Garlic Asiago Bites

My aunt has a really fun recipe for quick cinnamon bites using refrigerated biscuit dough. I love making this recipe for a quick fun breakfast or even just a snack for a movie or something.

Basically, just a little butter, sugar and cinnamon, cut the rolls into fourths and bake it.

Last week I decided to try something tasty with asiago cheese, garlic, and butter to make a tasty bread dish to go along with our spaghetti. It was a smashing success! Just writing this is making me want to have more right now. I used 2 whole cloves of garlic for just 1 can of biscuits and it might have been a little much for some people's tastes, but we liked it. I don't really follow a recipe anytime I make these, but here's the basic idea. (It's really easy to make more depending on how many cans of dough you have.) I do about 2 Tablespoons of butter for each can of dough, like I said I did 2 garlic cloves and just grated some asiago cheese in there. If you're doing the cinnamon, use 2 Tablespoons of butter, 1/4 cup of sugar and a couple hefty shakes of cinnamon. Mmmm. Bake them at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes, but it may be more like 30 if you do a few cans at once.

I'm trying to think of what other "flavors" would be good. Any suggestions?

Ice Cream Sandwiches

For a fun and tasty treat, put a scoop of ice cream between two cookies. We have a handy-dandy ice cream sandwich maker from Pampered Chef (thanks mom!) and we enjoy using it to make this quick snack. Of course, mine never turn out like the picture in the catalog but they're still yummy!

Chicken Pillows

This is a classic recipe in my house growing up. They're so tasty! I have recently made one small change -- I add asiago cheese into the mixture and it is so yummy!

2 cups chicken, cooked and cubed
⅔ cup mushrooms, sliced
6 ounces cream cheese, softened
10 Tablespoons butter, divided
15 refrigerator crescent rolls
⅔ cup crushed Stove Top stuffing

Cream together cream cheese and 4 Tablespoons butter. Add chicken and mushrooms, stir until evenly mixed. Spread crescent rolls out. Put ¼ cup chicken mixture into center of each roll. Bring edges up to the middle, tuck and seal.

Melt 6 Tablespoons butter. Dip chicken pillows in butter, then roll in stuffing mix. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 15-20 minutes at 375°.

It is too much work to take pictures all the way during the preparation of a meal. For one thing, I never remember until the end. And for another, I don't really feel like blogging that step-by-step right now for this. So at least for a little while I'll be changing this to include just the recipe and any pictures I get of the finished product.

Vegetable and Meat Lasagne

For my first post, I thought I would start with a classic. Yummy lasagne. I don't really have a recipe, I just make it and it turns out differently each time.

First, start out with some ground beef. I use about anywhere from half a pound to a pound. Brown it in a frying pan, you can add garlic or onion and it is really good. After it is browned, I drain it and rinse it out to get the extra grease off. Put it back in the frying pan and add 1 jar of prepared spaghetti sauce. I use Hunt's, and I really like the garden vegetable kind. It has little chunks of veggies in it. Mushroom is also good. I just use whatever kind I want because I end up putting in whatever fresh veggies I've got around the house anyway.

In this case all I had was tomato and carrot, so I chopped them up and added them to my pan with the sauce and meat. The heat doesn't need to be on, just get the sauce nice and mixed together. Other suggestions of veggies to put in: mushrooms, onion, zucchini, anything you can think of, really.



In the meantime, the noodles can be boiling in a big pot of water. I do an 8x8 pan of lasagne, so I do half a box of lasagne noodles. Once they're cooked (and I prefer them to be a little on the crunchy side) I take the noodles out of the pan of water and rinse them in cold water to stop the cooking. When I am ready, I spread just a tiny bit of sauce on the bottom of my glass 8x8 pan, then layer the noodles. The noodles will be long, so I just cut off the extra pieces. Don't worry, they won't go to waste.

Next comes the layering. Before I do this, take a mixing bowl and mix about 16 ounces of cottage cheese with about a cup and a half of grated mozzarella cheese. You can throw some parmesan in there too, if you want. Stir that up so it is mixed well. Now comes the fun part. On top of the noodles, put a layer of the sauce/meat/veggie mixture.

On top of that, drop some small spoonfuls of the cheese mixture. It melts and spreads out so it doesn't need to perfectly cover everything.


Now, another layer of noodles. I layer mine the opposite way than the first layer. (See pictures if it doesn't make sense). Again, cut a couple inches off each strip to make it fit in the pan. The box of lasagne noodles that I have comes with 20 noodles in it, so I use 10 each time. This gives me enough for 4 layers of noodles. 3 on the bottom, 3 on the next, the pieces on the third, and 4 across the top so there's a bit of overlap. Just cut all the noodles first and you will have enough pieces for the third noodle layer.

Keep layering and just eyeball it to make the sauce and cheese mixtures last until the end. I usually save a little pasta sauce in the jar and grated mozzarella on the side just in case I run out to cover the top. I like to make sure that all the noodles on top have a little sauce on them so they don't get really dried out when baking. Spoon the cheese on top of the sauce and cover with remaining mozzarella cheese, and it's ready to bake.

I usually bake it at about 375 for 25-30 minutes. Since everything is already cooked, it just needs enough time to melt the cheese, so the cooking time is flexible.

This one actually wasn't one of my favorite times I've made lasagne, as you can see from the noodles it didn't seem like there was enough sauce. I'm not quite sure why. It was still tasty!!

Welcome to this blog. I love looking at recipe blogs and I love to cook so I decided to create my own food blog. This isn't going to be full of gourmet recipes, just the foods I make every day along with some new favorites or dishes for special occasions. I'm not exactly sure yet. Enjoy!