A Cook's Quest

It is secret recipe club time again.  My life has been a rush of finals, research papers, and of course all the running around required with baseball, dance, and other family obligations.  I have been on the look out for fast, easy and delicious side dishes to go with our slow cooker dinners.  Melanie over at Fabulously Fun Food has a lot of great side dishes that are not only tasty, but easy too.  She gives a great description of the pros and cons of each dish as well as the changes she plans on making the next time. For this recipe I listened to her suggestions and eased up on the oil but I didn't know how much ginger to use so I just guessed.  I will probably add more next time or use thicker slices because we really like ginger in our house.  Overall though it was delicious!  Perfect to use as a side dish or to make into a vegetarian main dish with some other veggies.  I really loved the flavor of the ginger with the broccoli and nutty...

  It is time again for the monthly Secret Recipe Club.  I love participating in this group because I get to try recipes and visit blogs that I probably wouldn't get to otherwise.  My family loves it to because this forces me to try recipes that I maybe would try. This month I was assigned to Veggie Whiz a vegetarian blog with tons of great recipes.  I couldn't have received this blog to research at a better time than now.  Lent started last week and I am always on the lookout for delicious dishes without meat in them.  I ended up choosing a side dish instead of a main dish to make for the Secret Recipe Club, but I have many other recipes marked to try very soon. These honey mustard roasted potatoes are delicious!  Slightly sweet and tangy but not over bearing.  The potatoes seemed to absorb the flavors without losing that potato taste that my family loves.  I left out the lemon zest simply because I tossed the lemon out witho...

My kids thought I was nuts when I told them we were having cake for breakfast.  There is something about eating cake for breakfast that makes the meal feel special.  Similar to a muffin batter, this cake is spread into a cake pan, topped with sugar, and then baked to delightful yumminess.  It isn't too sweet and has a wonderful lemon aroma that fills your mouth and blends perfectly with the blueberries dotted throughout pair it up with breakfast sausage or bacon for an  easy and tasty breakfast. The original cake called for 2 cups of berries, but I thought that was too much for such a small pan and cut it down to 1 cup instead.  Please feel free to add as many as you like though, there is nothing wrong with a lot of berries! ENJOY! Lemon-Blueberry Breakfast Cake Recipe Source: Modified Slightly from Alexandra's Kitchen Serves 6-8 ½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature zest from 1 large lemon 7/8 cup sugar (3/4 cup+2 tablespoons) plus addition...

Any dinner recipe that begins with "30 minutes" bumps to the top of my recipe list.  There is such a feeling of relief when I know that dinner can be thrown together quickly and my kids won't "starve" to death during the process, because  you know waiting for dinner to cook is the same thing as "starving." I found this recipe on Pinterest (of course), and I have made it several times with great success.  It is a great combination of sweet and sour that isn't too heavy.  I LOVE lemon and chicken together so the little bits of lemon rind in the sauce are little pieces of flavor just exploding in your mouth...YUM!  Plus, my husband isn't the biggest fan of chicken.  I sort of burned him out on chicken when we were first married because it was cheap, and I knew how to make it.  Now if I make chicken it has to be special and very full of flavor which this dish is. The original recipe consists of a sweet glaze, but we like sauce in our house...

Wishing you all a very joyous day!  

Whenever we get a beef we go through the meat in a certain order, steaks are gone first, followed by the burger and stew meat, and lastly we always have roasts.  It isn't that we don't like a good roast, but rather that I don't have a lot of experience producing a roast that is moist and juicy and flavorful.  I don't want to waste a good cut of meat on experimenting, so I usually wait until there are no other choices left and then make the roasts. When this happened recently, I turned to Pinterest for inspiration.  If you have not checked this site out I am urging you to do so very soon.  It is a plethora of ideas of ALL kinds, but my favorite are the food boards.  I found this recipe that someone pinned from Kalyn's Kitchen .  It is a slow cooker roast recipe that is moist, tender, and full of flavor.  I LOVE the depth of flavors created by the balsamic vinegar and beef broth along with the sweet roasted onions.  We served it w...

This cake, THIS CAKE, is unlike any other cake I have ever made.  It is a cake, within a cake, that has surprises throughout...good surprises like caramel, peanut butter cups, and peanuts...oh yes, it crazy rich, but soooo delicious! Usually I am all for easy, fast, economical, or all of the above.  This cake is not any of those things; however, for the holidays I am willing to splurge for a dessert that makes the entire family drool in anticipation.  I served this for a dessert party that my sister-in-law hosted after Thanksgiving and it was a hit for everyone who tried it.  At one point three of us were standing around what was left eating bites with our forks and visiting. I found this recipe by complete accident when I stumbled upon the blog Sprinkle Bakes .  If you have not seen this blog, go there right now and check out the many, many, many, tasty and beautiful recipes.  I made a few changes to the original recipe but nothing that changed ...