Greek Tortillini Salad

Ingredients:

1 (20 Ounce) Package of refrigerated Cheese Tortillini
1 1/2 Cups Grape Tomatoes chopped in half
1 Large Cucumber, chopped
1 Cup Kalamata Olives, pit removed and chopped
1/2 red onion chopped
3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese

Dressing:

1/4 Cup extra virgin olive oil
3 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
Salt and Pepper to taste

Bring a large pot of water to boil. Cook tortellini according to package directions. Drain the tortellini and rinse with cold water. 
Place the tortellini in a large bowl. Add tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, red onion, and feta cheese.
In a small bowl, whisk together, olive oil, vinegar, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper. 
Pour the dressing over the salad and mix gently until well coated. Serve immediately or chill in fridge for later.  *Salad will keep for 3 days-if it lasts that long!  Ha ha!

Another favorite pasta salad we have  brought to potlucks this summer and it does make a lot so there are leftovers for the next day. I was always snacking on it through the day. I also added a little more feta because who doesn't love feta? Enjoy!

Deli style Macaroni Salad

3 Cups uncooked macaroni
1 Cup Frozen Peas and Carrots
1 Small Onion Diced
6-8 Strips Bacon, Cooked and Diced
1 1oz. Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing seasoning packet
1 1/2 Cups Miracle Whip
1 1/2 Cups Mayonnaise
1 8oz. Block Cheddar Cheese, chopped

Cook Macaroni according to package directions. 5 minutes into the boiling process, add frozen peas and carrots. Continue boiling until macaroni is done. Drain. Rinse macaroni and veggies with cold water a few times. Meanwhile in a large bowl, mix onion, bacon, ranch seasoning, Miracle whip and mayonnaise until well blended. Add the macaroni peas & carrots and cheese. Refrigerate before serving.  Enjoy!


This is so good and quick and easy! I love recipes that I need to make quickly to a friends house and the ingredients that I most likely have on hand anyway. I even use Baco's (precooked bacon salad topping) in replace of cooking bacon to make it even faster.  It also makes a lot for leftovers to take to lunch for work! Yum!

Country Chicken with gravy

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup crushed cornflakes
• 1/2 teaspoon poultry seasoning
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 2 tablespoons fat-free evaporated milk
• 4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves (4 ounces each)
• 2 teaspoons canola oil
• GRAVY:
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup fat-free evaporated milk
• 1/4 cup condensed chicken broth, undiluted
• 1 teaspoon sherry or additional condensed chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons minced chives

Directions

• In a shallow bowl, combine the first six ingredients. Place milk in another shallow bowl. Dip chicken in milk, then roll in cornflake mixture.
• In a large nonstick skillet coated with cooking spray, cook chicken in oil over medium heat for 6-8 minutes on each side or until a meat thermometer reads 170°.
• Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, melt butter. Stir in the flour, pepper and salt until smooth. Gradually stir in the milk, broth and sherry. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 1-2 minutes or until thickened. Stir in chives. Serve with chicken. Yield: 4 servings.

I found a new recipe that is SO good. I also made baked sweet potato's with this meal. Heidi devoured her plate and I made extra gravy. YUM. Give a try. We all love our comfort foods, but this was also a comfort food that was still light enough for seconds.  Enjoy!

Classic Schwinn bike keeps running in the family.

Spinach and Artichoke Dip

• 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese, divided
• 1/2 cup fat-free sour cream
• 1/4 cup (1 ounce) grated fresh Parmesan cheese, divided
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 1 (14-ounce) can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
• 1 (8-ounce) block 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, softened 
• 1 (8-ounce) block fat-free cream cheese, softened 
• 1/2 (10-ounce) package frozen chopped spinach, thawed, drained, and squeezed dry
• 1 (13.5-ounce) package baked tortilla chips (about 16 cups)

1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Combine 1 1/2 cups mozzarella, sour cream, 2 tablespoons Parmesan, and next 6 ingredients (through spinach) in a large bowl; stir until well blended. Spoon mixture into a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. Sprinkle with remaining 1/2 cup mozzarella and remaining 2 tablespoons Parmesan. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until bubbly and golden brown. Serve with tortilla chips.

S'Mores Cookie Bars

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs, beaten 
• 2 cups marshmallow topping (such as Marshmallow Fluff)
• 2 cups milk-chocolate chips

1. 1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Line a 9-by-13-inch baking pan with foil, leaving a 2-inch overhang on 2 sides. Mist foil with cooking spray.
2. 2. In a bowl, combine flour, graham cracker crumbs, baking powder and salt; mix well. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer on medium speed, beat butter and sugar until light, about 2 minutes. Beat in eggs until well combined. Reduce mixer speed to low and slowly beat flour mixture into butter mixture. Divide dough in half. Press half of dough into pan until dough is uniform and flat. Spread with marshmallow topping and sprinkle chocolate chips on top. Scatter remaining dough over in clumps. Don't worry about covering the top; marshmallow and chocolate chips should peek through.
3. 3. Bake until golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes. Place pan on a wire rack to cool completely. Remove from pan, peel off foil and cut into bars.

I just made these today and had to take a taste test. Oh YUM!  Brian's work is having a annual boating/picnic get together for everyone this weekend at the lake, and everyone was asked to bring something. I am bringing my artichoke/spinach dip (that everyone asks for. Quite proud of it), and then I wanted to bring a fun dessert for the kids. I thought this would be a great way to still let the kids have S'mores at a BBQ without all the mess.  Enjoy!! Oh and when the marshallow center peeks throught the crumb topping, they bake just like you roasted them over the fire.

Tid bits

Hi sisters! I have a random post. Eric and I celebrated our 2 year anniversary this month! We went out to eat at a fairly new microbrewery called Brewery Vivant. It was ah-mazing! A real treat, that's for sure. We had a very upscale version of one of my favorite snacks, which is cheese and crackers with fruit preserves on it (usually cherry). All or most of their food is also locally bought so everything was amazingly fresh. The cheese appetizer included a cheddar that was aged 8 years and a blue cheese that you could eat totally plain (can you imagine that? lol) Anyways, my cheap version is the garden triscuits, with cream cheese and cherry preserves. I demand you all try it! :-) Ok, getting back to the anniversary. Dinner was really great (as you probably gathered). Fabulous food, and fabulous beer. Afterward we went home and watched Alien :P Anyone going to see Prometheus??? I am! Really excited about this one! On our actual anniversary date, we prepared a dinner at home since I had to work, but it turned out really great. Just not the food, but our conversation too :) Also, we've been sitting on the porch a lot.

The house hunt continues, but we're feeling optimistic. Stacy, I liked what your posted on my wall. Grand Rapids definitely has some amazing properties for decent prices especially when you consider what this city has to offer. We are looking at three more house this evening, then we are hoping to look at another property that we are really interested in some time later next week. The one we're excited about sits on 3.36 acres.
The cats are still goofballs. We've had them a year now! Nibbler's hobbies include watching squirrels, chewing through wires, and exploring the front porch.

Tiger likes to lay with mommy, beg for food, lick toes, and drink from the facet.

Ray Bradbury. I know he was old, but I was still bummed when we passed away. The weird thing is that, a couple days before he passed, I just started reading some more of his short stories after I ended The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series. Anyways, I love Bradbury's short stories. If you can find Kaleidoscope on the Internet anywhere you should read it. It's so good. It's just so elegantly written. Honestly I never really cared for Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 was OK. But, I am all about everything else of his I've read. I can tell he was a direct influence for so many other sci-fi greats.

Last but not least. I've become a pro at the breakfast sandwich. OK not really, but I made this one this morning. Notice the running yolk. Just the way I like it. I used, a wheat English muffin, egg, ham, and American cheese. Not the healthiest, but who really cares. Happy Friday everyone! Miss you and love you tons!

Olive Garden Breadsticks.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups warm water
• 1 packet active dry yeast
• 4 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 Tbsp. unsalted butter melted
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 1 Tbsp. salt

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, dissolve sugar and yeast in warm water and allow to sit for 10 minutes, covered. Mixture should be frothy.
2. In separate bowl, combine flour and salt. Add to yeast mixture. Add melted butter. Mix with paddle attachment of stand mixer or wooden spoon until fully combined.
3. Knead dough for a few minutes just until dough is smooth. Do not overknead!
4. Grease a cookie sheet. Pull off pieces of dough and roll out into strips. Cover the dough and let sit in a warm place for 45 minutes to an hour.
5. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F and once heated, pop in the bread sticks.
6. In microwave, combine the following: 1 stick unsalted butter (or 1/2 cup margarine), 2 teaspoons garlic powder and 1 teaspoons salt.
7. After bread sticks have cooked for 6 or 7 minutes, brush the bread sticks with half the butter mixture. Then continue to bake. Bake for 5-8 more minutes.
8. Immediately upon removal from the oven brush the other half of the butter on the sticks.Allow to cool for a few minutes before eating.

These were actually very easy to make. If you do try this recipe, my dough was smooth like it states in the directions, yet a little sticky. They did still rise later and I might try to make them less sticky to see if they rise just a little bit better and would be easier to roll. But, oh do these taste just like Olive Garden's! YUM. These would make great pizza sticks for kids too. I think I might get some mozzarella and pepperoni's to melt on them and then you could dip in marinara.  I got about 12 breadsticks from this recipe. Heidi gobbled one up pretty fast. Oh and I used just a little bit of the butter mix to brush on the breadsticks while they baked. I got a little too much garlic on some of them. Oh well. Next time I will try to make mine also a little nicer. The pic is mine this time and they look silly. But who cares, right. They will get eaten fast anyway. :)

Actor tag

I’ve seen some movies lately that I’ve realized can all be stringed together by the actors in them. I’m going to call it “actor tag”. It’s kind of like a “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. It all started when I saw “Water For Elephants”. Of course, the book was better, but I did enjoy the movie. What I really enjoyed was Christoph Walz as August. He was brilliant and I had to look him up at IMDB. This led me to “Inglorious Bastards” in which he won an Oscar for his role. I liked the movie, but once again Walz was incredible and definitely deserved the Oscar. He’s a German actor, but I hope he’ll continue to appear in more American movies because I’ll see anything he’s in. I didn’t mean for this actor tag streak to continue, but the next movie I saw, “X-Men First Class”, also stars Michael Fassbender who appeared in “Inglorious Bastards”. I didn’t care for the last couple of X-Men movies that came out, but this one is outstanding. I loved getting everyone’s backstory and the actors were great too. (And Kevin Bacon is in it. Ha!). As I was once again on IMDB, trying to figure out where I had seen James McAvoy (first Narina movie) before, I noticed Jennifer Lawrence was in X-Men. I did not realize that was her. So I’m taking it as a sign that I need to see The Hunger Games. I wonder how long I can keep this actor tag game going?