Only the Tastiest Bean Dip

It's summer! Or at least the drippy, humid version of summer we normally only get for a few weeks in Ohio. Anyhow, here's some bean dip I plan to make for watching movies in the air conditioning, as well as wrapped in tortillas for instant leftover burritos on the sly. Hooray, slothlike ingenuity!

Bean Dip

1 small tub (pint?) sour cream
1 can refried beans
1 can black beans
1 can corn n' peppers
1 pound ground beef,
cooked w/ taco seasoning
1 can diced tomatoes with jalapenos,
(or green chilis, whatever they sell)
1 package cheese

Cook for 30 minutes at 350 degrees, covered with aluminum foil. Let cool and enjoy!

1. Coat bottom of a 9x13 with sour cream

2. Then, refried beans. They usually just mix together instead of layering, oh well...

3. Black beans, drained.

4. Taco meat. Mmmmmm

5. Corn n' peppers...

6. Spicy tomatoey goodness. Yes!

7. Aaaand my favorite, cheese.

8. Ready for consumption!

Bacon Shell Meatloaf

ARGH I haven't put anything up here in a while, it's been a crazy quarter. Luckily, I've now lost all reservations about skipping classes, so it's getting easier. Soon it'll be summer, and I'll have all the reading time I can get my claws on! Oh, and lots of experimental cooking time. I'm thinking very seriously about buying an ice cream maker and trying to put Jeni's out of business, or gaining at least 20 lbs trying to. My last ice cream recipe just didn't have the creamy texture of, say, Denise's Ice Cream (RIP), and I'd love to make crazier flavors like the Guinness recipe I've been eyeing. AND it would be awesome now the pool is opening up! What a great weekend!

Anyway, I made this a looong time ago, but Memorial Day weekend is the perfect occasion to put it up, so here it is...

First step: mixing ingredients together. I even fried the green peppers with bacon grease...

Somehow, raw meat looks even less appetizing in tube shapes.

After mixing it all together by hand, I had no idea how to get this huge ball of meat into the pan delicately. It didn't help that my hands were covered in raw meat chunks like some b-movie monster. RAAARRGH!

It worked, but it turns out that meat in this quantity is by nature pretty ridiculous. I mean, look at this giant loaf! HAHAHA!

Bacon shell. What more can I say?

DO NOT DO THIS STEP. It looks delicious (which is the only reason why I put it up), but the bacon can't get nice and crispy and just releases water (which you'll see in the last picture).

Oh yeah! The recipe:

Bacon Shell Meatloaf

1 package BACON
1 lb beef
1 lb italian sausage
1 egg
1 green pepper
1 sweet onion
1/2 cup bread crumbs
2 tsp garlic
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1 bottle bbq sauce, half for inside the loaf, half for the topping

1. Cut up your green pepper and onions. (OPTIONAL: Fry a few strips of bacon, then fry the green peppers and onions in the grease. Mix everything in during step 2).

2. Mix all the ingredients but the bacon together. It's best to do this for your hands, so make sure you have some soap on standby for afterwards.

3. Form your meat into a loaf in a pan. It's best to have an actual loaf pan for this, but I used a 9x13 pan.

4. Layer bacon on top and cook uncovered for 45 minutes on 350 degrees. Dump on a bunch of barbecue sauce and cook for another 10 minutes.

Behold the almighty BACON LOAF. (And disregard the bacon water it's swimming in, oops)

BACON BACON Baked Beans

USA USA USA! Hey everybody, I officially got into art ed and I'm celebrating with lots and lots of BACON! Here's some baked beans. They're sooo good and they remind me of summer which is great because it's finally starting to act like spring! Thanks a lot, Ohio!

BACON

BACON BACON
Diced BACON (4 pieces, I ate the rest)

Cut up a green pepper...

...and fry it in the BACON grease. Mmmmm
Toss everything in a bowl and mix.

Grab spoon. Devour.

BACON Baked Beans

1 package of BACON (yes, you must capitalize it at all times)
1 green pepper
3 cans great northern beans
1/2 cup bbq sauce (at least)
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp mustard

1. Fry up your BACON. You only need 4 strips, but I did the whole package and ate the rest. YUMMM
2. Dice up the slices, as well as the pepper. Brown the pepper chunks in the bacon grease.
3. Get a bowl and mix everything together. Don't drain the beans and include all the grease with the peppers, it may look gross but it tastes awesome.
4. Dump this all in a dish and bake 35-40 minutes at 350.

Pink Pasta Salad

This could also just be titled "what I wolfed down while finishing The Hunger Games." Both were pretty good, although I felt a little bad reading about kids who had starved to death while I was completely stuffed with this goodness. Mmmmmm.....

It's quick and dirty. I just made it up on the fly, so really anything goes. All you need to start the one I made is to chop up some pickled beets and a cucumber.

It is obscene how much I love pickled beets.

Fry up some chicken and onion chunks, as well as a handful of pasta....

With garlic, butter, and basil this smelled soooo good.

Then just throw it all in together with some italian dressing! I forgot how easy and delicious it is. Ok so here's my big girl recipe, all written out....

Pink Pasta Salad
1 cucumber
1 can pickled beets (YES!)
1 onion
1 lb boneless, skinless chicken
(i used thighs to save money, but breasts would probably have tasted better)
about a handful of pasta
(I used whole wheat angel hair)
To taste:
Italian dressing
garlic, salt, onion powder, basil, whatever else floats your culinary boat

Chop the first four ingredients into bite sized chunks. Put the cucumber and the beets in a bowl, set aside. Throw your chicken chunks and onion in a pan along with some olive oil, and whatever spices you like. At this point I also added a little wine to cook because I am an unapologetic wino. So there.

Anyhow while your covered pan is cooking away, start boiling up the pasta. Basically at this point you just have to wait until everything on the stove is done. Strain your pasta and dump it in the bowl with the veggies, then add the chicken mixture. Stir it all up with the dressing and add whatever more flavoring you'd like. At this point if you're a pickled beet fanatic like me, add more juice from the pickled beet can. Rejoice.

Cover it in plastic wrap and store in the fridge. Oh, and do what I do and grab a bowl before it chills. Who cares if it's warm, It's delicious!

Yeild: One giant, steaming bowl of awesome.

I should've added zucchini. Oooo or apples!

Chamomile Tea Cookies

Well it could use any tea really, but I love chamomile. They ended up a little too crispy for me, but they would be great dipped in milk, coffee, etc.

Loose tea looks fancy, but the finer shreds in a cheap tea bag would work just as well.

Take 1 tablespoon of tea, then crush it up with a spoon or something like a crazy person. Dump in flour, sugar, powdered sugar, and salt....

....then butter, water, and vanilla until you get a nice little ball of dough. I may or may not have added yellow food coloring to make it look more chamomile-y. I'm not tellin.

Roll it out to 1/4 or 1/3 of an inch...

It stuck to the table way too much. Arrrhghh

Now you may ask me, why the maple leaf? What do tea cookies have to do with Canada? Well...



TFC hate cookies! (TFC= Toronto fc, MLS) I couldn't think of too much creative stuff to put on them, but hey. I'm excited for Columbus to win this Saturday. :D

OK! The recipe:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
1 tablespoon Chamomile Tea
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon water
1/2 cup butter(8 tbsp)

Preheat oven to 375. Crush up your tea leaves and mix it in with your dry ingredients. Add everything else until it makes a dough ball, then roll it out into about a 1/4 inch sheet. Use your cookie cutters, or just make your dough into a log you can keep in your fridge and slice off chunks when you want to bake just a few cookies. Bake on a pan (greased or parchment-lined) for 12 min, then decorate with whatever Toronto-hating slurs you can come up with.

Yeild: about 12 TFC hate cookies.


Oh, and garden update.........

All but one plant is dying or is already dead. Go blackeyed susan, go!

I Heart You Pancakes

Perfect!

I love love love looove pancakes! I make them every Sunday. The best trick I learned from mom is not to stir the flour too much or else it will go flat. My favorite are the nutella pancakes, but the brown sugar cinnamon ones are pretty good too.

Did you know pancake in spanish is el panqueque? It's an even better word when you say it like this(click the speaker to the right of the word in spanish. Teehee)

Plain Ol' Pancakes

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
Pinch or two of salt
1 scant tbsp sugar
2 eggs
2 tbsp butter
1 1/3 cups milk

Mix together the dry stuff, then the wet. It should be about the consistency of lumpy pudding. Drop it in the pan and wait till it gets dry and bubbly around the edge, then flip it.

Ok, now this is where it gets fun....

Cinnamon Brown Sugar Pancakes
Add about 2 tsp(give or take) to your pancake batter. When you drop it in the pan, wait a few seconds, then put about a teaspoon of brown sugar on top. Put more batter on top, then flip. It tastes great with caramel syrup on top.

Brown Sugar Filling

But I haven't made those in forever ever since I started using nutella for a filling instead. Same method and everything, just extra delicious.

NUTELLAAH!

Heaven.

Mornin Casserole

Goooooey

My good buddy (since 7th grade!) Kayleigh came to visit this weekend, which of course meant a giant saturday breakfast. We had casserole and Nutella pancakes, and watched a terrible, terrible movie on netflix. It was AWFUL, and not in the good way. All in all, very fun. Also here's a squirrel that was rummaging around outside my kitchen window...

I tried making squeeky noises, but it only made him angry.

Anyway, I just kind of made this up as I went along. I'd like to make this again, only with ham and bacon chunks and jalapenos. Ooooo and maybe some hot sauce.

Mornin Casserole

1 lb breakfast sausage
(or other breakfast meat)
1 sweet onion
1 green pepper
4 small red potatoes
6 eggs
milk
Lotsa cheese

Preheat your stove to 350. Chop up the potatoes, onion, and pepper(or whatever other veggies you want), and fry up your meat. Grease a pan and spread the meat down first, then layer up your veggies. Mix up the eggs, milk, and some salt and pepper like you're making scrambled eggs. Pour it in evenly, then put as much cheese as possible on top. I looove cheese. Anyhow, bake it for about 50 minutes. But then again this was in a glass casserole dish, so if you're using something else I'd go for about 30 minutes and check it after that.

Yeild: 1 super heavy pan of gooey deliciousness that will be awesome for leftovers.

BREAKFAST! Please note my awesome kitty oven mitt.
Also that blackberry wine on the right is from Ohio and it's crazy delicious.

Try it! (I buy it at the fancy Giant Eagle marketplace down the road)

Crazy Easy Ice Cream

This is the awesomest, easiest recipe ever. Honestly, I didn't think it would work but miraculously it did. You can add any mix-ins you want, I did nutella and bananas. PREPARE THYSELVES.

2 cups(1 small carton) heavy cream
1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
1/2 cup (8 tbsp) nutella
2 bananas

Stir together the first two ingredients until it gets kind of thick. The original recipe I found says to do it until it forms "stiff peaks" but I was still traumatized from trying meringues earlier, so that didn't really happen.

Next, drop in your nutella and keep stirring. At this point, you need to get your bananas liquefied: but not all the way, little chunks in the ice cream are pretty sweet. So use your electric mixer, or whatever equivalent you can dig up.

Then, all you have to do is cover it and put it in the freezer until it's set up. That's all. ISN'T THAT AMAZING?!

If you want it softer, fold in some whipped cream before you put it in the freezer.

(from here, check out the krispy kreme, mmmmm)

Cookies for a Panda Party!

In case you didn't already know, some people are actually pandas cleverly disguised as humans. When their birthday rolls around, it's best to cook these. (Miraculously found here, just in the nick of time.) I edited it a little because I wanted to only use dough, and I ran out of vanilla.

2 1/2 cups flour
2 sticks butter, or 16 tbsp
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
Black food coloring (if available)

Stir together both sugars and the butter. Next, add your yolks. (I tried saving the egg whites to make meringue cookies, and holy moly my arm hurts from stirring= bad idea.)
Anyway, then all you have to do is stir in your flour until it becomes clumpy. Separate out a little less than a third, and put that in a smaller bowl and stir in the cocoa.


PAIN.


It's best if you have the black food coloring here, even though it's something you only have around during Halloween. However I have the baking genius of my buddy Ms. Jennybeans to thank for my wide selection of food coloring and holiday sprinkles. Anyway, this is why you'll want the black...

Your dough will look like crap. Literally.

So there's that. Anyway, using about half-ish of your darker dough, make two long cords of brown and sandwich them in between three sheets of the white. Then roll it up into one long log, making sure it's really tight and mushed together or it will fall apart in the oven. Wrap it all in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for 15 minutes, and leave out the rest of the darker dough for the ears.





















Yes, that is my grizzly piggy bank in the background.

Okay, so this is the fun part. Preheat your oven to 325, and grease two pans. Start cutting the log up into 3/8" slices. Since my dough still got mashed up after that, I made up a maneuver where I wrapped my thumb and index finger around the slice and pinched the cookie together starting at the center and working my way out, turning as I went.

The pandas get smaller as you get toward the end. Awww.

Once you have all the panda heads made and put on your baking sheet, pinch off enough from the leftover black doughball to make little balls about twice the size of peas. Do the same pinchy maneuver to make them more like a thick coin, then slice it in half. You now have two little semicircles for ears that you have to attach to the head VERY thoroughly. Mash them if you have to, mine all started falling off.

Pre-Oven pandas.

Cook them for about 15 minutes, and cool a little before eating so they stay in tact. Makes about 30 little bears. Also...

Luckiest lady in the history of everything.