For the record...

Everyone LOVED dinner tonight! Usually there's one person (usually L) who is not happy about at least one part of dinner. Tonight: no complaints AT ALL and plenty of asking for seconds! YES! (fist pumping). That was awesome.

So I don't forget it, it was super easy. We had potato soup (T helped to make it - she's made it by herself before, it's a really easy recipe), rolls, and a green salad. Last time I made potato soup it was a hit except for D - and this time he loved it!

If you want the recipe - it's nothing fancy, but I've tweaked it some - here it is. It makes quite a bit, we'll have enough for another meal at least. Easily halved.

Potato Soup (easily made dairy-free, too)
6-7 med. to large potatoes, washed, peeled,* and diced
3T dried onion flakes**
1T dried parsley
1T kosher salt
4T butter
1 can coconut milk
a few grinds black pepper
2 Qts (8cups) water

Bring water to a boil (I forgot to do this first, and just dumped everything in first - still worked), THEN add potatoes, onions, parsley, salt, and pepper. Cover and lower temp - cook until potatoes are done - about 45 min.

Mash potatoes with a hand masher. Stir in butter and coconut milk. Simmer 15 min. uncovered - don't boil. It will thicken up some as it cools. We add some grated cheese to the bowls, and some people like diced ham thrown in as well. It doesn't taste like coconut in these proportions, but when I've halved the recipe I must have used more than 1/2 a can, as it did some - but still yummy. The original recipe called for some evaporated milk.

* I peeled about 1/2 of them. You don't have to peel any of them, really.

** Onion flakes are not my fave to cook with, but it makes this recipe REALLY easy. You could use fresh onion, but I would saute it first probably?

funyun casserole!

Kris is considering ending his 10 year streak as a vegetarian for this. We love that the can of vegetables is totally optional.

worthy of praise

We had a dinner tonight that was fantastic, and worthy of praise. Just a few vegetables that came together to make something delicious. A salad: lettuce greens, toasted pecans with a pinch of brown sugar, onion and golden beets roasted to perfection (drizzled with balsamic, olive oil, and honey before cooking), avocado, goat cheese, a little brown rice, and olive oil and balsamic for a dressing. Oven sweet potato fries: sliced, tossed in olive oil and kosher salt. It was excellent! If only we had worked in bell peppers, sautéed greens, and cherries it would have been the perfect meal for Dad Jorgensen :).

While the Jorgensens were here we ate another dinner that is worthy of praise. I had been wanting to try a new fennel recipe and found this one. However, I wasn't home to make it, so Mom Jorgensen whipped it up even though she had to improvise on 1/3 of the ingredients. Thanks! We substituted spicy veggie sausages for the Italian sausage, left out the mushrooms (but did cauliflower on the side), used plain yogurt instead of cream, and used goat cheese instead of Parmesan. I guess that means she had to improvise on 1/2 the ingredients, oops! Sorry for not doing a better job prepping for that one Gayle. Anyway, it was excellent as it was. I think the regular recipe would be delicious too. The cauliflower was a great side dish.

What did you eat for dinner?

cake pops

A friend of mine told me about the website foodgawker.com. This website has now become a problem for me b/c I love pictures of food. The first day I looked at it there was a link to a site about cake pops. I hadn't ever heard of them before, but apparently they were all over the internet in 2008. Sam saw the picture and fixated on the idea that we needed to make them and with Valentine's Day coming up we decided to go for it.


Most of the recipes I found sounded disgusting--a box of cake mix (baked), mashed up with canned frosting. Form that into balls and dip into some cheap, waxy chocolate. Yuck. However, Martha Stewart also had a recipe which is the one I opted for, although I cut out half of the sugar in the cake and didn't bother with two different colors to dip it in.

Sorry, I don't have any pictures of ours, but they looked a lot like the ones above. We tried doing chocolate cake with the cream cheese, buttercream frosting and dipping them in white chocolate, but Kris accidentally sabotaged our melting white chocolate. We ended up with chocolate centers dipped in melted dark chocolate and put sprinkles on the outside or stuck a conversation heart on. I was prepared to feel about them the way I feel about cupcakes--so-so. However, they were surprisingly good. I saved half the filling and froze it which I think will come in handy for Sam's 4th birthday.

Hope you had a nice Valentine's Day treat too!

Sunday Dinner

So our church time just switched to 1-4. We've always hated afternoon church, but have to admit it's not so bad now that the kids are a little older. At any rate, we're trying to come up with a good plan for Sunday dinners. Ideally they aren't much work, and really they can't be since we're pretty much all starving by 5-ish. But we want GOOD food since there are several weeknights (between dance and basketball - MOST weeknights) that we aren't home right before dinner so we have to have easy meals then.

Yesterday our Sunday dinner was awesome. Aaron pulled some ribs out of the freezer (he'd bought them on sale a while back) poured half a bottle of Famous Dave's BBQ sauce on it (usually we make our own, but you know... time) and put it in the crockpot in the morning. I got out some Rhodes rolls before we left for church. When we came home we baked the rolls, broiled the ribs with a little more sauce, and thawed/warmed some leftover mash potatoes from the freezer. Oh, and washed some lettuce for a salad.
YUM.
So crock pot might be the way to go... and the Rhodes rolls worked really well time-wise.

And we got yummy leftovers for lunch today. No more mashed potatoes, though, and the roll is replaced by our crusty bread (but it was hot - yum).


Anyone have any awesome Sunday Dinner After Late Church suggestions?

Now who should I get this for for Christmas...

A small part of the blurb on amazon:

" ...the self-proclaimed "King of the Kitchen Pimps" teaches readers how to become a "ghetto gourmet" with basics like scallops "rap'd" in bacon, shrimp cocktail (Cold Shrimpin'), spaghetti (Bro-Ghetti)..."

Awesome.

eating well

Last night we decided to try out the Corvette Diner which was rumored to have housemade vegetarian bean burgers and delicious fries. Both rumors were true, but that place was crazy. It is a 50s themed ginormous restaurant complete with a live DJ (spinning oldies, taking requests), poodle skirt wearing hostesses, dancing servers, a disco ball, an arcade, an ice cream counter, and more. The dancing servers made Kris and I feel so uncomfortable, especially when we remembered Eva's stories of her worst job ever. The kids loved that part. The lights refracted off the disco ball were also super exciting for the kids. Lucy kept pointing to things, wide-eyed, saying, "Uh-bu-duh. Bah-bee." I don't know what that means but she was having a ball. Sam's favorite part was the ice cream sundae and the arcade. Anyway...

Kris bought me the cuisinart ice cream maker for mother's day (I think Mom and Dad Jorgie have it?). Love it. Last week I made chocolate coconut milk ice cream that included melted dark chocolate and cocoa powder (plus a pinch of granulated coffee to bring out the chocolate flavor, a little chocolate cake baking trick I learned). Pow! That's seriously how it tasted in my mouth. It was excellent. I have no idea what the proportions were but hopefully I can recreate it someday.