Happy New Year

I can't believe it's already 2014! I am not one for making resolutions, but there are a few things I would like to accomplish:

1.  Get a job - not just any job, I want to help a company succeed and grow.
2.  Continue on my real estate investing journey - I just completed my online class and man there was a lot of information I learned!  Currently looking for an investing group or mentor that can guide me.
3.  Grow my networking group - I discovered this was an area I was lacking in my job searching adventure (sometimes I like to refer to my job searching as my once a day anxiety attack).
4.  Update my blog more often.
5.  Contine exercising and eating healthy (eating healthy least 80% of the time because I just love food!)
6.  Get my husband to clean his closet - it's just awful, that's all I'm gonna say 'bout that.

My husband and I started off the New Year by picking the lettuce we grew in our garden.  Tom and I have never tried growing lettuce, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.  We made a great salad and topped it with a bruschetta mixure, artichoke hearts and blue cheese dressing, it was really delightful.

So, here is to a new year, new adventures and hopefully a lot of good times!

Tomato Cucumber Salad

I love this time of the year, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, doesn't get any better!  Last night, after returning from a horrific experience at the doctors office, waited in the lobby for an hour before I was even called into a room, saw the doctor for 5 minutes and then waited another 30 minutes to do a blood test, after I went and complained that no one was helping me!!!!!  Good thing I didn't have to go back to work!

Tom and I decided to go to the movies and have "Date Night", but we wanted to eat something before we went, we had leftover stuffed poblanos (that will be in a future post) and I decided to make tomato cucumber salad with fresh basil and oregano, all from my garden!  I love it when I can "live off the land".

Tomato Cucumber Salad
1 large cucumber
2 large tomatoes
Fresh Basil
Fresh Oregano
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
Balsamic Vinegar

Start with peeling and cutting up the cucumber

 

Pick a couple good tomatoes, chop and add to cucumbers

 

Add some fresh basil and oregano

Toss this together with salt and pepper, olive oil and balsamic vinegar

 

I added some black olives, which my husband was not too happy about.  The great thing is I grew everything in this salad (except the olives)!

 

 

 

Spicy Chorizo Corn Chowder

When I browse thru magazines, the recipes I try to focus on have items that are growing in my garden.  This chowder recipe caught my eye immediatly because it has a couple of items from my garden, poblano chilies and fresh basil and it is pretty simple to make.

2 Poblano Chilies
12 oz chorizo, casing removed
4 cups fresh corn kernals, about 3 ears
2 cups chicken broth, reduced sodium
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 red onion, thinly sliced
1/2 cup sliced basil leaves

The poblano chilies need to be blackened and have the skin removed, my husband does this for me on the grill, puts them in a zip lock bag for a few minutes and the skin comes off pretty easy. Let cool, remove stem, seeds and chop.

Cook chorizo, breaking up sausage, discard any fat.
Cut corn from each ear.
In a saucepan, add cooked chorizo, corn and chicken broth, bring to a boil and cook until corn is tender, about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Reduce heat to simmer, add cream and poblanos.
Ladle into bowls, sprinkle with onion and basil.

For some reason my computer did not want to load all the pictures, trust me it was yummy!

Thank you Sunset Magazine for the recipe!

The $5.00 Bill Savings Trick

I am going to share with you one of my money savings tricks, I have been doing this for a long time and everyone like to give me a hard time about it.  Whenever I get a $5.00 in my wallet, I pull it out and put it in a drawer, pretty soon those $5.00 bills are a few hundred.

Feeling Inspired

I was having dinner with some friends last night and we got to talking about blogs, of course I said I have a blog but haven't updated in awhile.  Well, my friend Kortney was telling me about her friend, Katie and her blog, I promptly looked it up, All Things Katie Marie, it was great!  After browsing for awhile, I wanted to jump up and get my blog going again, but decided to wait until the morning, that way I can sit, have a cup of coffee and organize my thoughts.

I originally created the blog to celebrate my Grandma Opal and the wonderful food she cooked.  I decided that I am going to evolve my blog into celebrating not only the great food my husband and I grow and prepare, but the values I have learned from my family and the things that are important to me.

Here are some of the topics I will be including in my new, updated version of Grandma Opal's Midwest Favorites:
 - Recipes
 - Exercise tips and tricks
 - Budgeting and money saving ideas

Thanks for the inspriation Katie!  Everyone please follow All Things Katie Marie!

Walnut Tartlets

On the 5th of July, my sister and I had plans to do some wine tasting with Auntie Maria and Grandma in Santa Cruz, our journey began by going about 5 miles out of our way to the Summit Store in the Santa Cruz Mountains to get some sandwiches, if you ever visit this area, you MUST go to this store, it is AWESOME! After we got our sandwiches, we were on our way to Santa Cruz, there is a group of wineries on Swift Street and a delightful French Bakery, Kelly's French Pastry.  The wine was good, but the Walnut Tartlets at Kelly's French Pastry were delicious, so were the French Macaroons.  Well, I decided I could make those little tarts, so I got up this morning, looked up a recipe on the internet, found one that I liked and dived right in.  The funny thing is, I was thinking I haven't blogged about my food recently and on my way home from my jog, I saw my friend, Trisha, from high school, she reminded me that I haven't updated my blog, so here it is, thanks Trisha!

First, I had to make the pastry, not too bad and I found out that I LOVE my Cuisinart food processor! I have had the mini tart pans forever, but I have never used them, they worked perfect!  I love to buy nifty baking contraptions, haven't used them all, but I shall start!

 

 

Next, I had to bake these little guys and make the filling, these are the ingredients for the filling, not really low fat, oh well, I am going off the diet today.

 

Next, I had to fill the tart shells with the yummy, walnut mixture

 

 

These went back into the oven, the recipe said to bake them about 25 minutes, I think it was a little too long, they got a little browner that I would have liked, BUT they tasted really good.

 

I am sure that I will have to do some more R&D on these, but I think they were a success!  I will have my sister try these tomorrow, after we get our workout done!

 

My hubs and Sarah have been in Colorado for a week for softball, they are coming home tonight, I can't wait to see them, I will try to get one of them to be a taste tester later on!

 

Summer Garden Love Pie

The Palermo family spent their summer vacation in Oklahoma, visiting some great people and meeting some new one's (Makenzi and Cassi Coder, you girls are awesome!), as always, the Hillenburg family was the best and I wish we could see all you more often.  The girls got caught up on old movies(Ya Ya!) and saw a new one, that I won't name, and that we all walked out of.  One of the movies we were desperately trying to watch was "The Waitress", we could find the DVD cover, but no movie.  We even tried to buy it at several stores, but no luck.  If you haven't seen "The Waitress", it's about a woman who works in a pie diner and has a special knack for making pies and then she gives the pies all kinds of crazy names, there is some other things happening in the movie too, but I don't want to give away too much.  Right now, our garden is producing all kinds of wonderful things, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, basil, oregano and mint.  As I was looking thru a magazine, I found this recipe that incorporated all the yumminess from the garden and thought it sounded fabulous.  I guess you could call it a quiche, but that sounds too fancy, we are going to stick with pie, because for one, it's baked in a pie dish and for two, you need to have a pie shell to bake it in and three, pie just sounds like comfort food.  This isn't technically one of my grandma's recipes, but I will use her pie dough crust and if she was still here, I think she would really like it.  I have decided  that going forward all my pies shall be named.  I will call my apple pie "I love my daddy pie" because that was my dad's favorite.  I will call my banana cream pie "I love my husband pie" because that is one of his favorites that he only gets at Thanksgiving.  My pies shall all have the word "love" included in the name, because I know my grandma loved to make pies.

So,

Pie = Love

'Nuff said.

Here is the recipe for "Summer Garden Love Pie"
1/2 pkg pie dough(this girl doesn't use "store bought" dough, but if you have to use store bought it's ok)
2/3 cup fontina cheese
1/2 cup pitted kalamata olives, chopped
1/3 cup shallots
3 heirloom tomatoes, cut into 1/2 inch slices
1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp cornmeal
1 tbsp thyme
1 tsp kosher salt, divided
1/2 tsp pepper
1 1/4 cup 2% milk
1 1/2 tbsp grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
3 large eggs
2 tbsp fresh basil leaves
1 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered

Preheat oven to 350. Put dough into a 9 inch deep pie dish, sprinkle with fontina cheese, olives and shallots.  Lay half the tomato slices on top, then combine the flour, cornmeal and thyme (I added some fresh basil and oregano too) and sprinkle over the tomatoes. Top with remaining tomato slices, sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Combine milk, Parm-Regg cheese and eggs, pour into pan, bake for 40 minutes or until set, let stand 10 minutes, top with basil. Combine cherry tomatoes with salt and serve with the "pie".

Here is the cast of characters:

Grate the cheese:

Chop the olives:

Put the cheese, olives and sliced shallots in the pie dish:

Layer in some tomatoes:

Sprinkle with the flour/thyme/cornmeal mixture and I added some fresh basil and oregano and another layer of tomatoes.  Then mix the milk, eggs and parm and pour over the top:

Bake for about 40 minutes or until the pie is set and sprinkle fresh basil on top:

This pie had all the yummy flavors of the garden:

I would like to thank my husband for being my food photographer, couldn't do it without you!

Cinnamon Twists

What to do on a rainy Saturday morning, Sarah's softball game was cancelled, my house was clean and I had nothing to do, well I ALWAYS have something to do, but doing more laundry didn't sound half as fun as making homemade cinnamon twists, I could smell them baking even before I got the ingredients out of the cupboard.  My husband wasn't moving too fast, see we had gone out the night before to several bars with a friend of ours that was here from out of town and Tom had one Jameson shot with a pickle juice back too many(he said he had to do the shot - Peer Pressure) and he wasn't feeling too well, he couldn't wait to smell fresh baked cinnamon twists as he was laying on the couch "recuperating".

I pulled out Grandma's cookbook (this is a recipe that I have been wanting to try out and I think that the gloomy, rainy day was perfect), pulled out all of the ingredients and got to work.  I was pleasantly surprised that it was a pretty simple recipe.

Cinnamon Twists:
Bring to boiling in large saucepan, 1 cup buttermilk.
Remove from heat and stir in:
2TBSP shortening
3TBSP sugar
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt(I generally use a little less salt)
Cool to lukewarm & add:
1 egg
1 pkg yeast
Mix in with a spoon:
3 C flour
Knead dough, roll into a rectangle 6 x 24".  Spread entire surface with melted butter.  Sprinkle half of the dough (long way) with:
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
Bring unsugared half over to make rectangle 3x24". Cut dough into strips 1 inch wide. Twist in opposite direction.  Place on greased baking sheet about 2 inches apart.  Let rise in warm place until light.  Bake at 375.  Spread baked sticks with icing made with 3/4 cup powdered sugar and 1 TBSP milk.

Kneading the dough...

Roll out the dough, spread with melted butter and spread half with the cinnamon/sugar mixture, fold over and slice...

Twist ...

For some reason, Grandma did not say how long to bake the twists, I started with 15 minutes, then added about 5 more minutes when they looked nice and golden brown.



Drizzle a little glaze of powdered sugar and milk and yes, they tasted as good as they looked.

The whole time these were in the oven, Tom kept asking if they were done, as soon as they came out, I put his on a plate and served it to him, as he laid on the couch (just like the good, dutiful wife that I am, hehehe). I called my mom and told her to come over and try my little masterpieces, I think she was over in about 5 minutes.  I love doing R&D!

Knock You Naked Brownies

The other day was my coworker's 30th birthday and I decided that she needed a sweet treat, so I was looking at the Pioneer Woman's website and found "Knock You Naked Brownies".  The only was to describe them is "SINFUL".  I looked up the recipe, made a quick shopping list and stopped at the store on the way home from work, the recipe calls for a box of German Chocolate cake mix, do you think that my grocery store had it?  They had every flavor of chocolate cake EXCEPT the one I wanted, I keep telling Tom that I am not shopping there anymore because every time I look for something, they never have it or they used to have it, now they don't carry it any more.  The other grocery store that is close to my house is yucky and I try not to shop there, unless it's an emergency and in this case it was and they had the cake mix I was looking for.

Here are the ingredients:

It is really pretty simple, take the cake mix and add evaporated milk, melted butter and chopped pecans, mix is together.  It is a pretty thick batter, then divide it in half:

Place half the mixture in a well greased 8x8 baking pan and bake for about 10 minutes.  In the meantime melt the caramels with some evaporated milk in the top of a double boiler:

Then, pour that yummy, caramel goo on top of the baked brownie, top with some chocolate chips and put the other half of the brownie dough on top:

Bake this for about a 1/2 hour, let it cool completely.  I put it in the refridgerator overnight, dusted it with powdered sugar and this is what you get:

I left one of the brownies at home for Tom to try, he said he couldn't eat it that morning because he was afraid his clothes might fall off. 

Red Velvet Cupcakes

A couple of weeks ago we were having some really nice weather, I think it was close to 80 degree's so Tom and I decided to have a little backyard BBQ and there is nothing we like better than sitting out on the patio enjoying good food and good friends.  We kept the menu pretty simple, some chicken wings for an appetizer, macaroni salad, bacon wrapped jalapeno poppers and Tom put together some kabobs and for dessert I made red velvet cupcakes from my grandma's cookbook with cream cheese frosting.  Our friend Lee Bradford brought his two daughters over and they were more than happy to sample the frosting and the cupcakes (all before dinner).

Here the ingredients for the cupcakes:

Seems like some of the recipe's in grandma's cookbook always contain something that isn't expected and Nesquik was not what what I expected, but it gave the cupcakes a nice chocolate flavor.
So, all the ingredients got all mixed up together:

and then filled up the cupcake holders:

These little goodies went into the oven and I whipped up some cream cheese frosting.  After the cupcakes cooled, I put a little dollup of frosting on top and the rest is history!  I think Lee's daughter's ate about three each.





Here is a little sample of what Tom cooked up on his smoker:

These are whole jalapeno's, stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon

These are the chicken wings, with some sort of secret sauce he tossed together with everything that was in the refridgerator.

and these are the kabobs, they were DELICIOUS!

I think Tom is turning out to be a great photographer, especially a great food photographer!  One of Lee's daughters thought we were silly for taking pictures of our food.  Sometimes Tom and I will go back and look at the pictures and remember how good everything tasted.

Comfort Food

My husband thinks we are the only couple who wake up in the morning and start talking about what's for dinner.  I am going to say it WE LOVE FOOD and we like to cook for our friends.  So last Sunday we woke up and decided we were going to make some good, stick to your ribs comfort food and of course fried chicken was what we wanted.  It has been a long time since I fried chicken and I am pretty sure my grandma made it, there wasn't a recipe in her book, so we improvised (and the internet helps ALOT!).  I made sure that my sister and I did our workout that day so I wouldn't feel guilty about eating a big meal.  The other cast of characters on the menu were loaded mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, fruit salad and biscuits (not homemade, I have not perfected the biscuit yet, we, the biscuit and I have a love/hate relationship, I just can't figure it out) and for dessert, Devil Dog's (this is something from the Pioneer Woman's website, but my grandma has the same recipe's in her book).

So here we go into the land of comfort food....

I decided I needed to get my cake going first, so I whipped up my grandma's chocolate sheet cake, but did not make the icing that usually goes on the cake, because I am going to cut the cake into circles and put frosting on top.  I am going to say it many times in my life, but this is the BEST cake in the whole world, I always requested it for my birthday's growing up.

This is me whipping it up and still in my work out clothes, but dontcha love the apron (what goes thru my mind right now is "I'm sexy and I know it").  Anyways, back to the cake, got it in the oven:

So, now the cake is baking, we get the chicken out and soak it in buttermilk and some Sriracha chili sauce, we wanted to add a little kick to our chicken:

Now, I need to get my fruit salad put together and in the fridge so it will be nice and cold, I used fresh pineapple, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries:









Doesn't that look good!

Next up, the loaded mashed potatoes.  I boiled red potatoes, smashed them with cream cheese and sour cream and added, wait for it.....

Yes, that is BACON and CHEESE, we also added some green onion to the mix, I have to say that the potatoes tasted as good as they look.

My husband, Tom, was in charge of frying the chicken (which he did outside in the back yard, we built an outdoor kitchen a few years ago and it sure is nice when you have to fry things that make the house smell).  I can't really tell you what was in the coating for the chicken (mainly because I don't remember the things we thru in there), there was flour, salt and pepper and a few other spices.

So while Tom is frying chicken, I got busy on my dessert, Devil Dog's.  I saw this on Pioneer Woman's website and thought they looked yummy and pretty simple.  My cake was nice and cool, so I cut out the circles.  I am making the frosting for the cake, you have to beat the frosting for about 10 mintues, I love my KitchenAid mixer.  The frosting is a crazy concoction of flour, milk, butter, granulated sugar and vanilla.  Now, time to put these Dog's together:

I used my little decorating tool and piped on the frosting and topped them with a cherry, don't they look yummy!

Dinner is ready! 

This was a fun meal to put together, Tom and I work pretty good together in the kitchen, I just wish he did dishes...



Yes, people, my husband does the dishes, isn't he dreamy!