Thanksgiving Menu and a few recipes!

I am so excited that the holidays are upon us!!! My family will be traveling to the Dallas area to spend Thanksgiving with my in-laws. I am looking forward to see everyone but honestly I am most excited about the food and more specifically the cooking!! My mother-in-law is working Thanksgiving day so we will celebrate with the traditional feast on Friday. On Turkey Day we are going to Alan's dad's house. He lives on a little farm south of Fort Worth. We always love visiting his house because the girls get to ride horses and run and play and enjoy the open fields. It's a lot of fun. Since I will be the only "woman" at the house that day, I am taking over all food and cooking duties!! Since the day will consist of relaxing, watching football, and riding horses, I wanted make easy, comforting foods that we can enjoy all day long. So here's the menu:

Chili (it's my dad's recipe, and it's fantastic!)

Cornbread

Jalapeno Poppers

Chips and Guacamole

Pumpkin Squares (got this new recipe from my cousin, Angie!)

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Apple Cider

Hot Chocolate

On Friday, we will have the traditional Thanksgiving meal with all of Alan's family including my new sister-in-law! Alan's oldest brother, Steven is getting married TODAY!! It is just a ceremony at the Justice of the Peace in Plano, but on the Saturday following Thanksgiving we are having a family barbecue and reception for them. It is going to be three days full of food, family, and fun!

I have one more "project" planned for Thanksgiving. Any guesses??? You're right, cupcakes!!! At Friday's dinner there will be 13 kids there!! We are going to decorate cupcakes and I have two really cute ideas. One is a Turkey that I found in Hello Cupcake! The other idea is to do a Cornucopia with little "fruit" and acorns in it. I think it will turn out cute and give the kids something to do for a while. I PROMISE to take pictures and I'll post them after Thanksgiving!!

In the hustle and bustle of this busy season, as much as I love the food and festivities, I try to stay focused on what really matters, spending time with my family. I am so blessed not just with a great husband and kids, but my entire extended family is a blessing to my life. I am truly rich because of all of them. I am so thankful to be a part of such a wonderful family! Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Chili recipe:

2 pounds ground beef

1 pound ground sausage

2 packages Williams Chili Seasoning (according to my dad, this is the best, so I always use it)

2 cans tomato sauce

2 cans diced tomatoes

2 cans black beans (drained)

2 cans pinto beans (drained)

1/2 cup brown sugar

Brown the ground beef and sausage. Combine all ingredients except brown sugar in a large stock pot. Simmer and add brown sugar about 5-10 minutes before serving. Tastes great with cornbread or with Fritos and cheese (my personal favorite!). Enjoy!!

Batch Cooking

Well, I've done it again!! This past weekend, me and my friend Missy batch cooked. Every time I talk about it people ask what on earth batch cooking is! Well, it's two days of planning, shopping, cutting, prepping, boiling, cooking, cutting, sealing, laughing, pouring, measuring, stirring, laughing, eating fun!!! Ok, I'll be more specific. Here's a run down of what we do or at least what we did this weekend. I'm sorry I don't have pictures to go with this post. I really meant to take them, but when you're in the middle of a 23 hour cooking marathon, you kind of forget to snap a few pictures here and there.

Day 1: We started out at Starbucks, notebooks in hand, and chose the recipes we wanted to do. We have compiled about 40 recipes, so we go through them and pick out the ones we want to do. This time we picked out about 32 recipes!! That may not sound like a lot, but we do each recipe X 4. Two for her family and two mine. We go through each recipe and make our shopping list. We try to stay organized (dairy, canned, frozen, baking, spices, etc.) so that shopping will go smoothly. As soon as we had our list together we headed to Sam's!! We always start at Sam's because we buy so much in bulk and definitely get the best deals there. For example, we needed 156 chicken breasts for our recipes, so we needed 13 bags of chicken breasts. Not to mention the 20 something pounds of ground beef, 4 roasts, 4 briskets, and 6 pounds of stew meat! Two huge cart fulls and 700something dollars later, we headed to Wal-Mart! We found pretty much everything else we needed at Wally World. One last stop at Market Street for lunch and two miscellaneous items we couldn't get at the other stores and then back to Missy's for cooking!!

Missy and I have come up with a pretty good system even though this was only our second time to cook together! We've both batch cooked with other people before so we've learned a lot of things that work and a lot of things that don't. Missy is the prep master!! She goes through the recipes and figures out how many chicken breasts need to be cooked, how many pounds of meat need to be browned, what veggies need to be chopped. I start putting together the "raw" recipes. Raw recipes are ones that don't require the protein to be cooked. These meals just require assembly. So Day 1 is always packed! Planning, shopping, prepping, raw recipes, and 13 hours later we were done.

Day 2: Assembly day!!! All of the prep work that Missy did the day before now gets put into the remaining recipes. We just each pick different ones and start putting them together until it's all done. Now let me just say that we are what I would call "extreme" batch cookers!! Before cooking with Missy I had only made about 20 recipes at a time and that wasn't doubling them, just 20 meals for my family. Missy has such an amazingly organized system, that with just a little bit more time that I was putting in before I am coming home with triple the amount of recipes! My freezer is packed with 66 meals!! The great thing about that is I don't have to cook for a few months!!! If you don't have the freezer space for 66 meals, you can cook on a much smaller scale, and it is still so worth it. Batch cooking makes my life SOOOO much easier! It is two packed days, but it is so worth it.

If you are interested in more info about it, or have any questions, let me know! I love sharing information with other moms and wives or even single ladies that just want to make their lives a little easier, and batch cooking does that for me!!! Again, sorry there are no pictures! I promise to post some pictures of some of the meals as we eat them. I will also share some recipes. I have batch cooking notebooks available for $5 is you want one. They have about 35 recipes in them along with some really great tips sheets and helpful information. Hope you feel inspired to get in the kitchen and start cooking!!!

More Cupcakes!!!

Today is my sweet Molly Kate's birthday! I made cupcakes for her party tonight and they turned out pretty cute! I really like making cupcakes that are all a little unique. I like lots of variety. Vanilla cupcakes with chocolate icing, vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing, strawberry cupcakes with chocolate and cream cheese icing. To celebrate my sweet girl I decorated with her initials primarily. I also used "1" and castle cupcake toppers to go with our princess theme!

Happy birthday sweet baby girl!

On a different note, let's talk about steak!!! Sunday night we cooked out steaks to enjoy the last of this really beautiful weather and to enjoy while watching the Cowboys game. I've come up with a really good "rub" for steaks, so I thought I'd share.

Of course, it helps to start with some really good ribeye steaks!

Fun Stuff!

As much as I love cooking, I think I love baking about 1,000 times more! I'm a bit of a sugar addict. So, this week, I had two "sweet" projects to do. The first was a very simple party favor I volunteered to make for a Teacher's Luncheon at Taylor's school. I've seen these little spoons before and figured they would be super easy to make, and they were! I melted some chocolate bark and just dipped the plastic spoons in it. I laid them all out on wax paper and once they had hardened I drizzled them with white chocolate bark. Easy peasy!! The part about this project that I liked the most were my new Make and Mold decorating bottles! I love stuff like this that makes these little baking projects more fun. I had to make 80 of them, but it didn't take that long at all! I wrapped them invidually in Make and Mold treat bags and voila! Cute favors! Sorry I forgot to take a final picture once they were all done.

My second project this week involved my favorite thing ever.....cupcakes!! On Wednesday morning, my sister Kelsey went in for an ultrasound to find out if she is having a boy or a girl. I thought it would be super fun to make little baby cupcakes. This idea inspiration came from an awesome book Hello, Cupcake!

I combined the baby shower cupcakes with the slumber party ones and came up with these! I think they turned out pretty cute!

And that's right, it's another girl!!! This makes granddaughter #6 for my parents and grandson #0!!! Yes, we just seem to keep churning out the girls, but hey, we love pink!! Ok, back to the cupcakes. I just used a simple box cake mix and store bought frosting in a can(because they taste really good and leave me more time for decorating). The babies faces are Mini Nilla Wafers, the blankets are different candies I just rolled out and molded, and that's pretty much it!! Cute, huh??

Praline Chicken

It seems that the recipe for praline chicken is in high demand! I got this recipe from this awesome new cookbook my mom gave me. It's the Southern Living Christmas Cookbook. My mom got it at TJMaxx, but today a friend told me that they have them at Dillard's at the make-up counters for only $10, and some of the proceeds go to Ronald McDonald House! I also got the recipe for Italian Cream Cake from this cookbook. I want to make literally every recipe in here! They all sound so amazing!

So here's the Praline Chicken recipe (I did slightly modify the seasonings from the cookbook, I will let you know where):

2 teaspoons Creole seasoning (I used salt, pepper, and garlic powder, because the Creole seasoning is too spicy for my kids)

6 skinned and boned chicken breasts

1/4 cup butter, melted

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1/3 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 cup chopped pecans, toasted

Sprinkle seasoning on both sides of chicken. Cook chicken in butter and oil in a skillet over medium heat 5 minutes on each side or until done. Remove chicken, reserving drippings in skillet. Place chicken on a serving platter; keep warm.

Add syrup and sugar to drippings in skillet; bring to a boil. Stir in pecans; cook 1 minute or until heated. Spoon mixture over chicken. Yield: 6 servings.

Super easy and super yummy!! Here is the picture from the cookbook. Normally I will try and post actual pictures to prove that I am in fact making these meals! I just started the blog after I thought to take a picture of this dish!!

(Sorry the pics aren't great, but I'm not writing a photography blog here!)

Try it out and let me know what you think!!

Skinny Chef Kickoff!!

Well, here it is. A blog totally dedicated to my love of cooking, baking...ok, let's just get down to it...my love of food!!! I love all things food. Food shows, cooking food, baking food, buying food, eating food...my love affair with food has been a long one. Not always a healthy one, but maybe we'll get to more of that at another time. Let's kick this thing off right!

Ok, first let me explain the title. I am many things but skinny and a chef are not on the list. But I like to think that somewhere deep inside is a skinny little hot mama waiting to come out. Her only hindrance is, you guessed it, food!!! I am so far from being a chef, it kind of makes me chuckle to even use that word. Ask my husband when we first married! I was FAR from even being a decent cook. I think my couch potato-ness led to a dear relationship with Food Network. It all started with Rachel Ray. The appeal of cooking a meal in 30 minutes was definitely for me!! Although I've never actually been able to cook a meal from one of her cookbooks in less than an hour (not to mention the aimless wandering in the store looking for obscure ingredients. What the heck are pignoli nuts anyways?) Now I love watching cooking competition shows. I've learned so much about cooking from watching these shows. They've given me a little more confidence to step out of the box and try some new things. Last night I received a huge compliment from my hubby. He said "you know, you've really become a great cook!" This from the man who grew up with a momma that can cook anything and everything tastes amazing! Another reason I am not in the chef category, not even close to it, is I don't really make up new recipes on my own. On the rare occassion that I'm feeling super adventurous (and pretty confident that it will turn out half way decent) I will just go for it and be creative, but mostly I cook/bake things that I find in a cookbook or online. Some of my recent favorites include:
-Italian Cream Cake
-Bread Pudding
-Prailine Chicken
-Papas con Chile (just like Abuelo's!)
-Anything from bakerella.com (gotta love anything that you can put on a stick)
-my dad's chili recipe
-Banana bread
and the list goes on and on...... (can you see why I'm not skinny?)

If you want recipes for any of these let me know, I'll share!

So I'm going to give this blog a try. I will include pictures and recipes of things I make and I'll let you know how successful (or unsuccessful) the dishes are. Trust me, I'm my own worst critic. I will not let you waste your time on a bad dish. If it's not good, or not worth the time it takes to make it, I'll let you know. You can also send me any recipes you think I should try. I'm up for anything! My family is used to being the guinea pigs by now. I've made some pretty intersting (aka, nasty) meals over the past 4 1/2 years. Happy reading (and eating)!