Today I’m attempting to make truffles as holiday presents. I found a really easy recipe online that I want to try out. Here goes….

Here’s the first finished batch, just regular chocolate. Half are rolled in crushed walnuts and the other half have cocoa powder sprinkled on top. Yum.

These ones are coconut flavored and dipped in white chocolate with cocoa powder on top of them. Hmm… one appears to be missing in the bottom photo.

These are the pumpkin pie truffles, made using canned pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice, dipped in chocolate with powdered sugar sprinkled on top.

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I have to say that I am consistently impressed with the Target brand food line, Archer Farms. Everytime I pick up an Archer Farms product I am usually pretty happy with it, with the exception of their chocolate chip cookies. A few days ago I decided to try their ice cream and got the chocolate overload. Mmmmboy was it good! Usually when I get store brand ice cream I don’t like it, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Go Target!

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Chicken and dumplings can be super easy to make anyway, but just opening cans and putting the contents in your slow cooker is even easier. I made this recipe last week when I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner with what we had unpacked.

12.5 ounce can of chicken
Family size can of cream of chicken soup
Chicken broth, enough to fill the empty can of soup twice
4 carrots, chopped into large chunks
4 celery stalks chopped into large chunks
Half of one vidalia onion, chopped into chunks
3 potatoes chopped into chunks
2 teaspoons Bell’s poultry seasoning
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 1/2 cups of Bisquick
2 tablespoons of cold butter

Put all of the ingredients, except for the Bisquick and butter, into a slow cooker and set to high. Combine the Bisquick, butter in a bowl and add just enough of the soup from the crock pot to make a dough that is not too sticky and refrigerate. Let slow cooker sit for four hours then form the bisquick mixture into half inch rounds and drop in the slow cooker. Let cook for another fifteen minutes and serve.

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Last night I made a really yummy dinner; salmon with pomegranate and honey; spinach, and smashed turnips and potatoes as sides. I have attempted to make salmon with pomegranate in the past, but that was before I really knew how to use the fruit and it didn’t come out all that great. This time it came out real good, maybe just a little too sweet but next time I will do better.
I have also discovered that I can sneak extra stuff into my smashed potatoes. One, I make smashed instead of mashed to keep the skin of the tuber and keep all the goodness and vitamins associated with it (hee hee, I used the word tuber in a sentence). Two, instead of using water to boil, I use chicken broth and don’t dump the liquid, but mash it with the potatoes, once again to retain nutrients. This dinner I also cut up a turnip and boiled and mashed it with the spuds since I am always trying to sneak good things into my families diet. (Let me make a note here, when I use the word diet I am NOT talking about how we are trying to lose weight using food but the things that we eat on a regular basis. It irks me when I use that word and people automatically associate it with weight loss.) When making my smashed potatoes I have also discovered that by adding plain yogurt as a substitue for sour cream you get a much better taste, lower fat and more calcium! By following all these steps I have gotten to the point that I am making really good and good for you potatoes.
Here is my recipe for the salmon:

1 large fillet of boneless salmon (I used about a pound and a half)
Half of one pomegranate
2 tablespoons of honey
1/4 cup of white wine
2 tablespoons of butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Place fish in an oven safe dish. If using salt and pepper, add now. Take as many of the pomegranate seeds from the fruit as you can and place on top of the salmon. Drizzle the honey over the top of this then pour the wine over that. Cut the butter into pieces and place all over the salmon and fruit seeds. Broil the fish until it flakes with a fork. If the top starts getting too well done and the inside is not cooked all the way through, take it out of the broiler and cook in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven until it is complete.

This recipe is different than the one I made last night in that I drastically cut back on the amount of honey I used.

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Something that I have been curious about for sometime is the difference between scalloped and au gratin potatoes. I looked it up on Google last week and found out that scalloped means cheese and au gratin means covered with bread crumbs… or something like that. Anyway, I decided to try my hand at making scalloped potatoes and improvised a recipe that came out really good. Here we go….

4 – 6 potatoes, thinly sliced (the thinner the better)
1 can of cheddar cheese soup
1 cup of chicken broth
1 stick of cream cheese (8 ounces)
1/2 cup of plain yogurt
salt and pepper to taste
shredded cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and grease a 9 x 13 baking dish. While slicing the potatoes, put the soup, chicken broth, cream cheese and yogurt in a pot on the stove using medium heat. Put the potatoes into a large bowl and once the cream cheese is all melted pour the soup mixture into the bowl with the potatoes. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir. Pour the potatoes into the baking dish and sprinkle with the cheddar cheese, cover with a lid or tin foil and bake for an hour. Remove the lid and bake for another five to ten minutes. Let cool for ten to fifteen minutes and serve.

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Since my family will be moving soon we have been trying to empty out the freezers so we have less frozen food to move. I pulled out some frozen turkey from Thanksgiving last year and I have been trying to find something to do with it. Last night I was having a hankering for snack foods for dinner. I warmed up some of the left over turkey and put it in the food processor to shred it. I lined the bottom of an oven and microwave safe dish with refried beans, layered the shredded turkey over the top of that and that put salsa on top of all of that. Put it in the microwave for about four minutes and put cubes of Velveeta cheese on it and put it in the oven at three hundred degrees until the cheese was melted. With some tortilla chips it was great and really hit the spot for the snack food I was craving. It was a big hit with my husband and two year old, which always makes me feel good.

I love being able to recycle left overs into something else.

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My Sister-in-law introduced me to marble rolling pins a couple of years ago and they are the best rolling pins to use for baking. They are really great because they are so heavy that they evenly level out whatever dough you are using. Also, your dough will not stick to it since the surface is so smooth. When I was buying some house warming gifts for my sister a few weeks ago I saw one and had to pick it up! So now, I too am the proud owner of a marble rolling pin. Pie and pizza crusts don’t stand a chance!

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I love to cook. At this point in my life it kind of stress’s me out because of the kids, but I still love it anyway. The past two days I have made the mistake of going into Le Gourmet Chef and Williams-Sonoma at the mall. In Williams-Sonoma I practically left having convulsions because I wanted to buy just about everything in the store, with the exception of the Dutch oven section. I love kitchen gadgets and am always looking at something new to add to my arsenal of ladles, rolling pins and hand mixers, etc.

Anyway, today I was going gaga over cake pans. I saw one cake pan that had molds to make a giant cup cake once you put the cake together and another one that made a beehive. I don’t know why I feel the need to have a cake pan that makes a cake in the shape of a beehive. I would probably only  make a beehive cake one time. But, it’s so pretty.

Afterwords I called my husband to tell him about my visit and promptly drove him crazy with the way I pronounce Willian-Sonoma. I say it wrong every time, I can’t help it.

Update July 2, 2009: After writing this last night, I walked into my mothers kitchen today and there was the beehive cake pan! She bought it last year! How funny!

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I just ordered myself a dutch oven from Amazon.com and it should be coming in the mail tomorrow! I’m super excited! I just got a book out of the library called “Glorious One Pot Meals” by Elizabeth Yarnell and after reading it I decided that these recipes sound fantastic and easy. Of course you need a dutch oven to make all of them, so I went ahead and got one. I can’t wait to try the recipes and the oven! I know what I’m using to make dinner tomorrow night! I’ll post an update about the dutch oven itself and how the recipe comes out.

Update June 22, 2009:

I got the Dutch oven on the seventeenth. So far so good! I have cooked two very successful recipes, and one not so successful. The pot itself seems to be really well made and I am very happy with it. There have been no chips on the enamel as of yet, and I even put it in my dishwasher and it made a twelve hour trip to New York with me in my car with a toddler.

The first recipe I made in it was Sante Fe Chicken, and it was soooooooooo good! I will most defnintely make that one again. I then made some sort of a steak dinner, but I think I deviated too much from the original recipe since it wasn’t too good. After that I used on the stove top and dumped all of my left over veggies in the fridge into it. I then added some beef cubes and it came out so tastey. I have to call my husband and tell him to freeze it so I can have some when I get home from my trip to New York.

I’ll be sure to post the recipe for Santa Fe Chicken once I get home.

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