Grilled Pizza Rolls and Wavy Carrots

Despite last week's events, I did try to make the best of things in the kitchen and find ways to still cook things without having an oven.

One of the things that I did was use our gas grill more. Our grill normally gets used to cook just the usual hamburgers, chicken, hotdogs and the occasional pork chops. However, this past week I cooked Totino's pizza rolls on it!! I have read about others grilling whole pizzas so I thought doing the pizza rolls would be no different.

I preheated the grill for a couple of minutes. I put the pizza rolls on a cookie sheet and placed it on the grill to cook. I should have turned the heat down to low when I put the pizza rolls on the grill however, I waited to turned the heat down to low after turning them once. As you can see from some of the pizza rolls, I left the grill on high for a bit too long, but the pizza rolls were not burnt just a bit extra crispy.

They took a little bit longer to cook than what they do in the oven but the results were met with two thumbs up from each of the family members.

The other thing I did this week was use a kitchen tool that has been sitting in the back of the utensil drawer collecting dust!

I use my Pampered Chef crinkle cutter and made some carrot sticks for a snack. My daughter came into the kitchen while I was cutting them up and asked what I was making. I told her "carrot sticks". She looked at me and said those are not carrot sticks they are "wavy carrots"!

I love finding fresh ways to do things to save on heating up my kitchen and re-energizing a veggie into a fun snack.

This post is linked at:

• Fearless Fridays at Home Ec 101!

A New Twist to a Tried & True Recipe

Last week, I had the privelege of providing a meal for a young couple in my church that just had a new baby girl!  While I was there I even got to hold her...just a week old! Oh what sweetness!

One of the items that I brought was my tried & true no bake cheesecake recipe.  However, knowing that it was just the couple I didn't want to make a full recipe and take it and then it possibly get wasted from them not being able to eat all of it.

I decided to make a double batch of the cheesecake and make some mini cheesecakes. So I decided to pulled from my pantry a box of mini foil/paper liners and a bag of Nilla wafers.  I know you think I am crazy because I didn't want to make full recipe for fear of it going to waste so I make a double recipe instead?!?  Anyway, having never used Nilla wafers with my cheesecake recipe, I wasn't sure as to how it would turn out but I figured they would be less messy than making up homemade graham cracker crust to press into each mini cup. 

The fun part of this whole process was that the Nilla wafers were exactly the size I needed to cover the bottom of each of the mini cup liners, which I separated the paper and the foil liners so I had twice as many to work with.  I did learn that the cheesecake holds it form and doesn't soak through on the foil liners so next time I do this I will just use the foil liners and save the paper ones for baking muffins or brownies.


Once I had the cheesecake mixture made up I used my large scoop to put the mixture on the Nilla wafers.  As you can see from the picture, one scoop was plenty to fill each liner.  The other thing I did was put those liners on a cookie sheet rather than in my mini muffin pans because it was easier and less trouble than trying to pull out full cups out of the pans.  

Since I was running short on time the day I was making these little mini cheesecakes, I decided to speed up the process of "firming" the cheesecake up by sticking the cookie sheets with the mini cakes in the freezer for about an hour. In doing the "firming" in the freezer it kept the Nilla wafers from going mushy.  I ended up with a crisp crust.  A word of warning....if you stick them in the fridge afterwards you will find that the Nilla wafers will soften and you will have soft crust.  So it is your choice as to which type of crust you would like to have with your cheesecake. 

I left them plain and did not add any garnish to them. I placed eight of them on a paper plate and then into a ziploc bag(something disposable so I did not have to worry about getting a container back from them) to take with the meal for this couple.  

I will be making these again because they were quick and easy to put together. They are small enough for little hands to handle yet big enough for adults to get a couple bites of a sweet, delectable dessert.  Also having them as mini cheesecakes rather than one big one allows for several different garnishes to be put on them.  This dessert would be great to make up plain for gatherings and serve several garnishes on the side for guests to choose their favorite. 

Here is the recipe:

1 can sweetened condensed milk
8 oz. package cream cheese
1/3 cup lemon juice
1 tsp. vanilla
1 can of pie filling (cherry, blueberry...)
1 graham cracker crumb pie crust or Nilla Wafers

Beat cream cheese until light and fluffy. Gradually add sweetened condensed milk. Stir in lemon juice. Pour into pie crust. Refrigerate until firm and then add pie filling on top if desired. Can use fresh fruit(strawberries, blueberries are best) for garnish as well.

This post is linked at: 

• Tasty Tuesday at Balancing Beauty and Bedlam!
• Tempt My Tummy Tuesday over at Blessed with Grace!
• Kitchen tip Tuesday, over at Tammy's Recipes!
  
• I am Blissfully Domestic at Blissfully Domestic!
  
• Fearless Fridays at Home Ec 101!
• Friday Feasts at Mom Trends!

Being Real with a Recipe Flop!

The ladies over at Home Ec 101 are starting a new blog meme called Fearless Fridays.  It is going along with their new series, "Kitchen Bravery", basically it is a meme to brag about your successes and failures in the kitchen.

I decided to play along today and humbly brag about a failure that I had in the kitchen this past week!  I am not sure what exactly went wrong with my main course meal on Monday night but to have only one or two people out of seven tolerate the meal means something was not right.

A little background...I am working at trying at least one recipe a week because I really need to get out of the rut of the same meals over and over again. In taking inventory of my freezer, I found that I had several packages of already browned ground beef and they were in need of getting used up.  So I did some recipe searches to find some ground beef recipes that did not use a tomato based sauce. 

I came across this Hobo Casserole over at Recipezaar that looked yummy and definitely fell into the new recipe category.  I decided to give it a try.  The only substitutions I did was using dry minced onion instead of fresh onion and garlic powder for the minced garlic.  I also made up some beef broth using water and bouillon for some of the milk. Everything else I used as according to the recipe. Here is how I put it together...

Hobo Casserole

2 lbs ground beef, browned (thawed from freezer)

8  potatoes, peeled, cubed and cooked

3 large carrots, peeled, diced, and cooked

2 tsp. garlic powder*

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

1 can 2% milk (used the soup can)

2 tbsp. minced onion*

4 tsp. Worcestershire sauce*

a few shakes of salt and pepper

1 beef bouillon in 1 cup of water for beef broth

Cook the potatoes and carrots on the stove until tender. While the potatoes and carrots are cooking, combine soup, spices, milk, broth and meat together in a separate bowl.   Once the potatoes and carrots are done, mix into the meat mixture.  Pour into your baking dish and cook at 350° for 30-40 minutes until heated through.

*spice amounts are approximate

The Results: It was fairly easy to put together. It smelled and looked appetizing. However, the texture was mushy, that it was hard not to have my(and hubby) gag reflex engage while I was eating it.  It was not very flavorful and what flavor there was seemed more of a bitter, vinegary taste, maybe because I did not measure out the spices or worcestershire sauce.   It also came out more like a stew/soup in consistency rather than casserole-y. 

Now I have a TON of it as leftover and not even sure if I can salvage it into a better dish as a "leftover makeover" or if I just need to bite the bullet and trash it.  

What do you think??  What could I have done differently? Do you think I should trash it or is there a way of salvaging it?  

This post is linked at: 

• Fearless Fridays at Home Ec 101!