Chicken Roll Ups

The other night I was trying to decide what to make for dinner…so I checked my Food board on Pinterest. Not helpful at all. It has 27 pins on it and all but four were dessert! Thankfully I have another collaboration Pinterest board that three other friends also add recipe ideas to. I checked out that board and found this easy recipe for Chicken Roll Ups. The best part was that we had almost all the ingredients already (and I probably could have made it without the item we were missing and been fine). It took me almost an hour to make (including the 30 minute baking time) but you can make the filling ahead of time and just keep it in the fridge. I had to cook the chicken and make the filling before putting it in the oven.

My version of Chicken Roll Ups with green beans.

Basically it is chicken with cheese and spices wrapped up inside a crescent roll and baked with a sauce on top. It was voted a winner in our house, so we’ll likely make it again. The only note I would give the recipe would be that it might need more than 30 minutes to bake in the oven. Some of our crescent rolls were not fully cooked.

For the recipe, please check out this blog post over at Plain Chicken.

Crockpot Santa Fe Chicken

I ran across this recipe on Pinterest and thought, “That looks pretty good and seems pretty simple. I’m going to give it a try.” So I pinned it to my food board and made plans to make it. The nice part of this crockpot meal was that it could cook either 10 hours on low or 6 hours on high. I think this is nice for people who work during the day because some crockpot meals are 4 or 8 hours and you just aren’t home from work in those time frames.

Santa Fe Chicken from Chef in Training.

I am using the photo from my Pinterest board, because my meal didn’t come out looking this nice, but it tasted great! I got all the ingredients out and measured up the night before because we would be out the door in the morning to head to bible study. Right before we left, I put everything into the crockpot and off we went. When we returned from bible study, the house was already smelling yummy.

Here is the recipe: (I got it from Chef in Training.)

CROCK POT SANTA FE CHICKEN

Recipe From: skinnytaste.com

• 24 oz (1 1/2) lbs chicken breast
• 14.4 oz can diced tomatoes with mild green chilies
• 15 oz can black beans
• 8 oz frozen corn
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
• 14.4 oz can fat free chicken broth
• 3 scallions, chopped
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
• salt to taste

Combine chicken broth, beans, corn, tomatoes, cilantro, scallions, garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, cayenne pepper and salt in the crock pot.

Season chicken breast with salt and lay on top.

Cook on low for 10 hours or on high for 6 hours.

Half hour before serving, remove chicken and shred.

Return chicken to slow cooker and stir in. Adjust salt and seasoning.

Serve over rice.

This is a Weight Watchers approved meal, if you are doing such a program. (We are not, but I thought it was nice to see that it wasn’t horrible for us.) You can get the point counts for it on Chef in Training’s page.

We will be making this meal again. It was easy and yummy. The only thing Big Monkey had to say about it was that I should use more chicken. (I probably used about half of what the recipe called for because it was what we had.) He said it was good but thought it would be better. Apparently I had talked it up too much.

Fried Pickle Chips

My mom recently went on a trip with my dad and some friends on a road trip to a few restaurants from the Diners, Drive-ins and Dives show. They had some yummy fried pickles apparently. A few days after they returned, my mom posted on her Facebook status that she really wanted some of the fried pickles. I decided that since I was going to go spend some time with my mom for a few days, I would make her some fried pickles and take them to her. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I didn’t get them made before we got to the beach, so we made them today. Aunt K was over and I brought all the ingredients with me so we got to work during nap time.

I found this recipe online at CopyKat. It is supposed to be a copykat of Hooters Fried Pickles, which is not where mom and dad had them but I figured the recipe would probably work okay.

Ingredients:
8 cups vegetable oil
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon red pepper
11 ounce jar hamburger dill pickle slices (I bought the wrong kind of pickles!! Whoops!)
2 cups buttermilk

Heat 8 cups of vegetable oil to 350 degrees in a large pot. (Next time I plan to do this in the deep fryer, but we don’t have one at the beach house.)
Drain dill pickles in a colander and then place in a medium sized bowl with the 2 cups of buttermilk.
Place all dry ingredients into a bowl and mix well.
Take a few of the pickles out of the buttermilk and dredge into the seasoned flour.

Buttermilk dip and flour dredge

Shake off excess flour and place pickles into hot grease.

Pickles cooking in the grease.

Don’t cook too many pickles at once or they won’t fry up crisp.
Fry pickle slices until golden brown.

Finished Fried Pickle Chips

Had I bought the right kind of pickles…these may have been better. Mom said they were okay…well actually I think she said something more like, ‘they aren’t horrible,’ but that’s alright. Aunt K liked them and it was a fun little afternoon project in the blah beach weather.

Sort of Homemade Donuts

Linky parties are always full of fun ideas. I saw someone make homemade donuts using canned biscuits! I thought it would be a quick and easy breakfast for us to have while camping. The night before we left to go camping, I cooked up some “Sort of Homemade Donuts” for our trip.

I hadn’t saved the recipe for some reason, so I googled for a recipe and found one on Make and Takes.

Basically you open a can of refrigerated biscuits and cut a hole in each biscuit. Now you’ll have uncooked donuts and donut holes!

Ready for the deep fryer!

I dropped them a few at a time into the deep fryer and then flipped them after a few minutes. As soon as they came out, I put them on a paper plate with a paper towel and then sprinkled with a mix of cinnamon and sugar and powered sugar.

Donut holes, ready to eat

In the end, I would vote to make these again. Pretty quick to make and they were quite tasty! Try some “Sort of Homemade Donuts” at your house!

Brownie Oreos

Amy ran across this recipe and told me that it was good. I decided that I would give it a try for a yummy snack. Amy was right! These are very yummy and so easy to make.

Check out Picky Palate for the recipe! Basically though, you need a box of brownie mix (and the ingredients to make them) and a package of Oreos.

After you are done, they will look something like this (unless you fully follow Picky Palate’s recipe because she adds fun frosting!):

 

Brownie Covered Oreos

They are SO good! I made a set of them for our last camping trip. I don’t think they lasted more than 20 minutes once we opened them up! Next time we will not bring the brownie covered oreos so soon! And we’ll probably ration them a bit more too!

Homemade Kit-Kat Candy

During the holidays, I got to try a great homemade candy. I was told it was homemade kit-kat. Now I don’t know that it tastes anything like kit-kat but I do think it might be homemade kit-krak. You just want to keep eating more and more of it!!!! I had to ask for the recipe and Kimberly was happy to help me out. Her friend had actually made it, but Kimberly managed to get me the recipe!

I finally decided to make it this week. It is pretty simple to make, although it take a little bit of time. And it is VERY good. Once again, I don’t think homemade kit-kat is the right name…but I’m going to call it homemade kit-krak. Since I’m addicted to it,  I won’t be sharing any of mine with you, but I will pass along the recipe! Thanks to Kimberly and Annie for the recipe! Annie posted the recipe also here on her blog. (Apparently this comes from Paula Deen!)

Homemade Kit-Krak

Homemade Kit-Krak

75 club crackers (Almost a full box)
1 cup butter (2 sticks)
2 cups graham cracker crumbs (from about 14 graham cracker sheets)
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup whole milk
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate morsels
1/2 cup butterscotch-flavored morsels

In an ungreased 13×9″ baking sheet, put a layer of club crackers. Cover the entire base (you may need to cut some crackers to fit).

In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat, then add the graham cracker crumbs, the brown sugar, the milk and the white sugar.

Boil the mixture for 5 minutes (starting the timer the moment you start to see bubbles) and stir the entire time. Remove from the heat, and spread half of the mixture over the crackers already in the baking pan. Place another layer of club crackers over the butter mixture. Return remaining half of the butter mixture to the heat for under one minute to get it flowing again.

Spread the remainder of the butter mixture over the second layer of crackers. Add a final layer of crackers over the top.

In a small saucepan, melt the peanut butter, chocolate and butterscotch morsels together, then spread this mixture over the third layer of crackers. Cover and place in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

Cut into bars and store in the refrigerator. (If you can manage to not eat all of them! Better yet, share with friends or serve at a party so you don’t consume all of the homemade kit-krak yourself!)

Mini Monkey Bread

I found this recipe during a blog linky party one day and thought it made more sense to make them this way instead of one big monkey bread. I also thought it was a very fitting breakfast for us ‘monkeys’. Thanks to A Southern Fairytale for posting it on her blog! Since there are only three people in our family that would be eating this breakfast, I decided to half the recipe. If you have lots of people eating, then you might want to follow her recipe.

 

Yum! Mini Monkey Bread

Mini Monkey Bread

1 10 count can of buttermilk biscuits
1 cup sugar (you could probably even use less)
1 T cinnamon
1 stick of butter
1T vanilla
1/4 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Spray muffin tin with cooking spray.
Cut each biscuit into quarters.
Place 1 cup of sugar and 1 T of cinnamon in a ziploc bag and mix. Add the biscuit pieces and shake well.
Place 5 or 6 biscuit pieces in each muffin cup. (We put 5 pieces in each one, making 8 mini breads.)
Melt 1 stick of butter, 1 T vanilla and 1/4 cup brown sugar over low-medium heat until fully melted; stirring often. (I did this in the microwave instead of on the stove…it worked okay but the stove is probably better.)
Pour the butter mixture over the biscuit pieces until the muffin tin is about 3/4 full.
Put in preheated oven and back for 25 minutes.
Remove from oven and quickly turn over onto a plate/platter so the butter sugar mixture will cover the mini monkey breads.

Enjoy! We eat these while they are still quite warm. They seem to be best that way!

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Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies

So good!

I found this recipe in an ad in my ReadyMade magazine (and several others since then) and pulled it out. Big Monkey loves mint chocolate chip ice cream…so I imagined that he would also love these cookies. I decided to make them to bring along for camping trip. Since this was an advertisement, they recommended using Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie Mix, but since I’m cheap and Betty Crocker isn’t paying me to tell you about this recipe, I bought the store brand sugar cookie mix. The cookies taste great, so I think it is fine of course!

Recipes makes 36 cookies (ours made more, but I make little cookies!)

Ingredients:
1 pouch Sugar Cookie Mix
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon mint extract (I made them with 1/2–not too minty, it was good.)
6 to 8 drops green food color (I used 8 and they came out as you see in the photo above.)
1 egg
1 cup creme de menthe baking chips
1 cup semisweet chocolate chunks

Mix cookie mix, butter, extract, food color and egg in bowl, until soft dough forms.
Stir in creme de menthe baking chips and chocolate chunks.
Using small cookie scoop or teaspoon (I use the Pampered Chef Melon Baller. Works great and makes nice but small cookies.), drop dough 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 8 to 10 minutes.
Cool 3 minutes; remove from cookie sheet to wire rack.
Serve warm or cool completely.
Store tightly covered at room temperature.

When making cookies, be sure that your dog is not left unattended. Roland managed to snag NINE uncooked cookies off the cookie sheet that were waiting to go in the oven while I was in Little Monkette’s room!

We give these cookies a thumbs up for sure. I plan to make them again. They are yummy and definitely festive for Christmas time.

Banana Bread

Lately we have been buying bananas by the bag from Aldi (Our local Aldi finally opened!!! Yay!!). Some weeks we end up not eating all the bananas, so I make banana bread. I have been using a recipe that I found online and we like it. Big Monkey would like it if we put some nuts in it, but the recipe does not call for any. You can do as you choose.

Ingredients

• 3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 1 cup sugar (can reduce to 3/4 cup-but we don’t!)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F.
With a wooden spoon (Luckily I still have one…Big Monkey hates wooden spoons!), mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large bowl.
Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla.
Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in.
Add the flour and mix.
Pour mixture into a presprayed 4×8 inch loaf pan.
Bake for 1 hour.
Cool on a rack.

Slice and serve! Enjoy!! This doesn’t last too long in our house! It is yummy!

Beer Bread!

We don’t have beer bread too often (only when we have bought it from those party companies for way too much money!). The other day I came across a beer bread recipe from another blog’s linky party. (I get lots of great project ideas, recipes included, from linky parties.)

Thank you to Handy Man, Crafty Woman for linking up this recipe this week! I checked out the recipe and was excited to see how simple it was. I decided it was certainly worth a try…if we liked it, we could make it more often and not pay big bucks for the premade mix. I made chili for dinner the other night and made the beer bread to go with it. It passed the test! We will be making more of this beer bread. It was easy and WAY cheaper than buying from the party company!

Beer Bread

3 cups sifted flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup white sugar

3 tablespoons melted butter

12 ounce bottle of beer

Preheat oven to 375.
Mix the ingredients in a bowl (but not the butter).
Pour into a greased loaf pan, spread butter on top of the batter.
Bake for about 45 minutes, until bread is golden brown and pulling away from the edge of the pan. (I ended up baking ours for almost an hour before the middle was cooked too!)

Give it a try, you might like it too and save money! Thanks again Handy Man, Crafty Woman for sharing this recipe!