Mini Pizzas!

So, I said there wouldn't be any pizza nights, but I accidentally lied. For the record, though, the pizzas Sarah & I have made are much better than these. That's not to say the English muffin mini cheese pizzas aren't good though. They're super quick & extremely easy, which is the best! Plus they hit that pizza craving spot so that's great. Paired with a side salad and strawberries for dessert & you have a super easy, fresh dinner!

Easiest how to ever: English muffins (halves), tomato or marinara sauce, & cheese. (You can add toppings too, if you want). Bake at 350 until you can smell them & the cheese is melted.

-Amanda

Pesto Pasta & Poultry

So, I realize it has been a crazy long time since we last updated. If there's anyone who avidly reads this, I apologize. May is always a crazy month with school & finals, plus we were both sick for a good portion of the month which means a lot of Campbell's soup & nothing fancy. Sarah is home for the summer now, which means no more pizza nights either.

As I'm going through the kitchen trying to use up all my food before the beginning of the summer, I remembered I haven't made pesto in a while, plus I have a lot of chicken in the freezer that I should cook, and I found leftover sun-dried tomatoes. Here's the end result:

Of course, it wasn't as great as the usual family bbq, but it was pretty good for my homework filled, rainy Memorial Day.

-Amanda

Birthday Cupcakes

My birthday was on Friday and Sarah was super sweet & offered to make me a cake! She realized that we don't have a good cake pan so she made cupcakes! They were funfetti & super moist & super delicious!!

She had a bit of batter left over after making a dozen so she also made some mini cupcakes. But we forgot to take a picture before they were all gone. They were super cute though!

Thanks Sarah!!

-Amanda

It's been a while

Since I haven't updated in so long, I have 3 different meals to add on today.

Salad

Super delicious & healthy! I added almonds, craisens, shredded cheese, sliced ham, and boiled eggs.

Burrito

I'd been craving Qdoba for a while so I made a giant Qdobs inspired burrito. Super delish! It had refried beans, spanish rice, ground turkey, corn, green peppers, and onion. I was super full afterwards.

Pizza

We hadn't made anything in a while so Sarah & I made a pizza tonight. We loaded the sucker with veggies & it was wonderful! Our toppings this time were tomatoes, green peppers, onions, and spinach. Très good! Yum.


-Amanda

Raspberry Spring

It's a beautiful spring day in Chicago, and i decided to use baking as an excuse to get outside. Ok, outside means walking to and from target, but still. I had been wanting to make those cookies with the raspberry in the middle but i left my new cookie cookbook at home. After mild serching online I found an easy recipe. They were really quick and easy to make, the time they took to bake was a little off, but my cookies are a little large.

-Sarah

Happy Easter!

Instead of doing our normal pizza thing this week we optied to make a semi-traditional Easter dinner. We went to Jewel yesterday to pick up everything we needed to make ham, green bean casserole, cheesy potatoes and rolls. It was crowded, being the Saturday before Easter and all, but not pull-your-hair-out-and-order-Chinese crazy. The ham we got did look suspicious, but we went with it anyway.

That brings us to today. Amanda started making the dough for the rolls around 1. Around 3 I started to make the green bean casserole and cheesy potatoes. Both turned out well, though not as good as my moms. I used the recipe on the back of the Frenches fried onions for the green beans and a recipe from my mom for the potatoes.

Amanda handled the suspicious looking ham and the rolls, both of which turned out amazing. The ham took longer to cook than we both thought it was but it was worth it.


After waiting extensivly on the ham we were ready to eat!

Everything tasted amazing and we talked about how we celebrated Easter growing up and thunderstorms.

Happy Easter!

-Sarah

Grilling

Since the weather was so beautiful today, we thought it would be nice to grill up some burgers. There's a gas grill on the patio of our apartment that we wanted to try out. Neither of us had ever used one before but we didn't fail miserably, thanks to the nice guy who was also outside. Though in retrospect, I think the flames were too much because the burgers looked well done but were a little to pink for my liking. But they turned out pretty good nonetheless.

Sarah made a sweet potato for her side.

And I made some pasta salad.
Barbecues are one of the best ways to start spring!

-Amanda

Beignets

So, after we made the tortilla chips earlier tonight I decided I wanted to try and make Beignets. So I made the dough a little after dinner and put it in the fridge, procrastinated, did a little homework, continued to procrastinate and then right before SNL I rolled out the dough, which didn't turn out so well , but I continued frying them up regardless. They don't actually look completely like they are supposed to, but They taste pretty good. All in all it was a pretty good experience.

Espérez votre affamé

-Sarah

Mexican on St. Patrick's Day!

For our weekly food extravaganza we strayed away from Italian and instead went with a Mexican inspired feast. We wanted to use the rest of the peppers we had from Ravioli last week, so we cooked them in a little oil and just let them sit on low heat while we did everything else.

It was cheaper for us to make our own tortilla chips than to buy them, so we heated up some vegetable oil and cut the corn tortillas in quarters and fried them up! It was surprisingly fun and easy, and now we have a ton of extra chips!



Amanda cooked her chicken with a little cayenne pepper and taco seasoning to give it a more spicy, Mexican flavor.

I cooked mine with some pepper and minced garlic.

For a side I made some regular white rice and Amanda made Spanish rice.

Amanda's Dinner-chicken fajitas

My Dinner - I'm not a big fan of Mexican food, so I consider this a huge step in my culinary experience.

We also made some virgin margaritas with ginger ale. Not the most delicious drinks ever but very frothy and festive! Plus its just fun drinking out of margarita glasses.
Happy Green River Day from Chicago!
-Sarah

An Oscar Worthy Dinner

When I was flipping through the cookbook we got last night's ravioli inspiration from I came upon a recipe for Pepper Chicken with Honey Butter. It sounded absolutely amazing so I decided I would make that for dinner. It was very easy. The recipe itself calls for a whole chicken breast, but I've been working my way through a large bag of frozen chicken breast strips, so i used those. So you take the chicken and cover it in coarsely crushed peppercorn, both black and white variates (but I only had black) and cook on the stove with a little oil. The sauce is a 1/4 cup butter and two teaspoons honey. I drizzled some on when the chicken was almost done cooking and then more when I put it on the plate. The sweetness of the honey contrasted nicely with the pepper. For a side dish I made box mashed potatoes which were a cinch to make. It turned out to be a lovely, quick meal.





bon appetit!

-Sarah

Ravioli with Pizazz

So, its Saturday & we decided it was time to try to make something delicious again. We flipped through my amazing Betty Crocker Quick & Easy Cookbook and found a recipe for chicken and garlic ravioli with peppers and sun-dried tomatoes. We kind of improvised & didn't really follow the recipe at all, but it offered as inspiration.

We chopped up fresh green, red, and yellow peppers and added sun-dried tomatoes. Then we seasoned them all with a bit of green pesto.

We used garlic powder and Italian seasoning to season the chicken.

Here's the ravioli that's boiling & Sarah made some carrots with butter and brown sugar.

We mixed it all together and put in a little olive oil and mozzarella cheese.

And the finished product! I don't like cooked carrots so I opted for salad on the side.

A very delicious and colorful meal!

-Amanda

Quick Tasty Treats.

It feels like it has been a while since I've made anything worth writing about. I took pictures of dinner on Monday (pasta with chicken) but it was so mediocre i couldn't bring myself to write about it.

Today I did make Rice Crispy Treats because they are simple and healthier than cookies or brownies. I didn't do anything special to them and it took all of ten minutes. Waiting for them to cool was actually the most time consuming part and since that doesn't require me doing anything I'm not sure it counts...but here are some pictures.




Yum.

-Sarah

Cocoa Cake

The other day my friend Iris came over & we decided to make a cake. My mom sent me a recipe for her delicious homemade cocoa cake & we thought we'd give it a go. It wasn't as great as when Mom makes it, but I'd say it was pretty good nonetheless.

Here's the recipe:

3 c flour

2 c sugar

6 T baking cocoa

1 t baking soda

1/3 c oil

2 T vinegar

1 T vanilla

2 c water

First mix all the dry ingredients. Then add oil, vinegar, vanilla & water; mix until moist.

Bake at 350 for 30 min. Be sure not to open the oven in the first 15 minutes or else the cake will fall.

The frosting was a bit of an estimate-but it turned out delicious!

1/3 c butter

1 t vanilla

A bunch of powdered sugar (we just kinda guessed)

optional: cocoa to taste

optional: small amount of coffee

Then just add milk and mix until its the correct consistency

Enjoy!

-Amanda

(mis)Adventures in Breakfast.

After waking up and being slightly annoyed when i realized it was Sunday, I decided the best way to continue to put off homework (since there is no longer Aziz and dinner to distract me) was to make breakfast. Now I know what you're thinking, I make pretty good looking pancakes, I probably made those. YOUR WRONG. Several weeks ago I attempted to make what I call a Farmers Skillet. In this skillet there are potatoes, eggs, cheese, ham and onions. These are all good things when combined in my favorite omelette, so logic stands that it should taste great all mashed together, right? The first try was a complete failure. Never one to give up on food that logically should be good I tried again.

This time I looked for some tips online and made sure to scramble the eggs over the potatoes (which still seems sketchy to me). Everything else was pretty much the same, I'm out of cheddar so I used American cheese, which I can only hope contains typos because the expiration date read July 2050, lunch meat ham because that's the only kind of ham i have and i didn't think before starting and the potatoes and onions i got from jewel a week or so ago.

Now I'm aware this doesn't look like the most appetizing thing in the world, and you're sort of right, but at least it tasted better than my first try several weeks ago. Next time I think I'll stick to pancakes.

Please note if I die from some weird cheese infection, please sue kraft. Thank you.

-Sarah

Soup & Salad

As that it is freezing cold outside, I decided I wanted to warm up after my night class with a bowl of soup. In the cupboard I had vegetable noodle and tomato. Since a salad also sounded good, I opted for tomato soup because I didn't want a veggie overload. I went online to see if I could find a recipe to add some pizazz to boring tomato soup (also because I'm out of saltine crackers). What I ended up making was Creamy Citrus Tomato Soup with Pesto Croutons and I must say it was pretty delicious. The lemon sauce gave it a bit of zest and it was indeed very creamy. However, if I were to make it again, I think I'd just add some pesto to the soup to give it the garlic flavor and use the toast to just dip in. It was kind of difficult to cut the toast in the bowl and then it got soggy which isn't my favorite texture. But the flavors went really well together so it tasted good.

And in the salad, I added a tomato slice, green pepper, shredded mozzarella, craisins and almond slices to spring mix greens with spinach leaves. Then I topped it off with Italian dressing. Possibly my favorite salad creation, I used to make it this way all the time at the salad bar in the DePaul cafeteria-but I bet the veggies are much more fresh this way.

-Amanda

Pancake day!

I made pancakes and hash browns for dinner. The pancakes are the same as from an earlier post. The hash browns were just grated potatoes with a little onion and pepper. They don't look fully cooked but they are, i just used a really bad pan.

Happy Pancake Day everyone!

-Sarah

Calzone & Ed Byrne, what a lovely way to spend the evening

I believe its been about two weeks since we last made a pizza (and began this blog) so Sarah & I decided it was due time to try our hand at pizza once again. This time we wanted to be more creative than last so we made a calzone! Since I have about 3 weeks experience working at a pizza joint (Cheezies, gotta love it) I mustered up my memory on how to make these bad boys.

We wanted something different than just regular pizza & were inspired by the chicken, bacon, ranch flavor combination. We substituted marinara sauce for good ole Kraft ranch salad dressing (on sale at Target even!) and also added tomato, onion & green pepper to the meats. I almost forgot to put in the cheese but luckily Sarah reminded me before we put it in the oven.

We were much better at multi-tasking this time around. Here's all the prep work we did while the dough finished rising. Go us, right?

Despite what you may think by looking at this photo, the calzone didn't fall off the counter.

And the finished product. We brushed the crust with melted butter & garlic salt to keep it soft.

And we finished off our lovely evening by watching Ed Byrne, one of our favorite Irish comedians. Admittedly, he's one of the few Irish comedians I know, but still. Watch this, you'll laugh.

-Amanda

A Red and White Affair

Amanda's mom sent each of us a great Valentines day bag with lots of candy and cute erasers. In the bag was a huge 12 oz bag of Valentines day M&M's. As I am not one to open a bag of M&M's on my own and just eat them straight, I decided to make cookies with them. Of course I was out of both eggs and butter when I made this decision (which was on Wednesday) and only got around to making them this afternoon.

Baking seems to be become a weekend ritual for me and a lovely distraction from homework.

This is the recipe for Red's Ultimate M&M'S Cookies. I am not a huge nut fan so I didn't use any. I also like that they put the nutrition information at the bottom so I at least know how bad they are for me.

As I am trying to become a more organized person, I gathered all the ingredients I needed before I started baking. I have a picture to prove it!
After mixing making about a dozen cookies I began to get concerned because they were much crispier than I like, and our oven is known to get hotter than it is supposed to, so after carefully watching the next batch they came out looking delirious and not at all crispy. The whole process took about 10 minutes of prep and then about an hour to cook all of the cookies, plus another 10 minutes of clean up and a incident with the hand mixer.

Here are (almost) all of the finished cookies. This recipe makes around 50 cookies, so don't say you haven't been warned!

-Sarah

Salsa Chicken

When I went grocery shopping at the beginning of the quarter I bought quite a few chicken breasts that have since been forgotten in the freezer. Well, yesterday I decided I should actually make something with one of them. I had some left over refried beans and rice from a couple of days ago, so I thought I'd cook the chicken in a way that would complement those flavors. What I ended up doing was putting cayenne pepper on the chicken as it was cooking. When it was nearly done, I added medium salsa and let the chicken absorb the flavors. The salsa somehow caramelized or something and it tasted kind of like a spicy barbecue sauce, but with onions and peppers on top. Then while I was reheating my leftovers, I topped the chicken with some cheese.

¡Lo era muy delicioso!

-Amanda

Like the worlds biggest Reese's cup but better

As Valentines Day is Sunday and I have no plans for any typical Valentines Day activities I decided to make Peanut Butter Brownies. I had to go to target to pick up the brownie mix and icing, and realized we were also out of vegetable oil and brown sugar. So after getting all of those things together and emptying the dishwasher I set out to recreate the brownies we made last October.
Here is everything you need to make Peanut Butter Brownies, along with my pitiful excuse for a mixing bowl (or the pink thing behind the brownie mix).

Here is the batter already marbled and ready to bake!

Out of the oven, waiting for frosting.

After the brownies came out of the oven I made dinner, so while i was waiting for my potato pancakes to cook I mixed together the peanut butter frosting and added it to the brownies

Now for a taste test!


As predicted, the brownies taste amazing!

Happy Valentines Day, everyone!

<3 Sarah