Peach Cobbler

No clue where my sister found this recipe, but it's really good, and quick. I like fast and easy.

Layer into a 9x13 greased pan, in order:

Peaches - 1 large and 1 small can, with juice

Butter pecan cake mix (just the mix, not the extra ingredients)

1 stick of melted butter

Coconut - however much you like

Pecans or walnuts - however much you like

Bake at 350 for about 40 minutes. (My oven is wishy-washy, so check it at 30.) ;-)


Toss a little flour at your nose so you look industrious.

Granny, Help! My Bread is Terrible!

Typically, junk mail causes me to sigh, roll my eyes, head straight for the closest trash receptacle, maybe even get a blood pressure check...it rarely makes me smile.
There's one catalog, however, that always makes me chuckle.




My Granny was a junk-mail queen. Among her garage sale plastic flowers, Conway Twitty 8-tracks and homemade yarn kittens, we could always find items she purchased from Fingerhut. Trinkets, dust collectors, most of it junk. All Granny. She bought a lot of flowered hand towels, probably from Fingerhut. She cut them in half, crocheted across the top, attached a button so the towel could be looped over a drawer handle, and gave them away as gifts.




Granny was little more than a feather. Barely five feet tall, she probably weighed a hundred pounds on a good day. She struggled with heart disease and several other health concerns, so she didn't have a lot of good days in her last years. She may have been small, but she was anything but weak. She raised nine children. She worked in a diner on Broad Street in St. Louis, Missouri. When she felt well, she was always on the go.

When I was about ten years old, my mother took my younger sister and I, my aunt and her boys, and Granny to a local park. The kids were all playing on the swings and slide. Mom and Aunt Joyce decided to enjoy a trip down the slide as well. Not to be outdone, Granny nimbly climbed the steps and began the trek down the shiny metal. Apparently, Granny had, over the years, forgotten how to gracefully bring yourself to a halt at the bottom of the slide. KERPLUNK!! Into the dust Granny landed, directly on her tailbone, legs out straight in front of her. I can still see the look of complete shock on her face. As soon as her daughters were sure she wasn't badly injured, they did what all good children do when their seventy year old mother falls off a slide...they burst into raucous laughter.

Around this same time, I recall sitting in Doc's Place, an ice cream shop, in Homer, Michigan where I grew up. Granny was relaying to my mother a story that my aunt had shared with her. I do not have a clue what the story was about, but I can remember that it involved how gravity affects a woman's upper body parts. My grandmother, being the proper lady she sometimes was, didn't want to mention this issue in front of my sister and I, but she wanted to make the point to my mother. Sitting at the table across from me, grinning and eating her ice cream, she kept drawing her hand down her chest. "You know, how they...you know...fall...down". I'm not quite sure why she thought that I wouldn't know to what she was referring!

Granny made The. Best. Dinner. Rolls. Ever. THE BEST. Try as we might, no one in the family has ever been able to duplicate the taste of Granny's bread. Countless times, we asked her to write down her recipe. "Oh, you just throw a little of this and a little of that in and stir it all up."

So you can probably sense my frustration when my bread machine malfunctions on Thanksgiving Day and I get this! (Great for having Communion with the family, though!)



Granny has been gone for 21 years. She would love my children. They would love her fuzzy TV with rabbit ears, her crocheted slippers, her bread.




Granny, I miss you.

You'll Like the Taste of Chicken

Savannah and I absolutely LOVE to go to Seasons Coffee Bistro for Saturday morning coffee and cheesecake. If we're there at lunch time, we like the White Chicken Chili. I decided to try my hand at making some at home. If I say so myself, it was quite exquisite. One of the better soups I've made. One thing I don't understand though - why does the back of the bag of beans say to sort and rinse? I have no clue what I'm looking for when I'm sorting, but because I felt like being a sheep today, I did as I was told - I was really hoping for a gold coin, or something. Nothing! Just white beans. I suppose that's a good thing. Most likely why I needed to sort them. On to dinner...

Ingredients:
1/2 pound Northern beans
2 large onions
1 stick butter
1/3 c. flour
1 c. chicken broth
2 12 oz. cans evaporated milk
1 T. Tabasco sauce
1 T. chili powder
1 t. cumin
1 t. salt
1 t. pepper
1 t. garlic powder
Fresh or canned green chili peppers to taste
2 pounds chicken breast (more or less depending on preference)
1.5 c. shredded Monterrey Jack Cheese
8 oz. sour cream
---------
Prepare your beans ahead, or used canned.
I used boneless, skinless chicken breast, bought in bulk.
I cooked probably 10 pounds in the crock pot for several hours in about 3 cups of water, and shredded it.
This will make enough chicken and stock for at least 3 family size soup meals.
Freeze what you don't need for this chili.
I will make chicken and dumplings, and chicken tortilla soup, with what's left.
----

In a skillet (cast iron preferably):
Saute onions in butter
Stir in flour, cook 3 minutes
Stir in broth and milk, bring to boil
then simmer till thickened
Stir in spices
Add beans and peppers
Transfer to crock pot
Add cooked, shredded chicken, cheese, and sour cream
Let simmer for 20 minutes.
Garnish with cilantro, tomatoes, tortilla chips, etc if desired.

Did Anybody Else See the Partridge?

We have some lovely friends that we met courtesy of our local Ron Paul Meetup Group. They live a couple miles outside of town. Last month, their family vacationed while it just so happened to be raspberry season. We fed their 4 dogs and 12 chickens for 2 weeks, in exchange for berries. A very unfair trade, in my estimation! We did very little work, and in return got 9 jars of jam, and a few bags of berries in the freezer. Had I purchased the same amount at our grocery store, they would have probably been chemical-treated, AND cost me over $30!













This is the first time I've made raspberry jam, and I must say, the family was impressed. Mmmmmmmmmm...













So now with this second attempt at canning (What? you don't remember my first attempt? No one died, and as a matter of fact, I just opened the last jar today!) being relatively successful, I'm on a mission to save the world through the miracle of self-preserved foodstuffs! Ok, not the world, but my family will be eating more healthfully.









See this? This tree in our backyard is absolutely loaded with pears. Last year, we got none...count that...zero, zip, NOT ONE! single pear off this very same tree...Why, you ask? Because our backyard was also loaded with squirrels.













It would appear that the squirrels entertained themselves with cable television over the winter, because we haven't seen many around. Or maybe there's something in our trashcans that causes infertility.






Now if we manage to keep the blasted rodents out of the tree for a few more weeks, we should have plenty of pears to can, make jelly, and share with our berry friends.

(And if we could get rid of the mosquitoes, we'd go outside, pick up that bike, and fashion that lumber into the swing set for which it was intended, but that's another story.)

101 Ways to Eat a Chicken

I'm sitting here thinking my "In The Kitchen" section looks like I never cook. In reality, I'm a fairly decent cook of most basic things. I don't get fancy too often. My "A" personality type simply can't stand to take the time to read completely through a recipe before just throwing everything in a bowl and calling it good, then getting really ticked when it doesn't taste the way the picture made it look.

Meijer has chicken breast BOGO this week, so I'm stocking up because everybody in our house likes chicken.

This week, we've already had chicken marinated with Italian dressing and Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing. It was good, but I had to bake it in the oven. I would prefer it on the grill. I've also fixed it with the Italian dressing and a jar of strawberry jam or apricot (my sister's suggestion) preserves. I prefer the strawberry. Fix a box (for us, 2 boxes isn't enough!) of Lower Sodium Chicken Rice-a-Roni. Throw together a quick spinach/strawberry/pecan or walnut salad with the Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing.

The kids all really like chicken covered in bread crumbs, covered with Alfredo sauce and baked for about 25 minutes. Toss some mozzarella cheese on the last 5 minutes of baking, serve with linguine.

At Aldi's or Dollar Tree, you can get Seasoning Grinders. They're cheap and really tasty. (Pick up the Sea Salt grinder at Aldi's. You won't want to use regular table salt after you've tried it, really! We accidentally used the pizza and pasta grinder in scrambled eggs, thinking it was pepper - mmmmmmm...now we use it purposefully on eggs.) Use any of the grinders, or Lipton Dry Onion Soup mix, or a GrillMates spice combined with crushed corn flakes - dip the chicken in a milk/egg mixture, drag through the corn flakes, bake it, eat it, wipe the drool off your chin.

One of my very favorite chicken salads just has shredded chicken breast, mayo, red grapes and pineapple. Put it on a sweeter-type bread or French bread for sandwiches. My boys pick out the fruit - I think they're weird. It's a mutual feeling.

Ok, that's my chicken ideas for the week. Hopefully liver isn't the sale at Meijer next week.

Thinking With My Stomach

Want a quick dinner that everyone (except my niece, who - strangely enough - doesn't like Italian food!!) will scarf down?

Try this - I don't know what it's called - Pasta Slop, maybe?

Shopping list:
1 16 oz. box Penne pasta
1 jar spaghetti sauce (I like Bertolli's Organics)
1 large package of pepperoni (you can toss in some browned hamburger, or chipped ham, maybe a little dirt for extra protein - mushrooms if you like them, green peppers, you name it)
1 can Campbell's Cheddar Cheese soup
2 8 oz. packages of shredded Italian and/or Mozzarella cheese

Cook the pasta, throw it in a bowl with all the other ingredients, mix it up good and flop it all in a baking dish rubbed with olive oil. Bake it for about 1/2 hour at 350, which also happens to be the exact time and temperature you need to bake a 9x13 pan of Betty Crocker brownies with chocolate chips tossed on the top. Steam some broccoli for nutrition's sake, and call it a day.

For a slightly more elegant ending, make
Peanut Butter Mocha Cheesecake

Shopping list:
Chocolate Cookie Crumb Crust
1 8 oz package cream cheese
1/2 c. peanut butter
2 T. Powdered Mocha-flavored coffee (I like General Foods International Suisse, but hot chocolate would be fine, too - I just like coffee any way I can get it!)
1 t. vanilla
1 tub of chocolate Cool-Whip

If you are REALLY into the chocolate thing, spread some Hot Fudge sauce on the crust before proceeding. If you add a sliced banana at this point, it makes this dessert a healthy choice.

Mix everything but the Cool-Whip together until it's creamy (add a few drops of milk if it's too thick) then fold in the Cool-Whip and plop it all in the crust, be patient while it sets up in the fridge, and remember you have to share with the whole family. Unless you live alone, in which case, call 9-1-1 after 1/2 the cheesecake is gone and they should be there with the emergency insulin by the time you finish off the last bite.