My first of two posts for Motts is up!
I’m excited to announce that I have a new post up on SheKnows.com!
The post is for Mott’s juices and I hope you’ll check it out!
You can view the post by visiting this link.
In the post I will talk about the after school snack I made and served with Mott’s juice. Having all the right tools and ingredients on hand made it easy to make this after school snack!
You will also be able to view this post on the See My Sponsored Posts page.
Enjoy!
Have you seen it yet? Dairy Pure Milk has a great new Worry-Free flip cap!
Do you ever have one of those “Why didn’t I think of that,” moments when you see something new on TV? I know I do!
I recently had one of those moments when I saw the television commercial for Dairy Pure’s new “Worry-Free” flip cap. I can’t tell you how many times our milk caps have gotten lost, accidentally thrown in the trash, or gone flying on to the floor upon being opened. In the past, I’ve had to put plastic wrap over our milk cover with an elastic band or use an old cover, or put all the milk into a pitcher, all to solve our milk cap problems.
Clearly, I’m not the only one whose household has had these types of milk cap worries, because Dairy Pure Milk recently introduced their new Worry-Free flip cap, which now keeps the cap ON the milk, where it’s supposed to be.
You can say it, I know you want to: “Why didn’t *I* think of that?”
Exactly.
Since we’re big smoothie people, especially now that the warmer weather is coming, I was excited to try out Dairy Pure milk and the great new worry-free cap, for a new smoothie recipe, which I’ll share below. I also enjoy using locally produced products and Dairy Pure is made by Garelick Farms in Franklin, Massachusetts, which is the town where both my husband I used to work.
Five important points!
When I tried out the Dairy Pure Milk, I made note of their Five Point Purity Checklist, which states the following:
*Our Farmers pledge NO artificial growth hormones
*We test our milk for antibiotics
*Continuously quality tested to ensure purity
*Only from cows fed a nutritious diet
*Cold-shipped fresh from your trusted dairy within hours
Those five points are all important, and I was pleased to know that Garelick takes those things seriously.
But it’s the cap….I love that cap! My days of plastic wrap, elastic bands and pitchers are a gone with the Worry-Free cap.
Before I share my smoothie recipe with you, I wanted to also pass along the Dairy Pure Recipe page in case you’d like to find even more recipe inspiration using Dairy Pure Milk!
And remember: Be sure to read to the end of this blog post, as I’ll be putting my instructions there for a Dairy Pure special giveaway!
Dairy Pure Milk with a Worry-Free cap is an excellent choice for your own smoothie concoctions!
Now…for my recipe! I often post smoothie recipes for my Fun Friday posts, and since it’s Friday, I thought a new smoothie recipe would pair well with my Dairy Pure Milk! I recently received a gift from my friend Amy: a jar of crunchy cookie butter!! She knew that I’d given up my favorite hazelnut spread for Lent, and she thought this delicious crunchy cookie butter would help me through the 40 days. She’s right! The jar is almost empty! I’ve been eating it with a spoon, but I thought I’d try it, along with the milk, in a smoothie and it was a.m.a.z.i.n.g!!
Here’s the recipe that I created last week:
Throw it all in a blender and you’re ready to go!
COOKIE BUTTER & BANANA SMOOTHIE
32 oz. of milk (You can use your choice of skim, low fat or whole milk, We used skim.)
Two frozen bananas
1/4 to 1/2 cup crunchy cookie butter
Three scoops fat free vanilla frozen yogurt
Whipped cream (optional)
Place all your ingredients into your blender or smoothie maker and blend it up! So simple! You can choose to add a little whipped cream to your smoothie if you’d like!
And now….the moment you’ve been waiting for! The Dairy Pure milk GIVEAWAY!
I know that if you’re like me, keeping your cold groceries cold between the store and home is important! Therefore, I’d love to give TWO READERS a special insulated, re-usable, handled shopping tote bag from Dairy Pure Milk! You can use it to keep all your cold foods cold when you’re en-route from store to home. Now you can shop for all of your smoothie ingredients: milk, fruits and frozen yogurts and keep them all cold so that when you get home and unpack, your ingredients will be ready for blending!
Do you want one? Leave a comment on my blog! What would *you* make with Dairy Pure Milk?
Here’s how to enter for a chance at the giveaway:
Leave me a comment here on my blog, telling me something yummy you would make with Dairy Pure milk!
That’s it! Easy peasy! I will take all of the responses and randomly draw two names for the totes. Be sure to check back so that you know if you’ve won!
I will run this giveaway for ONE WEEK, until Friday, April 4th, at which point I will announce the winners on the blog and on Facebook.
Good luck!!
**This is a sponsored post. I was compensated for this post.
However, all of the thoughts, and opinions I have expressed here are my own.**
I loved the flavor in this stir fry!
You might think to yourself that if you’ve had one stir fry, you’ve had them all. How different could they possibly be?
I think it depends on what your ingredients are. There are so many different flavors out there, whether it’s the sauces you throw in or the ingredients and vegetables that you include.
Recently I had so many veggies left in my fridge that I didn’t want to go to waste, I decided to do a stir fry. I wanted to try a new one though, just to see what was out there. I also knew that besides the veggies I wanted to utilize, I also wanted the stir fry to include both chicken and shrimp, since I have kids who like one or the other, but not both.
I Googled “shrimp and chicken stir fry” and chose this one from http://hipfoodiemom.com and I really loved it! I had everything the recipe called for except mushrooms and snap peas, but I also had zucchini so I threw that in instead. It seemed reminiscent to me of a “Dump Cake” recipe I once read, where you literally just dump all the ingredients in together. That’s what I love about stir fry recipes, you can really throw in a lot of different things.
I think that the difference between this recipe and some of the ones I’ve tried in the past are the sesame oil and the balsamic vinegar. Those are new to any recipe I’ve tried before.
Here is the recipe as Hip Foodie Mom has it on her site. I hope you’ll pay her a visit!
It was the unique combination of sauces that made this recipe so good!
Author: Hip Foodie Mom
This was a fabulous addition to our ever-growing list of gourmet pizzas!
A couple of weeks back, I had a typical Facebook messaging exchange with my friend Gina. It consisted of the usual commiserating about the fact that neither of us knew what to make for dinner that week. I happened to mention that I did have taco meat already cooked up and frozen, but that I didn’t necessarily want to have tacos again.
Her suggestion: Taco Pizza.
“Ohhhh…..I said, I like that idea!”
Lucky for us, there’s a bakery right down the street that sells fresh dough
If you love Tacos, you’ll love trying out Gina’s Taco Pizza!
by the pound, 24 hours a day for just a little over a dollar a bag.
That’s right, 24 hours a day. If I wanted to go at midnight to get a bag of dough, slice of pizza or a cookie, I could. I don’t, but it’s nice to know the option is there.
So last week I got my dough (during daylight hours) at the bakery and came home to get ready for our pizza dinner. We had a regular work day combined with a pre-dinner meeting and Dance for one of the girls. Pizza for dinner was the perfect answer to our need for quick, easy and delicious.
I’d actually gotten three bags of dough. We were having a ham and pineapple pizza, a meatball, cheese and sauce pizza, and our newest addition: Taco Pizza, thanks to Gina.
Coincidentally, we were also having furniture delivered the next morning between the hours of 6:30 am and 9:30 am in time for us to be out the door for work and school, but right smack-dab in the middle of lunch preparations. Having pizza for dinner the night before would allow me to bag up slices of whatever flavors anyone wanted for lunch the next day, after dinner.
Easy-peasy. It took a lot of advanced planning to make the night and next morning go off without a hitch, but it was healthier than ordering take-out that night or school lunch the next day, and much tastier too!
For this pizza, the only thing I’d do differently the next time, is crush up my tortilla chips and bake them right in there with the meat, underneath the cheese. This first time that we tried out the recipe, we crushed them up and added them on top. I found them hard to eat, but in our Taco Bake recipe we put them right inside, and I think I’d enjoy them more that way on the pizza than on top.
Otherwise, this is so easy!
Spread out your pizza dough, add your taco meat on top, and throw on some crushed tortilla chips if you’d like to, before adding your cheese. We used cheddar cheese on ours because of the nature of the pizza, rather than mozzarella.
Once your pizza is cooked, it’s up to you what toppings you’d like to add, anything you’d normally add to a taco.
Here are some suggestions:
Sour cream
Avocado
Olives
Tomatoes
Lettuce
Be sure to check out my newest post for Jimmy Dean!
I’m excited to share that my second post for Jimmy Dean Sausage Crumbles is now live on SheKnows.com! I hope you’ll check it out by clicking on this link.
Since completing the posts for Jimmy Dean, we’ve been finding all kinds of great ways to incorporate them into our recipes. We’ve used them in eggs and pasta, among other things. They’re a very versatile and convenient ingredient and I like to have them on hand.
Enjoy my post at SheKnows, and give Jimmy Dean sausage crumbles a try!
A dish from my past! Delicious memories!
Every so often I come across a recipe that reminds me of my childhood because it’s a recipe from my mom and I grew up eating it. Today’s recipe is one of those. I came across it when I was looking for a different recipe. It’s another one that although I grew up eating it, my kids had never had it, meaning it’s been “that long” since I’ve made it.
I like this recipe because it’s adaptable. You can fill the center of the pancake as is, or you can add in or take out ingredients or change them all together to suit your needs. We were out of mushrooms this time around so we didn’t use them even though the recipe calls for them. There are lots of combinations that would be great in the center of this pancake and it’s great for a variety of taste buds!
I love kitchen science. The kids’ eyes pop when they see how big this rises in the oven.
This recipe is a little long, but I encourage you to give it a try anyway. It’s a fun recipe to watch bake in the oven because it puffs up quite a bit and it’s neat to show the kids the difference before and after. We had it for dinner, but it’d also be great for a brunch or even for a breakfast dish.
Enjoy!
HAM AND SPINACH PUFF PANCAKE
INGREDIENTS
PANCAKE:
1/4 cup butter (I used I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter)
2/3 cup flour
3/4 cup milk (I used Skim)
2 eggs
1/2 tsp. salt
We filled our puff pancake with ham and spinach. What would you put in yours?
FILLING:
3 tsp. butter
2 cups (8 oz) sliced fresh mushrooms (this time around I didn’t have any so they’re not pictured)
1/2 lb. cooked and cubed to 1/2″ ham
10 oz. package chopped, frozen spinach thawed and well drained
1 1/2 cups (6 oz) shredded cheddar cheese ( I used very little cheese due to our dietary restrictions, and this time I used reduced fat provolone cheese.)
DIRECTIONS
Heat oven to 400 degrees.
In a 9″ glass pie plate melt 1/4 cup of butter in oven (2-4 minutes).
Simple ingredients make this pancake easy to prepare.
In large bowl combine milk, flour, eggs and salt.
Using wire whisk or rotary beater, beat until smooth (2-3 minutes).
Pour batter onto pie plate. Bake 20-25 minutes or until golden brown.
Meanwhile, in 10″ skillet, melt 3 tsp. butter. Stir in mushrooms, cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally until mushrooms are soft (5-7 minutes).
Stir in ham and spinach. Continue cooking until heated (3-4 minutes).
Stir in one cup of cheese.
Spoon filling into center of hot pancake.
Sprinkle with 1/2 cup of cheese. Heat until melted and serve.
I love when books contain recipes that go along with the story. This was a great one!
My kids and I are huge readers, and when it comes to history, all five of us, my husband included, are big fans. We all love to cook and bake, so when my daughter found a historical fiction book about the life and times of a girl during World War II, she was excited to read it.
“My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck” is part of the Dear America series of books.
At the end of the book there was a recipe for War Cake, something that was spoken about throughout the story.
She was so excited! We had to make it.
I looked at the ingredients and we had them all. Well, we had almost all of them. The recipe called for walnuts and I don’t love them so we don’t often have them here.
I came up with a great substitution though: chocolate chips! Everything goes well with chocolate chips.
This was an excellent book and the recipe inside was a bonus!
We decided that on Sunday afternoon this would be a great recipe for her to make. Looking at it further, I realized that it was ultimately pretty healthy too, as far as cakes and desserts go.
Due to the fact that ingredients were hard to come by during World War II, this cake is made with brown sugar rather than white, no eggs, no milk, and only a little butter. My daughter learned in the story that white sugar was used to make gunpowder during the war and therefore, was almost impossible to come by. Although the character in the story is fiction, the events are based on true historical events during WWII and are based on the author, Mary Pope Osborne’s own parents’ experiences as well. Mary Pope Osborne is also the author of the popular Magic Treehouse series of books.
I know that my daughter will be returning this book to the library this weekend during our weekly Saturday visit and she’ll be on the lookout for another Dear America story to read, since she devoured this one.
Almost literally.
Until then, here’s the recipe for Mary Pope Osborne’s War Cake.
Enjoy!
War Cake
By Mary Pope Osborne
INGREDIENTS
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
1 cup raisins
2 T. margarine (I used I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1 and 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 c. chopped walnuts (I used chocolate chips instead)
DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour an 8×4″ baking pan (we used 8×8).
Place the brown sugar, water, raisins, margarine, cinnamon, and cloves in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil.
Turn down heat and cook gently for 5 minutes.
Remove from heat and let cool until mixture is lukewarm.
Sift together flour, salt, baking powder and baking soda.
Add flour mixture to the cooled sugar mixture, beating until the batter is smooth.
Stir in the walnuts (or if desired, chocolate chips).
Spread evenly in the baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Let cool in the pan 10 minutes, then turn onto a rack to cool completely.
This made for an awesome Sunday night supper!
This past weekend was a busy one. We were all over the place on Saturday, and on Sunday it was much the same. It was all good, just busy.
By the time dinnertime planning time came around on Sunday afternoon, I was stumped and had to run out the door onto the next “thing” before I could help with the decision making.
As I was standing outside in the freezing cold that afternoon, helping to man my daughter’s Girl Scout cookie sale at the local grocery store, I got a text from my husband: Paninis for dinner.
YUM!!
I was so excited! We have a panini maker but I never, ever think to use it. It’s stored neatly in the box it came in, with the booklets of recipes tucked neatly inside, all in a closet in our hallway.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Apparently, the decision was a group decision made by Don and the remaining kids at home. A menu of paninis, roasted red potatoes, cole slaw (not seen on my plate because I’m not a fan), and sauteed zucchini was created and the specific types of paninis were requested.
We could have any of the ingredients on our sandwiches, or all of them.
The ingredients for the sandwiches were also decided upon together: bbq chicken, tomatoes, bacon and cheese. We could have any or all of those ingredients in our sandwiches, allowing everyone to tailor their dinner to their liking.
It was SO good. So, so good!
There were even some halves of sandwiches leftover, so they became lunch this week. Don reported his was even better the second time around!
Although we chose chicken, bacon, cheese and tomato for our panini ingredients, you can have virtually anything in yours! A list of suggested recipes were given to us as part of our gift when we received our panini maker, and a guide came with the maker itself.
Here’s a list of some suggested panini recipes for you to try. Be sure to read to the end!!
Portobello Panini
Panini with Prosciutto, Roasted Pepper and Mozzarella
Roast Turkey Panini with Pesto, Roasted Red Peppers and Fontina
Grilled Prosciutto, Soppressata, and Mozzarella Panini
Fresh Eggplant and Roasted Red Pepper Panini
Pesto Chicken Panini
Grilled Eggplant Panini
Grilled Marinated Artichoke Heart, Ham and Provolone Panini
Panini Caprese
Grilled Chicken and Arugula Panini
Mediterranean Tuna Melt
Salami, Sun-dried Tomato, Basil Panini
Ham, Chestnut Honey Mustard and Gouda Panini
Turkey and Cranberry Panini
Roasted Eggplant, Sweet Pepper, Feta and Fresh Spinach Painini
Flank Steak, Vidalia Onion, Porcini and Fontina Panini
Grilled Sausage, Peronata and Herbed Goat Cheese Panini
Sweet Dolci Chocolate Panini
Dolci di Latte Caramel Sauce and Apple Panini
Ricotta and Preserved Orange Panini on Raisin Bread
These were a fun, different kind of dinner! Of course, they’d be great for breakfast too!
I’m a football widow.
Not all the time, not all season long, which is FOREVER long, but towards the end, during the playoffs and the Superbowl itself.
I can’t fault my husband in any way. He loves the sport, but even so, he’ll record a game and watch it later on so that he’s available for our family’s needs.
So, during playoffs and the Superbowl itself, it’s only fair that he be able to hang out with his friends and watch the game.
That leaves the girls and I with a few meals that are just for us, and sometimes I try to do something fun. Sometimes I’m just totally out of ideas.
Today’s meal is one of the totally out of ideas meals. It was a Sunday night playoff game and I had no idea what to cook when I got home that night with the kids. We’d been running errands, it was evening, it was winter, it was dark, and it was really any other excuse I can come up with not to want to make dinner.
But, then I remembered that a friend had sent me a fun looking recipe to try, some pancake cups, which she thought looked right about my style. She was right! Except they were breakfast, not dinner. But really, does it matter? Nope! Not in my house it doesn’t.
So on that night (the cold, winter, dark night where I didn’t want to make dinner) I made breakfast instead, trying out these cute little pancake cups, which I have fondly renamed Upside Down Pancakes, because they are made in muffin tins, and when I cooked them there was a better well for my fruit compote when I turned them upside down than there was when I left them right-side up.
And so, with a recipe from “Racing and Saving Mama,” sent to me by my friend Gina, here are the Upside Down Pancakes for your next brunch, or dinner! I have put any modifications I may have made, in parentheses.
When I flipped my pancakes over after taking them out, they had a great well for toppings!
UPSIDE DOWN PANCAKES
INGREDIENTS
1 cup milk (we use skim)
6 eggs
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp orange zest -optional- (I didn’t use it)
1/4 cup butter (I use I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter) melted
(I also added in some Jimmy Dean Turkey Sausage Crumbles to half of my tins.)
The directions state to serve the pancakes with your favorite toppings so I created an apple-cranberry compote and served with whipped cream. YUM!
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Blend first six ingredients in a blender. (I used a hand blender to blend them.)
Be careful to see that any flour clumps are well-blended.
Blend in butter a little at a time in order to temper the eggs.
Grease muffin tins well and distribute the batter evenly between the 24 tins (I got 12 but I think my tins are larger than hers.)
The author of the recipe recommends using 1/4 cup of batter in each tin.
Bake for 15 minutes until puffy and golden on top.
Valentine’s M&Ms made these cookies extra special!
It’s a Friday, and it’s Valentine’s Day! I love when special days fall on a Friday or a weekend day. It makes them all the more enjoyable.
I got a sweet treat myself this week, when my kids who give out Valentine’s Day cards both decided to hand make them and to do it with absolutely no direction from me. For years we made them together and the last couple of years I’ve had to buy them. I just couldn’t pull it all off. It warmed my heart to come home from a meeting earlier this week and see that they were making them.
In addition to Valentine’s Day, we’ve also had a snow day this week, which has provided an extra opportunity for Valentine’s treats, and school vacation is coming up next week, which even though we don’t go anywhere special, is still a fun week off.
Earlier this week, we were having a friend over for one of the kids after school so I decided that in between my morning and afternoon work schedules, I’d make a quick little Valentine’s treat to greet them when they got home.
It called for only three ingredients and one of them was Valentine’s- themed M&Ms. The recipe didn’t use the entire bag, so I used them instead of chocolate chips in the cookies you see above when we had the snow day, and that’ll make a great treat today in the kids’ lunchboxes.
The after school treat was a three ingredient Skinny Dark Kisses treat which a friend posted on Facebook, shared from the Skinny Kitchen site. I can tell it’s going to be a site that I visit often! I hope you’ll check it out.
The recipe is shown below, just as they have it on their site. It was easy, other than unwrapping all of the Hershey Kisses, and a word of warning: they say you need to cool them for two hours, or put them in the fridge to speed up that time. I had a 1:30 story to cover, so I made them on my lunch break at 12:30, left in time for my story, and when I came home with the kids after 3, it had been just enough time for them to cool and be ready to eat!
The recipe below makes 25, but I made slightly more than that since I had a bigger tray. I was able to make 45 and I still had half a bag of M&Ms leftover and a quarter of a bag of Hershey Kisses left as well.
A cute Valentine’s treat, you won’t be able to eat just one!
Another word of warning: you can just eat one. They’re slightly addicting!
Prep Time: 15 minutes total (for 25 of them)
Bake Time: 5 minutes
Set Time: 2 hours for chocolate to firm up or 1 hour in refrigerator
Ingredients
25 Special Dark Hershey’s kisses, un-wrapped
25 mini pretzels
25 dark chocolate M&M’s available in bags of Valentine’s Day colors or use a regular bag
Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or foil.
2. Place pretzels on cookiesheet. Top each pretzel with one unwrapped chocolate kiss.
3. Bake 4 to 5 minutes or until chocolate begins to soften, but not melt. Remove from oven; top each with 1 M&M. Be sure to press it down a bit to set into the chocolate kiss.
4. Cool completely. This takes about 2 hours. To cool quickly, refrigerate until chocolate is firm.
Makes 25 total
The Whole bag of Chips 