Trent's Frank Stroganoff

When Trent and I were dating, he kept saying he wanted to make me dinner and make Frank's Stroganoff. I saw a steak in the fridge at his house so I kept thinking the stroganoff was made traditionally, with the steak. Then he made it for me and I was shocked, I won't lie. It is not Frank's Stroganoff, it's Frank Stroganoff, and not named after my brother-in-law. It's actually made with hot dogs. Now wait a minute! Before you judge a book by it's cover...or a recipe by it's strange choice of proteins...believe me, this stuff is really good.

1 large onion, chopped

16 oz. package sliced fresh mushrooms, rough chopped

olive oil for sauteeing

1 full package hot dogs (best are beef hot dogs), sliced. Trent slices them pretty, all diagonal and fancy!

3 cans cream of mushroom soup (the normal size small cans)

Large tub sour cream (24 oz)

1 Package of wide or extra wide Egg Noodles

Saute onion, mushrooms, and hot dogs until the onions are soft. Add cream of mushroom soup and stir until soup is warm. Add half the sour cream and stir to combine, heating through. Add more sour cream to taste, Trent uses the whole thing. Warm through, keep on a low simmer while you boil your egg noodles. Serve sauce on top of the noodles.

If you want the sauce more thick, use Trent's mom's trick and add a brick of cream cheese, it thickens this nicely. And, you know, a little more fat thrown in there never hurts.

You can serve this over rice as well...it's good that way too.

Trent is making this for us tonight, it will make three full meals for us...serves at least 6.

If someone is so inclined, try it with beef strips, like a tenderized round steak sliced very very thinly across the grain. I would saute the steak first until just barely browned, remove, then saute the onion and mushroom, add the beef back in and continue with the recipe. Sounds so good, let me know if you try it.

Antipasti Salad

Good salad to take to parties. ..this was enough for 20 people. Makes a lot, can be halved for smaller groups. I took this to a picnic and served it with bruschetta and baguette bread, with slices of honeydew and cantaloupe melon.

Salads with pasta will soak up dressing fast, so I always put the dressing on it just before serving. Lesson learned this time: I mixed the dressing the night before and put it in a jar in the fridge, it was fine, BUT do not put it in a cooler with ice...the olive oil will solidify (did it.) But remember you can run the jar under hot water and get the oil to 'melt' back to it's correct consistency. Whew.

6 cups dry pasta. I used mini raviolis I found at Winco in bulk food. It is stuffed with parmesan cheese and it's good!

2 cans medium olives (drained)

2 jars marinated artichoke hearts (drained)

2 jars sun dried tomatoes (I used the dry packaged kind at Winco and chopped them then soaked in a little olive oil...way cheaper and very delicious)

Sliced banana peppers to taste (I used about 3/4 cup, drained)

3 cans sliced mushrooms or 1pkg fresh sliced mushrooms

1 each red, yellow, green bell pepper, chopped

3 cups chopped or sliced meat...pepperoni, salami, ham, whatever. I used these cute little mini pepperonis from Winco

Cook pasta, rinse and cool. You can toss in a little olive oil to keep it from sticking. Toss with all the salad ingredients except the dressing and the meat and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Dressing:

1 1/2 cups olive oil

3/4 cup red wine vinegar

3 tbsp dried basil

3 tbsp dried parsley

3 tbsp dried rosemary

1 tbsp fresh minced garlic or 1 teaspoon garlic powder

3 tbsp parmesan cheese

1 tsp salt

red pepper flakes to taste (I used 3 packages of the dominoes kind lol!)

Mix and shake all together in a quart jar or bowl. Best if made a few hours in advance or the night before. To Serve, add the meat to the salad then shake the dressing very very well and toss into the salad. I kinda winged this for our picnic trip...it turned out great and everyone liked it. Looked impressive and was filling enough for lunch. Enjoy!

Halloween Witch Fingers

Hilarious! Great Halloween Party Food.
**I get all these ingredients except the peanut butter and gel in the bulk food at Winco. Much cheaper than buying packaged**

Peanut Butter Clay:
1 cup creamy peanut butter
Up to 2 cups powdered milk (will use probably 1 cup to start then more if needed)
1/2 cup honey

Look at the powdered milk first. It it looks like crumbs or if it is a little "chunky", break it up in the bowl first and get it nice and powdery. Mix in the peanut butter and honey. Mix all to a play-dough like consistency adding more powdered milk if too sticky, more honey if too dry.

Fingers:
About 40 regular sized pretzel sticks (bones)
Slivered Almonds (fingernails)
2 Tubes Red Gel (blood)

Make the fingers by rolling the clay with your fingers into little cylinder shapes of dough and pressing it around a pretzel stick, covering the pretzel completely. Use a spoon and make little rounded cuts to look like knuckles. Place a slivered almond on it for a fingernail. Continue and make all the fingers you can until you run out of peanut butter clay. I can usually get 35-40 if I make them a little skinny! Place the fingers on a tray or cutting board, or whatever you are serving them from. Dab red gel on the "stub" of each finger to look like they've been chopped off.

This is great served on a big platter along with a meat cleaver or big knife that has some red gel on it, looks like the fingers are freshly severed. When your guests eat these, it's like chomping into a finger bone, it's really funny.

Chicken and Noodles

4-6 Chicken Breasts (or leftover chicken)
1/4 to 1/2 Cup Chicken Soup Base (Winco, Bulk Food)
4-6 Stalks Celery (finely chopped)
One Meduim to Large Onion (finely chopped)
About 3-4 cups Sliced Carrots
1/2 to 1 tsp Thyme
1/2 to 1 tsp Poultry Seasoning
1/8 tsp Cayenne (optional)
Frozen egg noodles or fresh pasta egg noodles (I don't recommend dried pasta for this.)

Boil chicken breasts to cook them (I use broth or soup base to cook them in, but I discard it after and use fresh to start the soup, there's too many chicken floaties in it). You can also use leftover chicken, canned chicken, any kind of chicken you have on hand. Just make sure it's cooked and shred it into large chunks, set aside.

Saute the onion and celery in a little oil in a large pot. When they are soft, add the thyme, poultry seasoning, cayenne and the Chicken Soup Base powder (it's more like a dry paste) and a little water. Stir that all into a mixture so the base is incorporated then add a few cups of water at a time until you have the pot about 3/4 full. Add in the chicken and the carrots. Boil this until the carrots are almost done. Add more water if it's too salty, more base if it needs more chicken flavor.

Add the noodles, either fresh or frozen, and cook until the noodles are your desired tenderness. Keep in mind that there's a lot of stuff in this, so it's not very "soupy"...more like a stew.

** I like homemade pasta for this, but sometimes it's not feasible. The best noodles for this are in the frozen food section. My favorite are "Grandma's" at Albertsons. There's also a package at Winco, it's in a green bag package. They are ok too. Thaw them a little and break them up before adding to the pot.

Ham

HAM! Love ham. I had four calls from family members this Easter.."How do I cook my ham? The same way I cook a turkey?" The answer is Nooooo!
Just remember that ham is waaaay different than turkey because ham is pre-cooked and cured. Whether it is smoke cured or honey/sugar cured, it can be eaten directly from the package cold. Therefore, all you want to do with a ham is heat it through. My family hates an overdone ham!

I always buy a spiral sliced honey ham with a glaze packet. I heat the ham through at 325 degrees for 2 hours, check it, and usually go another hour. Then I glaze it.

I have tried a few different glazes and always come back to one that I made up. Take the glaze packet and empty into a bowl. Add up to a cup of brown sugar, a pinch of cloves, maybe a little allspice, and about a quarter cup of pineapple juice. Mix up to make a sort of paste. Baste your ham with the juices in the bottom of the pan, then remove most of the "ham juice". (Reserve it for your gravy OR freeze it in ice cube trays to use later in recipes as ham broth).

Smear the glaze paste all over the ham and return to the oven for at least 10 minutes. It will heat up and melt and will ooze down into the spiral slices.

If anyone has figured out a crunchy glaze, let me know. This paste glaze is what I came up with while trying to make a crunchy glaze that stays crunchy on the ham surface, but I haven't been successful.......YET. :) Happy hamming.

Sausage Dip

No one has ever accused me of being a healthy cook. Probably ain't gonna happen so...on that note, here is an artery clogger. Great party dip.

2 "chub" packages Jimmy Dean Hot Sausage

3-4 brick packages cream cheese (8 oz).....I use 4, because this is usually for a football party and I need a lot of dip.

One red pepper, chopped very fine

One regular sized container sour cream


Cook the sausage and crumble it, drain off the fat. Put it back in the skillet and add the red pepper and cook just until the pepper starts to soften a little.

Put all that in a crock pot set to low, add the cream cheese bricks and about a half cup sour cream to start. Stir together when the cream cheese starts to soften up. Cover and check every little bit and add more sour cream until it's a "dippable" consistency. I usually use the whole container of sour cream, to "cut" the thickness of the cream cheese. Takes an hour or so to heat all the way through, so start it a bit early for your party.

Serve with tortilla chips. Tostitos scoops are the best.

Crock Pot Tips

Easy Easy Easy Crock Pot recipes, my favorite kind of dinner...the one that cooks itself while I am at work! Tips for "crock potting"...

•USE THE LINERS. I cannot stress this enough. The cleanup involves peeling the liner out of the pot and chucking it and wiping out the pot. Available at grocery stores, probably near the foil packets or the saran wrap and tin foil displays.

•If you're in the kitchen anyway, like cooking tacos or spaghetti or something...make TOMORROW's dinner in the crock pot (like a pot roast or pork roast) and put it in the fridge overnight. I mean, you're in the kitchen anyway, so why not? Take it out in the morning and turn it on and it cooks all day. Two meals handled at once, your husband will think you're a freaking genius.
•I've found that it's okay to use either frozen or thawed meat in most of the crock pot recipes I will post (like pot roast and pulled pork and green chile chicken tacos). I often start with frozen solid meats, turns out great as long as you have ALL DAY to cook it on low. I start mine at about 7:30 am.

•Just expanding on the last tip, and this is a "take it or leave it" tip (meaning you should take it or leave it but I've been doing it for years)...I leave the frozen solid meats out all night inside the crock. I put all the ingredients together in the crock pot, including the frozen meat, onions, seasonings, whatever, and leave it on the counter! OH HORRORS!!! But the frozen meat keeps the other ingredients cold enough as it thaws and never once have I made anyone sick. Yes, it's okay to cook from frozen solid (above tip) but I prefer the meat to be at least somewhat thawed and this does the trick. If your meats are already thawed, put the ingredients together the night before and put the removable crock part of the pot in the fridge overnight if you've made-ahead for tomorrow.

•Crock Pot setting Low is always preferable if you have all day, unless of course the recipe tells you different. General rule of thumb: If you don't have 8 - 10 hours....use high for 6 hours and then go to low. Less than 6 hours is usually not enough time to cook meats to the proper tenderness that I like.

•Resist the urge to constantly lift the lid on the crock pot. I read somewhere that it takes 30 minutes to re-capture the lost heat/steam/cooking ability for each time you lift that lid. So, stir the meal every once in a while but otherwise, let it cook without lifting the lid.
Anyone else have any other tips they'd like to share?