At Home My Way

I got a new French-Bread pan for Christmas and used it Sunday to make two loaves of beautiful French Bread.  I also made a big pot of homemade Spaghetti Sauce.  What a feast!  (Like we need to be feasting AT ALL with all of the Christmas goodies we've been stuffing ourselves with lately LOL?) I made this  dough the old fashioned way.  I usually make dough in my bread machine but decided to stick to the basics and kneaded it myself.  It was a little sticky to knead but I made it work and the bread itself was divine! My new bread pan worked out great!  I have tried using foil logs, spraying them with cooking spray and baking loaves of French bread on a cookie sheet wedged between the foil logs, but that never worked out just perfectly.  This will work much better! I also love the little holes in the pan which crisps the bottom of the loaves. We loved the thick slices, still slightly warm from the oven, bu...

For just about as long as we have been married, we have spent Christmas Eve with my husband's mom.  Sometimes she has lots of Christmas Eve guests and sometimes she has just a few.  This year she had a bumper crop.  The living room was full of laughing cousins, lots of stories, and even more good food. My mother-in-law always makes wonderful little BBQ hotdogs on Christmas Eve.  My sister-in-law and I LOVE them!  I haven't posted that recipe but they are just a jar of grape jelly plus a jar of mustard and regular hotdogs cut into fourths.  She cooks them slowly in a little crock for hours until they are thick and yummy. We are big on hot dogs apparently because the other favorite dish are regular old pigs in a blanket cut small and made with canned biscuits and hot dogs.  Those are always the first things to go. This year, my daughter, Rachel, made a Dried Beef Cheese Ball.  We love all kinds of cheese balls but this is a parti...

I have made this recipe for Sweet Potato Bake for many years.  I originally found this recipe in a Taste of Home magazine.  I didn't grow up eating sweet potato casserole so this was new for me.  (When I was little in the south, we normally ate sweet potatoes that were baked and served split in half with butter - with the potato cut in hatch marks so that the butter would soak in).  When  Taste of Home  first came out, I LIVED by every issue.  I loved pouring over the magazines and finding new recipes for comfort food to serve to my family.  This is one of the recipes that has survived many family dinners!  Believe it or not, every time I make Sweet Potato Bake, I drag out ALL of my magazines to find the recipe (I write my favorite recipes on the covers in permanent marker).  It's a huge process because I have so many magazines!   Thinking ahead, I am blo...

This recipe for Quicky (Chunky) Spaghetti Sauce is my very favorite spaghetti sauce.  My mom always called it "Quicky Sauce."  That's because it doesn't have to simmer for hours like some homemade spaghetti sauce recipes.  Is it as quick as jarred sauce?  Well... if you are browning hamburger anyway, its only a matter of dumping in some cans and a few spices, so it's pretty close!  The taste will win you over!  It's delicious! This sauce is deliciously heady with garlic, tomatoes and mushrooms, with a little bit of basil and sugar.  It comes out chunky but the sauce itself is thin.  With a big pot of buttery pasta, it doesn't get much better than this. Here's how I make Quicky (Chunky) Spaghetti Sauce AT HOME MY WAY:   Quicky (Chunky) Spaghetti Sauce   1/2 to 1 pound of hamburger, cooked and drained 1 can (8 oz) tomato sauce   1 regular can diced tomatoes (do not drain)  (fresh tomatoes work great ...

I have been on a serious Chinese buffet "roll" lately!  My favorite hometown restaurant is called "Happy China" and the staff at Happy China and I are now on a first name basis LOL.  The food is consistently delicious and I can get a buffet one-trip to go, which makes me one happy girl!  However, this isn't such a good thing on the old budget.  I find that my Happy China buffets are adding up and I need to find something just as good that I can eat at home and leave eating Happy China as an occasional treat. I decided this weekend to make my hubby one of his favorite meals ever, Hawaiian Chicken .  Hawaiian Chicken is one of those things that I like to eat, but I never think to make it.  I decided this was pretty close to the chicken I get at my favorite Happy China restaurant.  I decided to make Homemade Egg Rolls to go with our meal.  I figured the crispy egg roll wrapper would fill my need for dipping yumminess (I love to dip in...

This is another no-brainer recipe.  But, I decided to post it in case either of my kids (or someone else) wants to know how I do it.  Baking a whole chicken in the crockpot is one of the easiest things to make.  It takes literally seconds to prepare in the morning.  The only thing you would need to remember is that you do need a THAWED chicken to do this.  You could not use a frozen chicken.  I usually make this as a Monday meal and take my chicken out of the freezer on Sunday, leaving it on a plate to thaw.  I place it in the fridge overnight and Monday morning, I'm ready to get dinner started. Monday mornings are painful.  I want to stay in bed or stay home or do anything but go to work... but duty calls and so does the bank account.  I can make Rotisserie-Baked Chicken and have several meal options for the week. We usually have it the first time with some sort of potato or fries.  Since my family is a little small t...

I have been having some yucky lunches lately.  I'm so lazy before work sometimes that just throwing stuff in my bag to make when I get there even seems like work.  The tightwad in me won't usually let me eat out and I end up eating something incredibly unsatisfying like graham crackers and peanut butter, or cottage cheese.  Ugh. I am signed up for some wonderful thrifty-living, work-at home mom blogs and those ladies know how to put it on the table!  They know how to use what they have to make great, frugal, and nutritious meals  One of my favorites is the Prudent Homemaker .  She and her husband stock up and fill their pantry when they have money and then eat from it for long periods of time when they don't.  She bakes her own bread, makes her own soups, and pretty much makes everything from scratch that is possible.   She cooks, sews, gardens, cans, and bakes. She has beautiful pictures on her blog a...

This post is pretty much a no brainer but since it is the first time I have made them ... and since they were so easy and GOOD, I thought they were worth posting. Last night my husband asked me to make sweet potato fries for dinner.  What!!!!  I couldn't believe it!  My husband is the pickiest of picky eaters and I can assure you that he has never eaten a sweet potato in his life (and yes,... he's old LOL!).  We went to a friend's house for a fish fry Saturday night.  In addition to fish, chicken, and regular fried potatoes, our friend fried sweet potatoes.  He had told us he was doing them but I just assumed he was using bagged, frozen sweet potato fries.  My hubby was the #2 frier so in addition to frying, he was doing lots of munching and tasting.  I think cooking and munching and tasting is the best way to try new things.  You can't help but be hungry when you are smelling all of that good stuff.  To my surprise, our f...

One of our family's ultimate favorite desserts is this Chocolate Pie!  I have to take it to just about every family function.  Both of my girls like it, the old man likes it, and I LOVE it!  Various other interluders in our family (once married into the family or boyfriends and now exes also love it LOL!).  I always  bring home a completely empty pie plate when I make this. I referenced this Chocolate Pie in my post about this Lemon Meringue Pie : I got this recipe from a beloved friend at the first law office I worked at.  Jamilee lives on as I remember her each and every time I make one of her pies.  Jamilee's meringue would have stretched high to the heavens but I haven't quite mastered the art of a tall meringue.  I personally LOVE meringue but the other members of my family do not so I make my chocolate pies usually without meringue.  Once in a great while I will do my best to put meringue on it....

The other night when I made the Chili Mac , I also whipped up this Sunken Apple Cake . I found the recipe at a favorite blog - Chickens in the Road .  Suzanne posted this recipe and said that she even made this little cake after arriving home from a long trip.  Heck, if she has the energy to mix this up after driving from Texas, surely I can mix it up after a long day of visiting at home LOL!  Here is Suzanne's terrific post about this recipe. I loved everything about this little cake.  It's a small, snack-size cake, made from scratch with items I usually keep in my pantry.  Suzanne used apples and I had two apples left on my little apple tree so I used those.  But, you could use most any fresh or even drained, canned fruit.  It would be great served as a coffee cake for a breakfast treat or when friends stop by to chat and you want a little something to serve. Sometimes my husband's mom and his aunts all gather together for coffee at his mo...

My daughter and her boyfriend were in for the weekend.  It was so great to see them!   We toured a great old home in our area on Saturday.  It was built in the mid 1800's and is just humongous.  It is filled with fancy old furnishings, antiques, portraits of the family members, and possibly a few spirits LOL! My daughter and her dad always have a standing date at Pizza Hut on Saturday afternoons when she's home (not my thing exactly, but my daughter, her boyfriend, and Doug really love it .. so what can I say??).  I joined them for lunch so I wasn't very hungry all afternoon.  In fact, I was so full that I just couldn't think of anything to take out of the freezer to make for supper. By about 6PM, I was getting a little hungry.  I had a small amount of hamburger in my freezer which could be thawed quickly in the microwave.  It was about the size of my fist.  What on earth could I make with that little dabble of hamburger?  I deci...