Vegetable Soup

The weather has been gloomy and some of us have been feeling pretty 'yucky' too, so I thought a good pot of veggie soup would be nice to have for dinner tonight. I went ahead and started it around noon since I wanted it to simmer for a few hours and Blane has a football game this afternoon. Now the soup will be ready when we get home from the game around 6:30 tonight. In the past, I have made a hot pan of cornbread to go with this soup, but the general consensus yesterday was to have crackers with it. I made todays soup in a pot on the stove-top, but I have made it in the crock pot in the past...will just depend on your prefernce. You can use veggies that are already cooked/canned, so it doesn't have to be an "all day" crock pot endeavor. I have been known to just throw in all sorts of leftovers in my 'vegetable' soup.

Ingredients
2 pounds of ground beef (or any meat you want to use...leftover ham works well too)
2 pkgs frozen veggies
1 can crushed tomatoes in puree
1 can cut green beans
1 can whole kernal corn
some beef broth (i had abt half a container left over from another recipe in the fridge that i used)
2 cups water
S & P to taste
5-6 med potatoes, diced (or you can use canned potatoes, just dice them if they are whole)
1 medium onion, chopped
1-2 Tbsp Worchestershire
chopped cabbage (as much or little as you like)


- Brown meat in skillet; drain well
- In a large pot, combine meat and all other remainig ingredients and cook until veggies are tender

Serve with hot cornbread or crackers
Leftovers can be frozen

Pound Cake

Well, today was my first attempt at making a pound cake.  A dear friend has let me borrow her KitchenAid stand mixer for a while (thanks, Heather!) and I couldn't wait to use it!  I was like a kid at Christmas. Seriously, kinda sad.  :)  Anyway, I have been wanting to try my hand at making a pound cake for a bit, and found a recipe from Paula Deen that seemed simple enough. I am having some ladies over tomorrow night for a "girls night out" and thought it would be great to have pound cake for them. Boy, am I glad I made the cake today so I will have the chance to make another one tomorrow! My first pound cake turned out very gooey in the center.  It was still quite tasty.  I had my parents and my grandmother over for cake and coffee (not knowing until I cut it that it was so gooey).  By the time the five of us finished, half the cake was gone,  so it wasn't a complete failure.  :)    Now I know what to do differently next time..
Here's the recipe I used...

Paula Deen's Southwest Georgia Pound Cake

2 tsp pure vanilla extract (may use either lemon or almond)
1 cup heavy cream
3 cups sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
6 eggs
2 sticks of butter

- Generously grease and flour a 10" bundt or tube pan (I just used a tube pan)
- Using an electric mizer, cream butter and sugar together until fluffy
- Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition
- Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt
- Alternately add flour mixture & heavy cream to butter/sugar mix, beginning and ending with flour
- Stir in flavoring
- Pour batter into prepared pan
- Place in a cold oven, then set oven to 325 degrees and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes without opening the oven door. Bake up to an additional 15 minutes if needed (**this is where I think I went wrong. The cake looked great, but I didn't 'test' it. Next time, I'm going to cook it at 350 degrees and I WILL BE TESTING it to see if it needs a little longer.  I don't want another gooey cake**)
- Remove from oven and cool in pan for 15 minutes
- Invert cake onto plate

Beef Stew

I love me some easy crock pot meals.  I keep saying I'm going to read the blog I have heard so much about, where the lady cooked a meal a day for a whole year in her crock pot.  Some day. Soon. Hopefully, I will get around to it.

On Tuesdays, we have Blane's football games, and we don't get home until around 7:00 p.m.  I try to plan something that is either really quick, like sandwiches, or something that can be prepared ahead of time.  This morning, I had the ingredients in the crock pot by 7:30 a.m.  I just let it cook on the "auto" setting 'til around lunch time and then turned it to "low" for another couple of hours.  After the first few hours, the whole house smelled so good!  And, it was super easy.  Here's what I did...

Ingredients
1.5-2 lbs stew meat, depending on how many you are serving
2 lbs of potatoes, washed, peeled and cut into med. sized pieces
1 lb carrot, washed, peeled and cut into med. szed pieces
1 Vidalia onion, peeled and cut into small pieces
1 pkg of "beef stew" seasoning
S & P to taste
4 cups water

Combine all ingredients in crock pot.  Cook for about 6 hours.
Serve with fresh cornbread.

6-8 servings

Pan Fried Chicken

I had never cut up a chicken before tonight.  I had never made "REAL" fried chicken (I'm not counting frying up some chicken fingers).  When I was making out our dinner menu for this 2 week period, I came across this recipe and thought it would be good.  So I bought a whole chicken and decided to do it.  I googled "How to cut up a chicken" and found numerous instruction videos that made it look fairly easy.  They all lasted from 3-8 minutes.  WHATEVER!  It took me 20+ minutes and in the end my chicken did not look anything like theirs.   :(   I have since been informed that WalMart sell whole chickens already cut up (Thanks Mary Frances!)  Next time, I will be buying that. :)

Apart from the "cut up" hassle, this recipe is easy and turned out really good.  Skylar was helping me in the kitchen and we fixed potato salad and baked beans to go with it.

2 1/2 - 3 pound frying chicken , cut up (or use chicken pieces)

1/2 cup milk

1 egg

oil for frying

1 cup flour

2 tsp. garlic salt

1 tsp paprika

1/4 tsp poultry seasoning

1 tsp black pepper

- Blend milk and egg

- Combine flour and seasonings in a plastic bag

- Shake chicken in seasoned flour

- Dip chicken in milk/egg mixture

- Shake chicken in seasoned flour again to coat thoroughly and evenly

- Place oil in a large skillet, about 1" deep and heat to 350 degrees

- Brown chicken on all sides

- Reduce heat to 275 degrees and continue cooking until chicken is tender, about 30-40 min.  DO NOT COVER.

- Turn chicken several times during cooking

- Drain on a paper towel

Broccoli & Rice Casserole

I got a recipe from Reese's aunt last year for a broccoli and rice casserole that is a staple at Thanksgiving dinner every year.  We always enjoyed it and when I started cooking it was one of the recipes that Reese wanted me to get.  It didn't quite turn out like Aunt Joy's the first time I made it (it was actually quite crunchy) but I have refined the cooking times and tweaked the actual recipe a bit to where now it is actually quite good.  We had it tonight as the side dish to the meatloaf I fixed.  It is, like most of the recipes I fix, quite easy.

Broccoli Casserole

2 pkg frozen chopped broccoli

1 smal finely chopped onion

1 (10.5 oz) can cream of mushroom soup

1 cup water

1 cup grated cheese

1 cup raw rice (I just use a 5 oz. pk of Mahatma Saffron Yellow rice)

1/2 stick of butter

- Preheat oven to 375 degrees

- Melt the 1/2 stick of butter in a 9x13 casserole dish

- Mix remaining ingredients in a large bowl & pour in casserole dish

- COVER WITH FOIL  (**I forgot to do this the first time I made it, therefor the rice was undercooked)

- Bake for 1 hr 15-25 min, depending on your oven

Banana-Raisin-Pecan Bread

The weather has had me in a funk the last few days.  Flash flooding and random tornado warnings are getting old.  I thought that banana bread would be a nice treat for Skylar when he got home from school and the rest of us could have it for dessert tonight.  Of course, the schools decided to let out early today, so Sky got home while I was still mixing the batter, but it's the thought that counts, right?

 I have several bananas stored in the freezer because no one in the family will eat the bananas once they start to get really ripe.  Frozen bananas make this really easy.  I just set them out on the counter to thaw for about an hour and then they just fall out of the peel.  They look yucky (the peels are really brown), but they are super easy to smash.   Maybe it wasn't ready for Sky as a snack, but we will all get to enjoy it after supper in a little bit.  Anyway, I thought I'd share my recipe here.

Banana Bread

3-4 ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 cup of sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
chopped pecans (optional)
*today i randomly decided to add raisins. like the nuts, this is optional

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees
- With a wooden spoon, mis butter into smashed bananas in a large mixing bowl
- Mix in sugar, egg, & vanilla
- Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over mixture and mix in
- Add flour last; mix well
- Add any optionals at this point
- Pour batter into a buttered 4x8" loaf pan
- Bake for 1 hour
- Cool on a rack

Sloppy Joe Casserole

In planning our meals for the next 2 weeks, I saw that we hadn't had sloppy joe casserole in a while.  It's a really easy recipe and it tastes great.  This is what we're having for supper tonight.

Here's the recipe...

Easy Sloppy Joe Casserole

1 pound ground beef (or in our case, ground deer)

1 can Manwich or generic sloppy joe mix

1 can cream of potato soup

1 bag frozen tater tots

shredded cheddar cheese

S & P to taste

- Preheat oven to 425 degrees

- Brown ground meat and drain

- Stir in sloppy joe sauce and potato soup

- Spray a 9x13" casserole dish with non-stick cooking spray

- Add entire bag of tater tots

- Top with meat mixture

- Cover with foil and bake for 25 minutes

- Remove foil and top with cheese (as you can see from the pic, only 1/2 of us like cheese)

- Return to oven for 5 more minutes or until cheese is melted and bubbly

If you try this recipe, be sure and let me know how it turned out.

'til next time, happy cooking!