Cooking adventures

Lasagna rollups! Pretty good. Make sure to season the filling otherwise it might be a bit bland, as I experienced. You might also try putting a little bit of sauce in the middle of the rollup. This is meatless, but I would definitely try making it with Italian sausage or ground beef or turkey browned then added to the sauce that was set aside to pour over the top.

Ingredients:
- 8-9 lasagna noodles
- 1 jar of spaghetti sauce
- 16 oz ricotta cheese
- A couple handfuls of mozzarella cheese
- 1 egg, beaten

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Make the noodles to a ply-able tenderness and let them cool or you’ll burn your fingers. Pour about half the jar of spaghetti in to the bottom of a 9x13 dish. Put more water into the jar and then shake it, set it aside.

Mix together cheeses and the beaten egg. Season with salt and pepper, perhaps some onion or garlic powder. I put out a sheet of parchment paper and worked with three noodles at a time. Slather the noodles with the cheese mixture, then roll them up and place them in the baking dish on top of the sauce. Continue the steps until you have a baking dish full of rollups. Pour the rest of the sauce on top and then sprinkle more cheese on top.

Cover the dish and put it in the oven for 40 minutes. Then uncovered and bake for 10 more. The cheese on top should be melty.

Pasta salad! I love it. It’s so versatile. I grab a bottle of Italian salad dressing, some kind of noodles and then a variety of veggies. This was grape tomatoes, black olives and steamed snap peas. Plus lots of Parmesan cheese. I think goat cheese would be good too.

Coconut Chicken with Apricot Sauce from Pennies on a Platter. This was pretty tasty. I was able to cook three large chicken breasts from this recipe. I cooked on a baking sheet with aluminum foil, which next time I’ll use pyrex or something. The breading stuck to the foil when I pulled it from the oven. It wasn’t coconut-y enough for me. Not sure how to fix that without adding more coconut. The sauce was just ok for me, but was good for my dining partner.

Prosciutto, Asparagus and Parmesan Spaghetti from ValSoCal. This was sooo good. I didn’t include the mushrooms and replaced the onions with onion powder. Next time I think I’ll use thicker asparagus, my grocery story only had pencil thin ones. And I’ll probably make more sauce. I had enough to coat the pasta, but I like a saucy plate. I wish I had leftovers of this, but nope. Everything got devoured.

What to do with leftover Easter ham? Why, make fried rice. Yum. I fry up the ham in butter and brown sugar before frying up the rice with butter and garlic and the peas. Or, when I’m not making rice and just making ham, I microwave it with butter and brown sugar. hehe.

Grapes covered in goat cheese and walnuts from A Daily Something. Simple appetizer for Easter lunch. I think the hardest part was getting the goat cheese to cover the grapes fully. But it was like a sweet, tangy, crunchy bite.

Pizza crescent rolls! I had a tube of crescent rolls approaching their expiration date and I needed dinner. I had pepperoni and mozzarella string cheese. Each crescent roll got three pepperonis and a small piece of the string cheese. Baked and then served with a side of pizza sauce. Yum and fast.

“Crack Potatoes” from Plain Chicken. These were pretty good. I ate a bowl for dinner with a salad. The parts on the side where they were a bit crispy were the best part. There were still some potatoes that had a bit more bite to them which I wasn’t a big fan of. Maybe use fewer potatoes so they cook longer? I did bake the dish for 60 minutes.

Salted Caramel Butter Bars from Cookies & Cups, which is becoming one of my favorite food blogs. Delicious. Seriously. One bite caused my bf to call me a goddess.

It wasn’t really salted caramel, I didn’t have coarse salt. I had a salt grinder, and I didn’t want to go overboard. Unwrapping the caramels had to be the hardest, most time-consuming part of this recipe. I ended up with a lot more dough than I needed. Or I was supposed to do half and half for the crust and the topping.

Bunny cake. Isn’t it cute? Full recipe with step-by-step instructions, click here.

Happy Pi Day! By request, I made a square banana cream pie. I used a graham cracker crust and then adapted the filling from Joyful Baker. I made my own whipped cream to fold in (a little less than a pint of heavy whipping cream, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar).

And I accidentally didn’t follow certain directions. I ended up folding the cream cheese/condensed milk mixture into the pudding before folding in the whipped cream. But I folded the whipped cream into the pudding/cream cheese/condensed milk mixture. So extra folding.

Still all of it was tasty.

Pizza! Pepperoni and black olive. So yummy. I used a mozzarella and parmesan mix for the cheese.

Easy Garlic Chicken from Food.com. So I went through the comments and adapted the recipe a bit. I browned the chicken in olive oil before sticking it in the pan. Then with the garlic/brown sugar mixture, I added a couple splashes of chicken broth (made from water and bouillon) so that it would be slightly more saucy. I set my oven at 400 degrees and baked the chicken for half an hour to finish it. Pretty tasty. More sweet than garlicky which was fine by me.

Honey Beer Bread from Gimme Some Oven. Delish! The loaf I made today is pretty much gone. The only problem was that we had a slight overflow in the oven. Not sure if it was just that the pan wasn’t deep enough or there was too much butter.

Nutella filled crescent rolls. OMG yum. Just slathered Nutella on the crescent roll dough and baked for 12 minutes. Yum.