini-food processor...or both!)

I used these popsicle makers from IKEA:

Found here.

First, I poured the red in, and filled it about 1/3 full.  I put the popsicle cups in the freezer, without the sticks, and let them set for about 5 mins.

Next, I added the white.  Since I didn't add ice, there was less of the white mix, which worked out well for fitting it all in!  Back in the freezer, no sticks, for another 5 mins.

Last, I added the blue, put the sticks in, and froze overnight.

Here is the result:

As you can tell from the picture, I didn't have time to grab the camera before they dove in!

Two thumbs up from the littles!




And, back to the cupcakes.

I should mention, to be fair to the cookbook, I did make one substitution.  I did not have pureed yellow squash for the cream cheese filling, so I substituted apple sauce.  Still, I don't think applesauce caused this fail.

Here's what it looked like when I first tried to get one out of the pan:

Ewwwwwwwwww.

I put the remaining cupcakes back in the oven for an additional 10 mins.

And this is what they look like now:

Ummmm...

So, as I'm writing, I'm waiting for them to cool.  After dinner, I will attempt to serve these to my children.  I might not have even tried, but they saw me making them and have been asking if they are cool enough to eat since before they went in the oven!

According to my husband, if they taste better than they look, they would be great for Halloween.  What do you think?  Add a hat and call them witch cakes?  Or maybe a twiggy pretzel and they could be swamp mud cakes.

In a first for this blog, you're going to have to wait to hear the verdict!  The bigs are back from their 4th of July getaway to Montana tonight, so hopefully I'll have a chance to get more than two opinions...that is...if I can talk them into trying them!