Updated Pizza Soup

I added Pepperoni bits to my Pizza Soup it was so great! Try it!

Sweet and Sour Meatballs

This is a recipe the beautiful Caitlin Spratling gave me from the Wide Ward Cookbook. Oh wow. These are amazing! She deserves like 10 golden stars for sharing this. Seriously.

Sweet and Sour Meatballs

Meatballs:
2 lb lean ground beef
1 C rolled oats
2 eggs, slightly beaten
2/3 C onion, finely chopped (or 1/4 C dehydrated onion)
1 1/4 tsp salt
few grains pepper
1 1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce
2/3 C milk

Sauce (I like to 1 1/2 this):
1 C brown sugar
1/2 C vinegar
2 tsp prepared mustard
1/2 C bbq sauce
2 tsp worcestershire sauce

Combine meatball ingredients and form into balls about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Place in casserole dish in a single layer. In a bowl combine the sauce ingredients, mix, then pour over the meatballs. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 min. Serve over rice.

I am getting surgery next week so we made a whole bunch and froze them so we can have them for later. The sauce is SO good! We did it without the mustard, and doubled the sauce. So I would suggest doing that. I can't wait to eat these! Thanks Caitlin!

Fail

This isn't a recipe. This is a recipe fail. I wanted to be all cute and domestic for my husband tonight. Ya, that didn't work. I combined a whole bunch of stuff in the crock pot, (ie:spices, pepperoni, butter, rice and beans.) Come to find out, the water was soaked up into the rice. And not the beans. And I think the beans being expired didn't help at all. So...it smelled great. The goodness stopped there though.

So IF that meal wouldn't have sucked so bad, I would have had a new recipe for you all. I am HOPING to have a new one tomorrow though! Yahoo! Ps. We bought Arby's for dinner. And they forgot my bacon. So...a little of a dinner bummer tonight, but you all will have to be patient :)

Mashed Potatoes

Tonight I tried to add some extra stuff to bagged mashed potatoes to make it more delicious and I decided this:

Fake mashed potatoes are always disgusting. Make real ones.

So here is how I make my mashed potatoes:

potatoes

butter

ranch dressing

milk

salt

Boil peeled potatoes until you can squish them to the side of the pot, drain. Blend all these things together until it is a consistency you enjoy. DO NOT take the potatoes out of the potmuntil you are sure they are well squishable :)

I don't really measure that well with these. You just do however much you like. Let's say...

4 potatoes

1/2 a stick-3/4 stick butter

um...ranch dressing to taste

1/4ish cup milk (that one is very hard)

salt

That is all very relative. I apologize. What did we learn from today my friends??

Fake potatoes :(

Real potatoes :)

Cake Pops

Okay. So before I say anything. This recipe is fun and delicious, but please go into it with patience and lots of time. :) Also keep in mind this was my first attempt and may not be the best way to do this. It's what I did though. And some of it was fun. But all of it was tasty :)

1 box cake mix

1/2-1 tub of regular sized frosting (I did cream cheese)

2 things almond bark or baking chips

Lollipop sticks

Styrofoam something

Bake your cake as you would normally, let cool. Tear your cake into little bits, like so. Make sure they are small. Chunks are no good.

Mix frosting in with bits. Roll in balls, put on very lightly sprayed cookie sheet. (It helps if you spray your hands with cooking spray. It gets pretty sticky.) Get a little bit of the coating and melt it, dip the end of the sticks in it, then stick in the balls so they are sticking straight up. (The coating helps the sticks stay in the cake balls.) Put in freezer for at least a few hours.

This is the part I couldn't do and ended up having my husband and some friends do. Melt the bark or chips either on stove or in microwave, dip balls in them. If the pan or bowl is too shallow you can get a spoon and kind of spoon it on there and twirl if so it looks all pretty. Stick in styrofoam to let coating set. I would suggest putting a towel under it incase it drips.

Do not let the coating cook for too long. It gets grainy, gross, unusable and frustrating. Also if you have too much coating on one cake ball, it becomes WAY too intensely sweet. Try to find a nice even medium.

End product

The cake balls that I did. Not that pretty right?

The cake pops Jon and my friends did...hm...weird.