Frozen Fruit-sicles

A few months ago I bought a set of popsicle molds from the Target dollar spot thinking it would be a fun activity/treat for my little boy. Then of course I pretty much forgot about them, and never used them until I saw this challenge at Fun on a Dime.

So a couple of weeks ago we broke out the molds, our blender, and some fresh fruit and milk. I believe our concoction consisted of some milk, a banana and a half (you can see my little boy eating the other half, below!), a peach or two, and what little we managed to get out of a mango that we had a hard time cutting open. We are inexperienced in the mango department. Just look at the look on my husband's face... I'm pretty sure he was saying, "What am I supposed to do with this?"


We poured our smoothie mixture into the molds, and put them in the freezer to enjoy the next day.


We ran a little water on the outside of the molds to loosen the popsicles up enough to get them out, and enjoyed! I kind of like this next picture. Not so much the up-the-nose shot of me (I used to be notorious for that one), but the fact that my little boy seems to be lovingly looking at me and thinking, "My mom is so cool!".

I'll tell you what these popsicles are really useful for. The post-nap, pre-dinner snack. Works out great... He thinks he is getting a treat, while I know he's really having something healthy. And everyone's happy!

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The easiest homemade cinnamon rolls I've ever made!

I love cinnamon rolls, but I've never been that great at making them. Sure, they've always turned out pretty good, but the process... not good.

Let's just say there have been tears shed over the making of cinnamon rolls at my house, and they were mine. I don't have a fancy mixer or anything, so I've always mixed them by hand, and ended up with sticky dough that stuck to everything when I was trying to roll it up. Kinda drove me crazy.

But last week one day, I was making scrambled eggs with ham for dinner, and just had the idea "I should see if I can find a cinnamon roll recipe that will work in the breadmaker.", you know...to beef up my breakfast for dinner. Well, I found one! So we ended up having breakfast for dinner/dessert!

I love using my bread machine to make pizza dough (because let's just face it, I don't love handling dough). It's so easy to throw the ingredients on and turn it on the dough cycle. Granted, you do have to do that step an hour in advance of when you might have started making it by hand, but to me it is SO worth it to have the bread machine do all the work. I don't know why I didn't think of doing cinnamon rolls in there sooner!

I found this recipe on Allrecipes.com.

The website calls them "Clone of a Cinnabon". I call them Delicious. And Easy. Or maybe... So Delicious and Easy That I've Already Made Them Twice in the Last Four Days. But whatever you choose to call them, I hope you try it and enjoy!

Ingredients

• 1 cup warm milk (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
• 2 eggs, room temperature
• 1/3 cup margarine, melted
• 4 1/2 cups bread flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 1/2 teaspoons bread machine yeast

• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• 2 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1/3 cup butter, softened
  

**I just used the leftover portion of the stick of butter from the first part of the recipe, which ends up being less than 1/3 cup, but it is more than enough. I also didn't measure the cinnamon and sugar, i just sprinkled it on till it looked good.

• 1 (3 ounce) package cream cheese, softened
  
• 1/4 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/8 teaspoon salt

**I didn't have any cream cheese, so I just made some standard powdered sugar icing, and they were still delicious! Normally I'm all for cream cheese frosting, but you could easily save yourself the calories and they will still be so delicious!

Directions

1. Place ingredients in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select dough cycle; press Start.
2. After the dough has doubled in size turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, cover and let rest for 10 minutes. In a small bowl, combine brown sugar and cinnamon.
3. Roll dough into a 16x21 inch rectangle. Spread dough with 1/3 cup butter and sprinkle evenly with sugar/cinnamon mixture. Roll up dough and cut into 12 rolls. Place rolls in a lightly greased 9x13 inch baking pan. Cover and let rise until nearly doubled, about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
4. Bake rolls in preheated oven until golden brown, about 15 minutes. While rolls are baking, beat together cream cheese, 1/4 cup butter, confectioners' sugar, vanilla extract and salt. Spread frosting on warm rolls before serving.

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Experimenting with Vegetable Purees

I've never really liked peas. Growing up I HATED them. I can eat them now, but I don't usually choose them. As legend has it, my mom would serve peas with dinner and I would not cooperate. I gagged when I tried to eat them. When my mom said no dessert if I didn't eat my peas, I would opt out of eating the dessert as a way to get out of eating the peas...I actually told her I'd just smell the dessert, instead of eating it, so that I didn't have to eat them. I know...weirdo. Anyway, as the story goes, my mom pulled a fast one on me one night by mixing spaghetti sauce and peas in the blender before serving it with our spaghetti. I was none the wiser. No idea I had just eaten peas. It worked!

Point being, this isn't a new trick. I think it gained a little popularity when Jessica Seinfeld put out her cookbook Deceptively Delicious, all about this very topic. I really think it's a great idea. I realized recently that I am great at making sure Bitty eats lots of fruit, but not as good with the veggies.

Purees currently in my freezer: 2 half cup bags of sweet potato, and 2 of cauliflower... and I have more veggies just waiting for a date with the blender!

So, a couple of weeks ago, remembering what my mom had done, and what I had read in Deceptively Delicious, I decided to throw about 2/3 cup of frozen peas and carrots (thawed) into the blender with some spaghetti sauce to serve over the chicken with cheese ravioli (kind of a mix of chicken parmesan and baked ravioli) I was making. Unfortunately the carrots turned the sauce kinda orange, but it was still pretty good!

So then on Monday, I was planning on making sweet and sour chicken with fried rice. I decided to try using some sweet potato puree instead of the egg you're supposed to wet the chicken in before covering in cornstarch and frying. It worked pretty well! I don't make sweet and sour chicken often, because it's more work than I usually put into dinner on a normal night, but I think next time I would like to add maybe a quarter cup of sweet potato puree to the sauce mixture too and see how it turns out.

Soooooo good!

The only other puree I've made and used before is cauliflower. It's been quite a while but I thought it worked well too. I used some in my cream soup/sour cream/chicken mixture in enchiladas once and was pretty good. My all time favorite use of puree so far was in lasagna. I mixed 1/2 cup of cauliflower puree in with the cottage cheese and made the lasagna as usual. SO GOOD. I'm all for a moist lasagna, and the addition of that puree made it perfect.

So now, I've got some spinach in the fridge that's a little too wilty for me to want to use it for a salad like we usually do. I was so excited that I don't need to let it go to waste, but I can puree it instead!

Have you ever cooked with veggie purees? Have any good recipes to share??

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Kneader's French Toast recipe!

Kneader's french toast is delicious. If you've had it I'm sure you'd agree.

My first experience eating it was while my husband and I were dating. I was working a couple of on-campus custodial jobs that summer, and since I didn't have a car my then-boyfriend would come pick me up and take me to work in the mornings (he also made my lunches for me a lot of days! What a sweetie!)

Well, one day he told me he was going to bring me breakfast before he took me to work. This is what he brought:

So, other than being honestly the best breakfast item I have ever eaten, I guess it holds a little sentimental value for me, since it reminds me of all the nice things my husband has done for me!

A year or two ago, I was on a quest to make french toast that tasted like Kneader's delicious chunky cinnamon french toast...I didn't get very far. I knew it was made with cinnamon bread, so I tried a couple different cinnamon bread recipes... Didn't work so great.

Today, on a whim, I decided to google "kneaders french toast recipe" since I realized I had never actually done that before... I didn't find a cinnamon bread recipe, BUT I did find the recipe for the rest of the french toast AND the caramel syrup!! So I may just have to start experimenting with cinnamon bread recipes again! This would be especially wonderful, since I live nowhere near a Kneader's anymore!

Here's what I found.

This luscious French Toast recipe remains unrivaled! This recipe was originally demonstrated on Good Things Utah May 9, 2005 and is being reposted to the website so everyone can find it again.

Ingredients:

Kneader’s Over-Night French Toast
1 loaf Kneaders Chunky Cinnamon Bread cut in 8 slices
8 eggs
3 c. milk
1 T. brown sugar
3/4 tsp. salt
1 T. vanilla
2 T. butter

Preparation:

Butter a glass baking dish generously (9" x 13"). Place the bread flat in the baking dish. Mix all remaining ingredients, reserving the butter and pour over the bread. Cut butter into pieces and dot over the top. Refrigerate over night or at least 1 hour. Bake 45 - 50 minutes at 350 degrees. Serves 8

Kneader's Carmel Syrup
1 c. Brown sugar
1 c. Creme
1 c. Light Karo Syrup
Blend together and heat on stovetop until sugar is smooth.
Serve warm.

From the Ovens at Kneaders

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Birthday whatnots

We had a big weekend. Bitty's first birthday was on Saturday and we had a big little family party. Then my husband's birthday was Sunday.

Just look at this adorable kid. I think he had a great time!

We celebrated with lions...


tigers...


and monkeys...
Oh my! So, for Christmas last year my brother-in-law gave me the book Hello Cupcake! It's a good one. I had been planning on making cupcakes for Bitty's birthday for a while, and was just going back and forth on which ones to make...when, as my luck would have it, my book disappeared off of the face of the earth. Yeahhhh....

So luckily I was able to find a picture of the monkeys online. The lions I tried to remember as well as I could, and the tigers were something I just made up (hmmm...can ya tell?!). My mom was in town for the birthday party and she helped with the cupcakes, since I was running out of time to get everything done before the party started. Thanks mom!

The other big project I had been planning on before the birthday weekend (my husband's birthday was Sunday) was a homemade birthday banner.

I LOVE birthdays, and growing up we always had one of those paper Happy Birthday signs as well as some plastic pennant birthday banners that we would decorate the house with on everyone's birthdays. And at some point a few months ago I just got it in my mind that I was going to make a birthday banner out of fabric. I had see cute fabric banners all over the blogging world and thought this would be the perfect idea!

I finished it around 11pm on Friday, just in time for the big weekend! I LOVE how it turned out! I should have taken more pictures to post, but for now here's what it looked like:


Do you love it as much as I do??? I would really love to hear what you think about it... I've been toying with the idea of opening an Etsy shop for a while, but I can't decide if it would be worth the trouble... But this ended up so dang cute that I thought maybe someone would want to buy one if I sold them, right? I'll take some close-ups later and post them so you can see just how cute it really is!

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Girls' night treats

About a week and a half ago, my BFF Jackie came to visit. While I was grocery shopping before she came I happened to walk past the cake mixes and realize I didn't even have any treats for her visit, and you can't have a weekend with your best girl friend visiting without treats! That would just be insanity.

So I solved that problem!

I picked up some of this:

And a can of this:

And made one of the best treats EVER! Just take a look at these little goodies!



And they taste much better than they look! Cakemix cookies are quite versatile, but this is my favorite way to eat them. Funfetti cake with rainbow chip frosting sandwiched in between...YUM! I learned how to make cakemix cookies from my college roommates (Jackie was one of them, so what an appropriate treat for her visit!). The ones my roommates made most often were chocolate cake with peanut butter chips in the dough. The possibilities are endless, I'm sure.

The other reason these were a great treat is the fact that they are not very labor intensive. Here's the recipe.

1 package of cakemix of your choice
1/3 cup oil
3 eggs
other ingredients or toppings of your choice

Shape dough in to 1 inch balls, faltten into 1/4" thickness (I don't think we even did that step...). Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes.

And that's it. Easy Peasy.

We also made a late night Sonic run when my brain had gotten too fuzzy to sew a straight line anymore.

{Have you seen that one Sonic commercial with the two ladies making a late night Sonic run? OH man, I laughed so hard thinking about it, and how we are those women...I can't remember it exactly but it's something to the effect of "We're two crazy ladies on a late night Sonic run...You never know what we're going to do next! Maybe go....buy some eggs....and boil 'em...." haha... If you've never seen it, I'm sure it sounds lame, but I think it's so funny!}

And we ordered something that may or may not have been a good idea. We each got one of these in the strawberry limeade variety:


Freaking delicious! The reason I say it might not have been a good idea to order it, is that I have SERIOUSLY been craving one every day since then. And at about $2.50 a pop I can't really just go get one any time I want. That being said, I'm not sure how much longer I can last without getting another one! Maybe I'll have to take my hubby out for treats at Sonic for part of celebrating his birthday this weekend :)

P.S. There was absolutely NO signage for these babies at the Sonic we went to. If you go to order one and don't see it on the menu, go ahead and ask if they have it. Luckily Jackie had had one before so we ordered them even though they weren't printed on the menu.

What treats do you like to have on a girls' night??

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Friday Faves

Okay, I didn't mean to totally ignore the blog this week, but on the up side, I did get some things done that I needed to!

My sister told me about a blog called Our Best Bites recently and said she had tried a few of their recipes and liked them. So, when I was doing my meal planning a week or so ago I decided to check it out and work a few recipes into my plan.

I tried the guiltless alfredo sauce, the black bean soup, and the breakfast crescent braid. YUM!


There wasn't a picture of the finished alfredo sauce, but there are the ingredients. Pretty easy, and delicious! I thought it turned out a little salty though, so next time I would probably half the amount of salt. But I will definitely make it again! If you've ever reheated Olive Garden alfredo and seen the amount of butter all that cream was floating in, you will definitely appreciate that fact that this is "guiltless". SO YUMMY!



Black Bean Soup. I like this too! It was pretty easy to make, which is always a plus. I was kind of worried that I wouldn't like it, but I really did! We ate it by itself, but I think next time I make it, I'll serve it with quesadillas or taquitos. I know they've got a recipe for homemade taquitos on the blog, so I may have to check that out!


This one's called Easy Breakfast Crescent Braid. It was super easy and pretty yummy. We were thinking it would be tasty to add some bell pepper and mushrooms to the egg next time, or maybe try sausage or ham instead of bacon, though the bacon was delicious. You could get really creative with this. The only thing I would warn you on this is that it doesn't make a whole lot. My husband, my (almost) 1-year-old, and I ate the whole thing. So make two if you have more mouths to feed!

This site is definitely my favorite this week! You should really go check it out. Not only are the recipes tasty, the site's got such a fun, colorful design and awesome pictures (including the ones on this post!).

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Tex Mex Cheese Enchiladas

You may or may not know that I am a native Texan. Born and raised. Every once in a while I get "You're from Texas? Where's your accent?" Maybe because I've lived in outside of Texas for the last 5 years, my accent has faded away.

What has not faded is my loooooove for good ol' Tex Mex cheese enchiladas....mmmmmmmm... I decided about a month ago, that I wanted to try making some, since you can't really find them here.

On a whim I decided that what I needed to do was do a search for "enchilada gravy," since I remember being asked if I wanted the gravy or other sauce back in the day. My search yielded a post called The Essence of Tex Mex on a blog called Homesick Texan. It was interesting, she began by discussing the differences between Tex Mex and real Mexican food, etc. Then she gives a recipe for chili gravy, and cheese enchiladas.

I'll include the recipes here, add my modifications. Here's what you need to make the gravy:

Chili Gravy (from Robb Walsh)
Ingredients:
1/4 cup lard (or vegetable oil) **I used olive oil, and it worked great
1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt
1-1/2 tsp powdered garlic
2 tsp ground cumin **The first time I made this I used 2 tsp, and it was WAY too strong for me. This time I used 1 tsp, and I think it was just right.
1/2 tsp dried oregano (Mexican oregano is preferred if it’s available)
2 T chili powder (either homemade or a dark brand such as Gebhardt’s or Whole Foods) **Um, yeah, I used regular cheap-o chili powder and it was good. Don't go buy it special, unless you really want to.
2 cups chicken broth (or water)

Method:
Heat the oil in a skillet over medium-high heat.
Stir in the flour and continue stirring for 3 to 4 minutes, or until it makes a light brown roux.
Add all the dry ingredients and continue to cook for 1 minute, constantly stirring and blending ingredients. **It's cooking pretty fast at this point, so I found that measuring out all of the dry ingredients into a little bowl ahead of time made it easier.
Add chicken broth or water, mixing and stirring until the sauce thickens.
Turn heat to low and let sauce simmer for 15 minutes. Add water to adjust the thickness. Makes 2 cups.
Now here is Homesick Texan's cheese enchilda recipe:
Cheese Enchiladas
Ingredients: 1/2 cup vegetable oil **I used olive oil again here
8 corn tortillas **I made 12 or more with this amount of sauce.
3 cups shredded cheddar cheese (can make it with Velveeta for extra melting oomph and good ol' Tex-Mex authenticity)
One medium onion, diced **I didn't put any onion in mine. I'm sure it's good either way. 2 cups chili gravy

Method:
Preheat the oven to 450.
Pour the oil in a small skillet, and heat the tortillas one at a time. Keep them wrapped in a cloth until all 8 are heated. **I think the purpose of this is to keep the tortillas from tearing. Is there another way to do this without using oil? Soak them in water? Please leave me a comment if you have any ideas...I'd like to cut some oil out of the recipe if I could!
Pour 1/2 cup of chili gravy in a baking pan.
Take a tortilla, put 1/4 cup of cheese and 1 tablespoon of onion in the center and roll it.
Place rolled tortilla in baking dish, seam side down.
Continue with remaining tortillas.
Take remaining chili gravy, and pour it over the rolled tortillas.
Sprinkle remaining cheese and onions on top.
Bake for 10 minutes or until sauce is bubbly and cheese is melted.
Makes 8 enchiladas.



Okay, now I will share my all-time favorite side dish for homemade enchildas of any variety. Sauteed zucchini. For my husband and I, I usually buy 2 zucchini (these are actually Italian Squash, is there a difference?), or you could use yellow squash or a combination. Either way, use at least 2. We hardly ever have any leftovers of this, between the two of us, it's that good.

Slice it up, throw it in a skillet with a little bit of butter and some Tex-Joy if you are blessed enough to have some, or some "seasoned salt," or whatever you want really. Cook until tender.The zucchini just complements the enchiladas so well! Mmmmm...I'm making myself hungry. Try this meal out, it's delicious!
Aren't you so proud of me for taking pictures as I went this time?! I even pulled out the fine china, since I knew I'd be taking pictures. :) Just keeping it real (we don't have a dishwasher!). And P.S. that spot on the table cloth is just water. In case you were wondering.

Enjoy!

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Simplify Supper

If you thought my menu planning method was too much work, you might want to...

Wow. This website really does all the work for you. On the home screen of the website, you'll a pre-made calendar for the month, with recipes on each day of the week.

To the left of that is the shopping list for the current week of the calendar. And WOW, they even divide the ingredients into categories (according to where you find them in a grocery store) and label which day of the week you need each ingredient. Under the shopping list are buttons that allow you to print this week's recipes, email the list, or send it to your cell phone! They really mean business when they say they want to simplify supper.

Don't want to eat what they've got planned? No problem. You can also pick which recipes you want to make and when. The best part? The website will automatically make your fancy shmancy shopping list, no matter how many recipes you choose!

Or if you're like me, you can just use this website for recipe ideas, and browse, and browse, finding all sorts of yummies to try. And of course, being called Simplify Supper, you know that most of the recipes are very easy to make as well. Bonus!

Where do you find recipes and menu planning ideas?

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What's on the Menu?

Menu planning is one of those things that everyone does a little differently. It's always interesting to me to learn how other people do the mundane daily things in life, such as menu planning. I thought I'd share my method. It works for me.

I will admit, I don't love coming up with something to make for dinner every night. Not that I don't like making dinner. I like to try new recipes, to tweak someone else's (or my own) recipes, or to make a tried-and-true favorite and be satisfied with the yummy results.

If you know me at all, you might know that I am not the best {or quickest} decision maker. I agonize over really small decisions, and what should be no big deal turns into quite the ordeal.

This is why I prefer a more structured meal calendar. It takes the daily-ness out of deciding what's for dinner, lessening the frequency of those agonizing decisions!

So here's what I do. Since January or February I have been making a meal calendar on the computer and printing it out each month. If you want to use my method, here are the steps you should take:

1. Come up with the "categories" of food you usually eat, and decide how frequently you would like to eat from each "category." We decided we'd eat most categories every other week. For us these include pasta, sandwiches, rice, tortillas, soup, and breakfast. We have those categories assigned to Monday through Wednesday.

Every Thursday is Leftover Day. Nothing like saving money and cleaning out the fridge at the same time.

Every Friday is pizza night. Usually this is homemade pizza, but occasionally we buy a pizza, have a frozen, or do some other take on pizza, like bagel or french bread pizza. When we make homemade pizza we like to try and mix it up too. One of my FAVORITES is barbecue chicken pizza. So easy and SO GOOD!

Saturday is "Trent's Choice," because, even though planning in advance this way takes the stress off of making the decisions, I don't want to have to make ALL of the decisions. My husband has to choose what we have on Saturdays (theoretically:).

And Sundays I just leave empty at this point, because we usually try to make something yummy on a Sunday, and I don't want to be bothered with thinking about which category my Sunday dinner should fit into each week.

Some calendar programs are nice and will automatically repeat an event every two weeks if you tell it to. I just had to fill out the categories once in our calendar program, and my meal calendar was good to go for as long as I told it to repeat (mine will go until July, when things might change because we may be moving in with the in-laws for a while).

2. After you've printed your calendar with your categories set up the way you want them, you can come up with individual recipes or meals you want to make and assign them to days according to your categories. For example, Tortillas are assigned to Mondays on my calendar, so yesterday I made cheese enchiladas. (I'm going to share that recipe probably Friday, so get excited!!)

You don't have to fill out the whole calendar at once. Usually I'll do about 2 weeks at once. If I'm lazy I just do a few days at a time. Or like this month, I filled pretty much the whole month out at once, except for a few days I couldn't think of what to write in.

This is really flexible, people. I don't want you to get the idea that I'm a meal calendar Nazi. I just use it as a guideline to save me a little sanity. We don't always stick to what is written down. Last month I think I hardly made anything on the day that it was written in, but if nothing else, it was good be able to see what meals I had the ingredients to make, which brings me to the next step.

3. Go grocery shopping. I like to refer to my calendar as I make my shopping list, look at each day and add the items I need to buy for that recipe to my list. Some people are pros at grocery shopping and hardly spend any money. I'm not there yet, but maybe someday.


4. Make dinner. Make what's written in on that day. Or don't. I'm not tied to my calendar, so if I feel like making something else, I do. But, on days when I don't care one way or the other, it's SO REFRESHING to just be able to look at the calendar and know what to make, without having to think too hard about it.

How do you do menu planning? Leave a comment and share your methods!

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Zuppa Toscana... Mmmmmmmm!

{Once again, please excuse the sub-par photography.}

This is seriously so good! To me it tasted just like Olive Garden's. I made a few modifications because I'm cheap...I'll tell you what they are below the recipe.

Recipe: Olive Garden Toscana Soup
CDKitchen http://www.cdkitchen.com/
Category: O - Copy Cat Restaurant Recipes
Serves/Makes: 5
Difficulty Level: 3
Ready In: 30-60 minutes

Ingredients:

3/4 cup onions, diced 1/8 inch
1 slice bacon, 1/4-inch diced
1 1/4 teaspoon garlic, minced
1 ounce chicken bouillon (2 Tbs)
1 quart water (2 c.--I added 2 more, see below)2
medium potatoes, cut in half length-wise, then cut in 1/4-inch slices
2 cups cavallo greens (kale can be substituted), cut in half, then sliced into 1/16-inch strips
1 1/2 cup sausage link - spicy, precooked, cut in half length-wise, then cut at an angle into 1/2-inch slices
3/4 cup heavy whipping cream

Directions:

Place sausage link onto sheet pan and bake in 300 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until done.

Place onions and bacon into 3 to 4 quart saucepan and cook onions over medium heat until the onions are almost clear. Add garlic and cook for 1 minute.

Add chicken bouillon, water and potatoes, bring to a simmer for 15 minutes. Add remaining ingredients then simmer for 5 more minutes and serve.

Alterations:

Okay, so I didn't feel like buying a whole thing of bacon just for one slice. So I didn't.

Also, for some reason there was sausage in the freezer section that was way cheaper than the refrigerated kind...BUT there was no spicy in the freezer kind, so instead I got a pork and bacon kind, and added crushed red pepper flakes that I already had to make it spicy. Also, I just used the whole 1 lb. roll (a little more than it calls for).

I also added an extra potato, which let me add a whole extra 2 cups of water, stretching the soup. Also, I just cooked the sausage in the skillet and then drained the grease, instead of baking it.

Try it, it's DELICIOUS!!!!

By the way, I love that website, that this came from, cdkitchen.com. It's got lots of good recipes, including some yummy copy cat recipes (such as this one). Check it out!

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My Famous Salsa

Okay, so it's only famous among a few of the people I've made it for. But it is OH SO DELICIOUS! And also oh so easy! We made this yesterday to go with some delish cheese enchiladas I made (I'll post that recipe after I make them again... I forgot to take a picture!).

Anyway, I ate about half a bag of chips worth of this salsa today for a snack and figured if I knew how to make something THAT good, I should share the wealth. Here is another one of my not-so-great pictures (I'm slowly saving up for a better camera--it's sloooooooow when you don't have a job):

Salsa Recipe

Ingredients:

2 regular sized cans of tomatoes (This is very flexible, you can use diced, whole, or stewed. Any combination.)

1 can Ro-tel tomatoes or similar (tomatoes with green chilies)

1 small can diced green chilies (you can add or substitute jalepeno or other peppers if you prefer spicier)

fresh cilantro (I usually pull the leaves off so I don't have stringy stems in my salsa)

garlic and salt to taste

Directions:

Put all ingredients in the blender. Yep. That's it. ENJOY!

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