Salad Dressing Goodness....

This is one of my favourite salad dressings. Note that it's the "Lighten Up" kind. That's very important! It tastes kind of vinegary and lemony and wonderful! I especially like it over cut up english cucumbers and grape or cherry tomatoes. Yum! 

BBQ Summer Skewers

 

BBQ Summer Skewers

This is an adaptation from the recipe Sensational Sirloin Kabobs on allrecipes.com that my friend Angela told me about. It's soooo good! Below is my variation based on what our family prefers.

INGREDIENTS:

1/4 cup soya sauce

3 tablespoons light brown sugar

3 tablespoons distilled white vinegar

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon seasoned salt

4 fluid ounces Sprite or 7Up

2 lbs beef sirloin stead cut in 1 1/2 inch cubes

1 green bell peper

1 red bell pepper

1 yellow bell pepper

10 - 12 mushrooms, whole

1 zucchini

DIRECTIONS:

In a medium bow, mix soy sauce, light brown sugar, distilled white vinegar, garlic powder, seasoned salt, and Sprite. Reserve about 1/2 cup of marinade for basting. Place steak in a large resealable plastic bag. Cover with the remaining marinade and seal. Refrigerate overnight. 

Preheat grill. Thread steak, peppers, mushrooms and zucchini onto skewers in any order you'd like. 

Cook skewers on the grill for 10 minutes or till desired doneness. Baste frequently with reserved marinade as they cook.

NOTES:

* You can use any vegetables you'd like. Choose what your family prefers.

* We like our bell peppers undercooked so they remain crunchy. If you prefer yours much softer then you can cook you peppers in boiling water for roughly a minute first before putting them on the skewers.

Enjoy and Happy 4th of July to all my American friends!

Cupcakes....

I made these last week for an Etsy Craft Party I was attending. I am in love with these cupcake liners. They're from the wonderful shop HeyYoYo on Etsy. They're thicker than most I've used so they keep their shape and don't become nearly as transparent after they're cooked. Yay!

Happy Weekend! 

Please forgive me? I have chocolate!

 

 I have neglected this blog soooo badly! I have in all honesty not tried a new recipe since March. Bad huh?! So far I'm failing miserably at my challenge. This blog may be taking on a different life in hopes of at least getting updated. We'll see. In the meantime I'm going to bribe you to still like me by giving you a link to the most amazing looking dessert. Holy Wow! It's called The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie n' Oreo Fudge Brownie Bar and it can be found on the fun blog Kevin & Amanda. Enjoy!

 

Life is a Cookie Bowl!

 

I've been very bad at keeping up with this blog. Not a great way to start out. I neglected to factor in life when starting this challenge. Life has been busy the last few weeks. Just too much going on all at once. I have still managed to get dinners on the table but not new ones that's for sure! So I apologize and while I get back on track I'll post some foodie eye candy for you to enjoy instead starting with this amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bowl recipe I found on the blog Michael Ruhlman via Pinterest. Yum!

Honey & Soy Baked Chicken Thighs - New Recipe #4

This was so yummy I may have had 4 thighs just myself....but I did have to share with my daughter so it was probably more like 3.5 which is so much more respectable!

Ingredients!

This weeks recipe comes from Tidy Mom (I'm sort of lovin' this blog) but more specifically Amy from She Wears Many Hats who guest posted this recipe on Tidy Mom. This recipe is super easy and it turned out so yummy that I wouldn't change a thing except the cooking time but that's because in the 6 short weeks that we've lived in our new house I have discovered quickly that our oven cooks hot!!! Wow! At anyrate I have a cold and words are not coming easily to me today so without futher ado I give you....

Honey & Soy Baked Chicken Thighs (recipe straight from She Wears Many Hats via Tidy Mom)

Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 5 tablespoons honey
• 4 cloves of garlic; minced (or substitute 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
• 3 pounds (approximately) chicken thighs (or preferred chicken meat)
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

- Preheat oven to 425°F.

- Mix first 6 ingredients together in a large plastic zip-top storage bag. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the chicken to plastic bag making sure to coat each piece.

- Place chicken in baking dish along with sauce/marinade or leave in large plastic bag to marinate in the refrigerator.

- When ready to cook, in a baking dish, bake chicken in a 425° oven for 25 minutes with the skin side up. Turn the chicken and cook another 15 minutes. Then turn the chicken again to skin side up and finish cooking for another 10 minutes to crisp up the skin. Cook until internal temperature of chicken reads 165°F.  Note: I would have liked the chicken to be a tiny bit crispier but that was my ovens fault not the recipe. My oven cooked this chicken so fast I didn't have time for the last 10 minutes with the skin side up. I'll have to modify the cooking time next go round. :)

Chicken taking a delicious bath.

Before!

Quick Fun Fact: I've owned this Corelle baking dish for 10 years and this is the first time I've cooked with it. Yeah.....

After

We ate this with sticky rice and it was soooo good!

Lemon Linguine - New Recipe #3

I think I'm done with recipe books. I'm throwing in the towel. They aren't accountable. They sit on our shelves on in our cupboards laughing at us, knowing that they're filled with terrible recipes and one day we'll try one and there won't be any retaliation towards them. I mean yes we could spill water on them or throw them in the fire but are we really going to do that, no. I think I'm going to stick to blogs. Blogs are accountable. When someone posts about a recipe they know that at any given time a reader can post a comment about their love or hate of said recipe. I mean yes everyone is different and we all have different tastes and really what are the chances that someone is going to rage on you for posting a recipe they didn't like but still, it could happen! Blogs are way more accountable than recipe books.....that's what I think anyway.

Ingredients

So why the long winded rant at the beginning of this post? Well this weeks recipe did not turn out so good. I got it from a recipe book in my cupboard. I don't even know where the recipe book came from but it has a few yummy sounding recipes in it so I thought I'd give one a try. Did I mention already that it did not turn out so good? The pasta ended up having this weird texture/coating to it and the taste was way too lemon heavy. Still I do think it could be good but perhaps with a lot of tweaking that I'm just not capable of doing. Here it is none the less.....try at your own risk!

Pasta before sauce....looks good huh? Don't be fooled!

Lemon Linguine

8 oz. (250g) linguine, cooked and drained

1 tbsp. (15ml) olive oil

2 tbsp. (25ml) chopped fresh parsley

1 tsp. (5ml) grated lemon peel

1/2 tsp. (2ml) freshly ground pepper

3/4 cup (175ml) chicken stock

2 tbsp. (25ml) fresh lemon juice

2 tsp. (10ml) cornstarch

1/4 tsp. (1ml) salt

Dash (dash, haha) nutmeg

2 tbsp. (25ml) grated Parmesan cheese

Combine cooked linguine with oil, parsley, lemon peel and pepper. Meanwhile, combine next 5 ingredients (stock through nutmeg) in saucepan (this is the part where I think everything went wrong but maybe not....). Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat; simmer until thickened, about 2 minutes. Toss linguine with sauce and parmesan. Serve immediately. Serves 4 as a side dish.

I added shrimp to ours and I'm so glad I did as it was the only yummy part! I love shrimp. I defrosted some frozen shrimp and then warmed them up with some butter in a frying pan then added them to the pasta at the same time I added the sauce.

The lemon lime Koolaid we had with dinner was super yum! Good old Koolaid, hard to screw that up!