Skillet Cornbread

We got some snow yesterday.  Like a foot.  For most working adults, a foot of snow means shoveling the car out of the driveway and navigating treacherous roads.  For those of us who work in the school system, a foot of snow means you can hit the snooze button because it's a snow day!  And if you're a foodie who has a snow day, that means spending all day in the kitchen.  And staying in your pajamas as long as humanly possible.  Maybe that last one's just me. I love wearing my PJ's.

Wardrobe aside, I think it should be a law that if you have the day off of work due to a massive snowstorm, you should be required to make soup.  Write your congressmen and women.  On this particular snow day, I chose my delicious very veggie beef and bean chili as my soup du jour (it's the soup of the day [and that's a Dumb and Dumber reference]).  I also think it should be a law that when you make chili, you must make cornbread.  With all these great ideas, maybe I should run for Congress!  I have a great go-to low fat cornbread recipe.  But yesterday, I felt like trying something new.  I've had skillet cornbread on my radar for a while, so it seemed like the day to give it a shot.  Could I have a new favorite cornbread recipe?

Honey Whole Wheat Dinner Rolls

I am going to be a little liberal with the term "Makeover Monday" today.  But, hey, this is my blog so I can do whatever I want!  Honestly, we have been doing so much traveling for the holidays that I haven't spent much time in my own kitchen.  And I can't say I've been making a lot of healthy foods recently.  Oops.

But today I am going to share an amazing recipe for whole wheat dinner rolls.  It's whole wheat, and I used skim milk instead of whole milk, so I'm calling that good enough for a makeover.  I have tried making whole wheat dinner rolls a couple of times before finding this recipe in an issue of Cook's Country.  My previous recipes resulted in dense, short, and basically tasteless balls of bread that were certainly not worth the time it took to make them.  

Not so with these.  Cook's Country never disappoints.  This recipe gave me rolls that were tall, with a tasty wheaty flavor, but still light and fluffy.  And they were actually easier to make then I remember.  This recipe is definitely a keeper!

Makeover Monday: Black Cherry Salad

For those of you who don't know me personally, I recently started a new chapter of my career as the food service director for my old high school and elementary school.  I never dreamed when I was eating school lunches at Beloit High School that I would one day be planning said meals, but I am!  And as someone who loves food, I am totally loving this career move!

One of the best things about my new job is that I get a free lunch every day.  And despite what the kiddos might say, I think our meals are awesome!  Unfortunately, they might be too awesome.  I have found myself perhaps eating a tad too much on occasion.  Okay, practically every day!  So to make up for my overindulgence during the day, I have been cutting back in the evening, especially with dessert.  My only problem is that I have a serious sweet tooth.  

So to satisfy my sweet tooth I turned to this delicious black cherry salad.  I tweaked it slightly to cut out some calories so I could feel even less guilty about my yummy lunches.  It totally hit the spot!  You might have noticed by my lack of posts for a while that I have been a little busy since school has started.  Another bonus of this "dessert" is that it took almost no time to make.  Perfect!

Makeover Monday: Sweet and Sour Chicken with Fried Brown Rice

Add Chinese food to the list of things I didn't like as a kid, and now can't get enough of. In case you're keeping track at home, that list now includes chocolate and beans as well. I think Chinese food was one of those things I just decided one day I didn't like and I refused to eat it. I went many, many years without trying it. That changed in college when I experienced the food nirvana that is Panda Express. I don't even remember the first time I gave Chinese food another chance, but I'm so glad I did.

Unfortunately, I don't make Chinese food at home very often. I have no good explanation for this. It just doesn't happen a lot. Tragic, I know!  But the excuse I'm going to use today is that when I get Chinese food, I get chicken.  And most of the recipes I have for Chinese chicken are fried. I'm not a food saint, but food just doesn't get fried in my house. A few weeks ago I remembered that I had a recipe for sweet and sour sauce scribbled in a cookbook and I decided it was time to try it out. But I wasn't going to put it on pieces of fried chicken. So I took a shot at pan-frying some chicken pieces and adding this sauce to make my own healthier version of sweet and sour chicken.  And I'm happy to report that it turned out even better than I had hoped!

Maple Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Recently I found myself with another giant sweet potato from my neighbors to prepare.  I wanted sweet potatoes with some steak I was making.  I was broiling the steaks, so cooking sweet potatoes in the oven as I did with my honey-roasted sweet potatoes and balsamic vinaigrette oven-baked sweet potatoes fries wasn't an option.  I have also made sweet potato bread and rosemary sweet potato biscuits, but I had been eating bread with my French onion soup and garlic bread with spaghetti so I wasn't in the mood for bread.  Then a great idea came to me.  How about mashed sweet potatoes?

I have never made mashed sweet potatoes before, or even had them for that matter.  But it sounded pretty good.  I did some searching on the internet and found approximately 1 zillion recipes for mashed sweet potatoes.  As I often do, I basically picked various things I liked from the different recipes I found and came up with my own version.  One recipe I saw had maple in it.  I knew I was keeping that idea!  Some had cinnamon in the mashed potatoes, but I decided I would leave that as a garnish in case I decided I didn't want it.  Most recipes called for adding milk, but I opted for using the water I boiled the potatoes in.  It worked out really well because the sweet potato is naturally a little silkier than a traditional Russet potato.  Plus by reusing that water, you reclaim some of the nutrients that are lost in boiling the potatoes.

Makeover Monday: Skinny Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Be honest.  How many of you rolled your eyes when you saw the tittle of this post.  You might be thinking this is just another low fat mashed potato recipe that is going to leave you with a flavorless, unsatisfying glob of potatoes.  If that's the case, you are wrong!  These potatoes are just as rich, creamy, and delicious as the garlic mashed potatoes you get at your favorite restaurant, but with way less calories.  As a matter of fact, these are not just low fat; they have fewer carbs than regular mashed potatoes.  Interested yet?

This recipe is brilliant on three levels:  1.  Sauteing garlic in margarine and sugar.  2.  Cooking small chunks of potatoes in the liquid you would otherwise add to potatoes.  3.  Substitute some of the potatoes for cauliflower.  All the other one zillion mashed potato recipes I have tried are now dead to me!

Roasted Carrots with Onion and Thyme

I have always loved carrots.  They are crunchy, versatile, nutritious, and even slightly sweet.  You know I like sweet stuff!  But for some reason, when they are cooked, they lose some of their appeal to me.  In theory, roasted carrots should be great.  Roasting veggies releases their natural sugars and brings out great flavor.  But it can also leave you with dried out, shriveled up, carrot jerky.

So a few days ago, when I found myself needing a veggie to serve with dinner and nothing around but carrots, I sought out to make a roasted carrot side dish that was actually as good as it should be.  I found a recipe for roasted carrots in Cook's Illustrated, and I knew I had recipe gold.  

Honey-Roasted Sweet Potatoes

I recently received another batch of ginormous sweet potatoes from my neighbors.  Happy dance!  Like the last batch, these are too big to just stick in the oven and bake.  So I cut one of them up and roasted it.  As much as I love a good baked sweet potato with butter, cinnamon, and sugar, these slightly sweetened roasted sweet potatoes are now near and dear to my heart. 

This was an experiment gone right for me!  I have roasted sweet potatoes with rosemary and olive oil before, but I wanted to try something new this time.  Thanks to a bad experience as a child, I do not really like honey.  But I tolerate it baked in foods, and it complemented the natural sweetness of the sweet potato.  And the olive oil and salt gave it a nice sweet/savory/salty combo.  Yummy!  

Makeover Monday: Cranberry Walnut Jell-O Salad

The week of Thanksgiving is upon us!  After a two year hiatus, I am finally returning to my parents' house to have Thanksgiving with my family and I could not be more excited. As the big day quickly approaches, I find myself thinking about my favorite dishes that my mom has been making every year for as long as I can remember.  While I love them all, perhaps the one I get the most excited about every year is this Cranberry Walnut Jell-O salad.  I know that Jell-O salads aren't usually the star of the show, but for some reason I can never get enough of this stuff.  It is sweet, tart, crunchy, and just plain good.  With cranberries, apples, oranges, and walnuts, it is a perfect dish for this time of the year.

As with many of the recipes I have requested from my mom over the years, I was a little surprised when I saw that this seemingly healthy side dish was deceptively unhealthy.  It had a cup of sugar!  I've eaten desserts with less sugar than that.  And that is on top of the 73 grams of sugar in the package of Jell-O.  Ouch!  But I loved this recipe too much to just forget about it.  I was going to make it myself.  I was going to enjoy it without feeling guilty.  And I was definitely going to eat it more than once a year.