Weekend/Stupid Oven!

This weekend was pretty good. Friday night Jace and I went to Chipotle for dinner. I forgot how good that place is! Then we went and did some errands, nothing too exciting. Saturday was our typical clean the house, work in the garage and grocery shopping. We were pretty lazy with all the rain and snow. Later Saturday night we went to the Farmington Theater to see Contraband. I really like it a lot and for the first time ordered ice cream. If you have never had ice cream at the theater, it is actually quite a brilliant idea. 

Then Sunday we had church. After church I decided I wanted to make some Zucchini bread (see this earlier post for recipe details). I had frozen some shredded zucchini back in the fall and wanted to see how well it worked now. I mixed everything up but when I went to go put it into my oven I thought had been preheating all along, it said it was locked (it has a feature to lock the touch screen to prevent little kids from starting it). I hadn’t turned on the lock feature and Jace and I tried getting it to unlock. We looked everywhere in the manual, on the forms and everything we tried didn’t work. We tried unplugging for 6+ hours to hopefully reset the oven (didn’t work). We plugged it back in last night to maybe go through a self clean cycle (the forms recommend this-didn’t work). So this morning I woke up frustrated that my oven still is in lock mode (won’t let me do anything!). So if anyone has suggestions, recommendations or any ideas we should try I’m open to them.

Getting back to my zucchini bread though I was able to bake my loaves (1 at a time) in my toaster oven. It worked ok and they weren’t as good as usual but I figured they turned out pretty good considering the stupid oven situation. So while the oven didn’t work, the frozen zucchini from a few months ago did stay good and worked out perfectly. Hopefully tonight Jace can figure out what is wrong with it (he says he thinks it a switch board or something?) I guess we need to call a technician to come take a look at it. Overall though I would say I’m not too impressed with my GE appliances. We have the GE café series and for what we paid for them I excepted more. Here is our oven, if anyone has experience with it let us know!

Potato Cheese Soup

So-I’m just now getting around to writing about my weekend. Friday wasn’t very eventful. Jace worked on painting and fixing up the flatbed trailer he and his brother had bought. While he worked on that I went to the grocery store and then we watched a movie in bed with popcorn. Pretty exciting I know. Saturday wasn’t a whole lot better. We got up early to go help lay sod at my mother-in-law’s house. It went pretty quick surprisingly with everyone there. Then we went home and Jace, Jake and I finished the trailer. (I should’ve taken a picture because it did turn out pretty good). I cleaned the house and Jace worked on the garage. Then his brother and his friend showed up to play with RC cars. I was in the middle of making a dinner for my visiting teaching partner in the ward that just had a cute little baby girl. When I got to a breaking point though I took some time to run over to the new shopping area in Farmington with my sister-in-law Bonnie (she didn’t want to play RC cars with the boys). I found some cute candles and stuff for the house. I also needed a rolling pin and found one at Home Goods (my new favorite store). I ended up making Potato Cheese Soup, Halloween Rice Krispie Pumpkins and Ghosts. I saw the pumpkins on Kensley Rowland’s Facebook then found the Ghosts online. I think the pumpkins were cuter though. I also made the yummy strawberry salad my mother-in-law Janalyn made a few Sunday dinner’s ago (unfortunately Smiths didn’t have any strawberries when I went, apparently they are all really bad right now-but I replaced it with raspberries and blueberries and it still turned out good). I will post the recipes all below. After we dropped off dinner we just cleaned the garage and washed my car. We were both so tired that we just fell asleep that night. It was a pretty uneventful weekend but it was still fun to just have time off and get so much done. Tomorrow were going to Glenwood Springs, Colorado to visit some cousins and spend time with family. I’m excited to have a small break and see all the cousins. I will be sure to come back and blog about it J

Potato Cheese Soup

Karen Lewis

 Serve fresh cheese, green onion and bacon bits to add to the soup

Ingredients:

12 chicken bouillon cubes

2 large carrots, grated-food processor heaven!

3 qt. water (12 cups)

1 heaping Tbsp. parsley flakes

6-8 medium size potatoes cubed (tip-add more potatoes and cut BIG)

1 heaping Tbsp. minced onion

Directions:

Put all ingredients in pot, boil till potatoes are done. Add 1 qt. half-and-half. Bring to boil. Meanwhile in another pan melt 2 cubes butters. Add 1 cup flour. Mix with wooden spoon till smooth (make rue*) add to boiling soup mixture. Simmer 5 minutes serve warm with cheddar cheese, bacon bits and green onion.

*Mix some soup with the rue to make it runnier so it is easier to blend into soup. (Rue: corn starch and warm water)

Its also best to do more potatoes and less water to start with then add more so its not to runny to start with.

Strawberry Salad

Janalyn Olson

Dressing-I blended it in my magic bullet I got as a wedding gift. 

Dressing Ingredients:

 1 T. poppy seeds( + 2 teaspoons poppy seeds)

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup Balsamic Vinegar

1/4 tsp paprika

1/4 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 T minced red onion

(I added 5-6 berries) 

* add all ingredients into your blender and blend

Salad Ingredients:

 Spinach 

 Strawberries (sliced)-I used raspberries and blueberries

 Feta Cheese 

 Sugared slivered almonds (instructions follow)

 The perfect dressing

Almonds

Toast 3/4 c sliced almonds in fry pan until light brown add sugar mixture and stir until coated.  Pour on wax paper.

2 cup sugar-This was way too much I thought, would use much less.

1/8 tsp of nutmeg

1 tsp cinnamon

Pinch of salt

Pumpkin rice krispie (just add orange food coloring, a tootsie roll stem and green frosting)!

 

The ghosts just have coconut on the bottom and M&Ms. The pumpkins were easier and cuter I think.

Breadsticks were super easy. Take Rhodes rolls loaves, thaw, roll out and cut into strips. Put butter, seasame seeds and parmesean cheese then bake according to package.

 

Fall Cooking

I love fall weather. It makes me excited for new fall clothes and it makes me want to cook more. Jace and I have been eating A LOT of cereal this summer due to the yard. So now that the we cant touch the yard for 3 weeks, I have time to cook and bake at night! So Monday I decided I would make some zucchini bread. My mom brought us a HUGE zucchini from Ridge’s garden. She said it was time for me to learn how to make my own bread. So I figured I might as well learn.

See the huge zucchini-my knife struggled cutting through it. I need to upgrade to Cutco!

I decided because the zucchini was so huge I would make a double batch. (My loaf pans must be larger than normal though because my double batch should have made 4 loaves and it only made 2 and ½). Anyways I pulled out the Kitchen Aid mixer (which I love!) and the Kitchen Aid Food processor which I had never used before. (Also on a side note-we received the food processor in the mail when we got married but it had NO tag or name associated with it so I was never able to send a thank you note to whoever gave us the processor).  Jace had to help me set up the thing but once I got going it was so awesome.

15 minutes later after Jace figured it out for me.

It would have taken me forever to shred all that zucchini but the food processor was so fast! I got excited and shredded the whole zucchini and froze the half I didn’t use (my mom confirmed this was ok). While my bread was cooking I was so excited to use my food processor and since it was already out and set up (pretty sure I cant use it if Jace isn’t around) I shredded a whole block of cheese too!

The results of the food processor on the huge zucchini.

I like to have shredded fresh cheese but its much easier than doing it by hand. Anyways my bread turned out surprisingly delicious and I’ve eaten almost half of it already by myself. Tonight I’m planning on making some broccoli cheese soup! I don’t have the zucchini bread recipe with me so I will post it later.

The beautiful mixer that does all the work for me!

The end results!



I will be sure to post some more pictures and recipes of the food I'm sure to be cooking the next few months. Yumm! Also Monday night we had a neighborhood BBQ which was fun to go to. Tonight then I have my visiting teaching ladies coming over and I go visit my ladies on Thursday. I feel like such an old lady ha.