Tag Archives: dinner

Sooo…what was for Christmas dinner? Part 1

27 Dec
Roasted pork chops, sauteed green beans, butternut squash, twice baked potatoes, applesauce

Here's my plate, just before I dug in!

Yesterday’s post showed our pretty ordinary Christmas breakfast, which despite the simplicity of it, we love it. I noted however, that our dinner is more elaborate since we do host Christmas.

We tend to be creatures of habit, so we make the same thing more or less, every single year: Pork roast with homemade applesauce, twice baked potatoes, sauteed green beans and this year my cousin Val made butternut squash with apples as well (one of my favorite vegetables ever, by the way.)

This meal is actually relatively easy to prepare because you can do a lot of it ahead of time. You can use this meal for any occasion, not just Christmas, but it’s definitely our go-to meal for Christmas Day.

Homemade applesauce

Six pounds of apples is a lot to peel, and I'm always amazed at how much this reduces once it's done. It looks like less than it is, once the apples are cooked.

The day before, I make the homemade applesauce using six pounds of apples.

You can find the recipe for the applesauce on my Hanukkah post here.

Homemade applesauce, cooked.

Here's how it looks all cooked.

Once the applesauce is cooked, I put it into the serving bowl for the next day, and put it into the fridge, cinnamon stick and all. Just needs to be reheated in the microwave before dinner.

Homemade Applesauce

Ready to serve on Christmas Day.

Another big part of the dinner which can be prepped ahead of time, is the twice baked potatoes. Don does those.

Tomorrow, I will share that recipe and show the steps to get you from a bag of potatoes to the yummy side dish that we love so much. And, as an added bonus, the recipe for Twice Baked Potatoes gives you a ready-made appetizer as well: Potato Skins. You’ll see how that happens when you read tomorrow’s post.

Here we are, ready to eat our Christmas Dinner. Missing from the photo: Don, who's taking the picture so that I can be in it, for once!

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Bonus Recipe for your Monday: Beer Bread to go with your soup

28 Nov

I just finished posting a delicious Butternut Squash Soup recipe and in the post I mentioned that I often serve the soup with a homemade Beer Bread. The recipe for the bread is super easy so I thought I’d post that too, so that you’d have both in one day in case you decide to try the soup.

BEER BREAD

INGREDIENTS

3 cups self-rising flour

1/4 cup sugar

12 oz. beer (and yes if you use a crazy flavor, like blueberry beer for example, your bread will have a flavor as well.)

1/4 cup melted butter

DIRECTIONS

Mix flour, sugar and beer, pour into greased loaf pan.

Pour melted butter over top.

Bake at 350 degrees for one hour. Cool 15 minutes.

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Spaghetti WHAT??

14 Oct

Very rarely do I get a meal where all three kids give it a thumbs up. This one got three thumbs up!

I love a good meal as much as the next person. Food is right up there on my list of favorite things. However, last year when I started seeing articles about, recipes for and photos of the newest food rage brought on by the iCarly TV show, I thought, “No way. I’d never eat that.” Well, last night, I did.

Last night we had Spaghetti Tacos for dinner. You know what? I liked them! I even had seconds. All the kids had seconds. It was the craziest thing, but it was good!

It all started last week when my brother-in-law Dave, announced on Facebook that they’d had Spaghetti Tacos for dinner. When I asked him more about it, he said they were good, and super easy to make. You just needed spaghetti, meatballs, sauce and cheese, plus taco shells.

Coincidentally I already had leftover spaghetti in the fridge. I had a bag of meatballs in the freezer, although not homemade, they’d do for this trial of a new recipe. I grabbed some taco shells at the store on my way home last night and we were set. I actually had to get both hard and soft tacos because my youngest daughter doesn’t love the hard ones. My husband cooked up the leftover spaghetti with extra sauce and the meatballs on the stove in a frying pan, questioning me the entire time about what it was that we were making, and why. He made a big Ceasar Salad to go with it, and we sat down to eat.

Elizabeth sat down and announced, "My two favorite meals: tacos and spaghetti, all in one!" and took a big bite.

Believe it or not, the Spaghetti Tacos were a big hit! All of my kids had two, I think Elizabeth actually had three. I had two. Alex liked hers in the soft taco shells, and Elizabeth had two hard and one soft, pronouncing all of them delicious.

The only naysayer was my husband Don, who refused to try any at all. He had a chicken Ceasar Salad with the leftover chicken from another night.

All in all, I’d say Spaghetti Tacos were fast, easy, delicious and a great way to use up a leftover pasta dinner.

According to Alex, soft tacos work just as well and taste just as good!

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Saying Goodbye to Summer

2 Oct

Today is October 1, and this week the weather is supposed to turn into typical fall weather. We’re in the midst of work and school routines with soccer, dance and Girl Scouts in there too. As I look around my house, I see the typical transitional things happening, like the basket of bathing suits in the hallway, leaving the bedroom closet to make way for cooler-weather wear and the laundry basket of tank tops and sleeveless dresses ready to go up into the attic.

I realized today though, it was time to take down our Summer Vacation sign. I hated to see it go.

Our Summer Vacation sign ended up being so much more than I originally intended it to be!

On the last day of school in June, my youngest daughter, Alex, was still a half-day kindergartener. I wanted her return home on the last day to be special, just like I do for her sisters at the end of the full day. I wracked my brain for something special for her to do while we waited for all of them to be together at the end of the day for the full-fledged celebration. I came up with an idea: I would write out a banner for her to color and we’d hang it up to surprise her sisters when they got home.

At first I just wrote out Happy Summer Vacation and left it at that. Then I decided that she and I would think of all the things we like to do over the summer and I’d write them all over the banner to fill it up a bit more. So that’s what we did and it was a nice way to spend the afternoon together.

We put the sign up on the wall and I kind of thought that once the other girls got home and the banner had been seen, that would be it. Little did I know how big a part the Summer Vacation banner would play into our summer and how sad I’d be today when I finally took it down.

We began marking the banner with little star stickers each time we did one of the things on there and it became a sort of bucket list. The girls would take turns placing the stars. They also began adding things that either I’d forgotten or things we were adding to our summer plans. People would see our sign and talk about it when they visited, the kids would share with them the different summer experiences they’d had. One cousin was so happy to see themselves listed on the banner since we visit them at the end of each summer, and our other cousins were thrilled to be on there as well, since they visit us each summer.

We found too, that even though there were things we thought we’d do, they didn’t all get done, but at the end of the summer we discussed how although we’d missed some of the things on our list, other things replaced them that were just as good, or better.

In the end, this was one of our best summers ever. Our kids are at great ages to be going places, doing things, and enjoying time together. In addition to all of the “usuals,” we got a dog, we went camping; we really did do some extra-special things this summer.

I’m so glad that I have this sign, which I’ll keep in our memory box, so that we can one day look back at our Summer Vacation 2011 banner and remember it all.

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