I want to cover a couple of things with this post. First of all, I was thrilled to be contacted a couple of weeks ago to see if I would be interested in having Dine & Dish be the blog of the day for July 1st on the Sony Pictures site for the movie Julie & Julia. Of course, I was thrilled to be a mini-part of what I can only assume is going to be a must see film for all of us in the food blogging community. Make sure to visit the movie site each day to see what other blogs were hand picked to be the Julie & Julia blog of the day!

For those of you who are not familiar with Julie & Julia, it is a movie based on a book based on a blog by Julie Powell. Julie decided one day when she was trying to find some great purpose in her life, to spend 365 days devoted to making each recipe out of the famed Julia Child cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. Just as Julia Child paved the way for TV chefs today, Julie Powell paved the way for all of us food bloggers out here. Her blog was honestly one of the first times I had heard about the world of food blogging.

My friend Julie Lackey gave me the book Julie & Julia and I loved it and related so much to it! I can only imagine that I will be just as entertained by the movie (starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams).

Now, for the next part of this post. Being a mom of four kids makes it very difficult to get out to see movies at the theatre. A couple of years ago, some friends and I started a group called Chicks & Flicks.Chicks & Flicks is a mixed group of friends who get together about every 6 weeks to watch a movie in the theatre. We’ve seen “chick flicks” and we have watched movies our husbands would have enoyed as much, if not more, than us. If we were all to be there at one time, there would be about 15 of us in attendance. On most occassions, we have between 6-10 women. It is a great time, no pressure, no preparation needed kind of night. Our group was recently written about in our local Shawnee Magazine. To read about how you can start your own Chicks & Flicks movie group, check out the article. I shared a lot of great tips to getting your movie group started! I think it would be a great idea to have Julie & Julia be your first movie together. You can bet my group will be heading to the theatres on August 7th to check out Julie & Julia, the movie!

We had our fourth dinner club this past weekend and had such a great time. Each and every time we have dinner club makes me wish that I had the money and resources to have people over every single weekend. I absolutley am in my element when a group of friends are gathered around the dinner table enjoying each others company. I love that our every other month dinner club forces me to entertain on a regular basis because I love it!

Our theme for this month was Farm Fresh. The idea behind this theme was to encourage everyone to use the bounty of fresh ingredients that are available in our area this time of year. We enjoyed a wonderful Mozzarella and Tomato Basil Salad, Sesame Green Beans, Vidalia Onion Bake, Ted’s Special Mini Loaves, Mojo Beef Kabobs and Strawberry Shortcake. We also had two delicious kinds of Sangria, Strawberry Daiquiris and frozen Margaritas. Everything was delicious, the company was wonderful and we had a great time. If you haven’t started a dinner club yet and you love friends and food, do not wait any longer! Get one started today… you will love it!

Before I leave you with a recipe, I have to give a little shout out to Anne of Cooking with Anne. A couple of months ago I won a copy of the The Healthy Beef Cookbook and $100 gift card from her blog. The premise of the giveaway was that once I received the cookbook and gift card, I was to try a recipe out of the cookbook and blog about it.  The Healthy Beef Cookbook is put out by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and is a cookbook that anyone who loves to cook with beef needs. This cookbook is going to be a staple at our house, especially over the summer grilling season.

The first recipe we tried were the Mojo Beef Kabobs and they were fantastic. Ignore the photograph… I’m sure that the Cattlemen are probably cringing at the site of the charred edges of beef on the kabob, but my husband started brushing  the sauce on the kabobs right before he took them off the grill and the edges of them caught on fire!! The kabobs were fabulous, nonetheless, and we will be making them time and time again. Thank you Anne and the Beef Assosiation! Readers, you can plan on seeing a lot more recipes from this cookbook on Dine & Dish in the very near future.

Mojo Beef Kabobs (from The Healthy Beef Cookbook)

1. 1 pound boneless beef top sirloin steak, cut 1 inch thick
2. 1 teaspoon coarse grind black pepper
3. 1 large lime, cut into 8 wedges
4. 1 small red onion, cut into 8 thin wedges
5. 1 container grape or cherry tomatoes (about 10 ounces)

Mojo Sauce:
1. 1/4 cup fresh orange juice
2. 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
3. 3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh oregano
4. 3 tablespoons olive oil
5. 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley
6. 1 teaspoon ground cumin
7. 1 teaspoon minced garlic
8. 3/4 teaspoon salt

When I was 12 years old, my mom let me loose in the kitchen to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies on my very own. I followed the classic recipe on the back of the Nestle Chocolate Chip bag. I mixed the wet ingredients together and as the directions said to do, I sifted the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl. I scooped the cookie dough out onto a cookie sheet, placed them in the oven, and let them bake for the appropriate time. When the timer went off, I opened the oven door to find that each cookie was a gloppy mess. I decided that maybe I hadn’t baked them long enough, so I put them in the oven again for a few more minutes. After several times of repeating this, the cookies were still soupy and never firmed up. I was so disappointed.

It took me quite awhile to figure out what I did wrong, but as I was cleaning up after my unsuccessful baking event, I found a bowl…full of all of the dry ingredients that should have been mixed in with the wet ingredients! Still to this day I will not mix cookie ingredients up in two separate bowls. I just incorporate them all into the same bowl as I go along. I know that I have such a lack of focus sometimes and I really don’t want to repeat that mistake again.

Fast forward to today…many, many years have passed and I have come quite a long ways in the kitchen. I decided this morning that I wanted to make a crumb cake for breakfast. As I was mixing up the first set of ingredients my mom called. I talked to her for about a half an hour and as I was doing so, kept adding ingredients and finally put the cake into the oven. When the timer went off after 30 minutes, I opened the oven door only to discover that I made a beautiful cake but forgot to put the crumb on top of it! Talk about a “Duh!” moment. Sitting in a bowl right beside my stove top was the bowl full of the crumb mixture. Not sure what to do and not wanting just a cake without the crumb (because the crumb is the best part of the crumb cake) I went ahead and put the crumb on top and baked the cake for another 20 minutes. Luckily, my lack of focus did not ruin anything because the crumb cake turned out beautifully!

I learned a new lesson today…I am incapable of talking on the phone while I am mixing up ingredients to bake something. I simply do not have the focus to do both of those things at once. When I put this out on Facebook, I had several people respond with similar stories. What have you forgotten to do when you were in the kitchen because you were focusing on too many things at once?

New Jersey Crumb Cake (from Recipezaar)

40 min | 10 min prep

SERVES 8

Boredom… one of the many things that kids complain about during the summer months. When I was growing up, I said the words “Mom, this is boring” so often that my mom threatened to ground me for life if I said it again. Being the clever kid I was, I got out the Thesaurus and discovered that the word irksome is another word for boring. From that point on my new phrase was “Mom, this is irksome”.

When Jacob, who is now 7, was an infant, I often worried about him being bored. I used to cut out black and white photos from magazines and would tape them on the seat of the car that his infant carrier faced so he had something interesting to look at when he was in the car. I even went as far to buy a nursing bra that had colorful pictures on the flap so that when he was nursing, his little brain would be stimulated by the images. I crack up now thinking of the things I used to do to make sure he didn’t get bored.

Boredom is not just a things kids suffer from. I know that when I make the same recipe over and over, my family gets bored with it and they want a change. The folks at Pace have created a couple of new specialty salsa’s to help curb the boredom that might crop up when using salsa in recipes. Pace sent me a jar of their Black Bean & Roasted Corn Salsa to try out. I love black beans and when I tried this salsa alone, knew I’d be perfectly happy with dipping some chips into it and eating it straight from the jar. I thought, however, that it might be more beneficial to use it in a recipe. Below is a yummy recipe for Southwest Black Bean and Corn Dip… give it a try and keep boredom at bay by seeing what you can cook up with Pace’s new line of specialty salsa’s!

Southwest Black Bean and Corn Dip

8oz package of cream cheese, softened
2 chicken breasts, cooked and diced
1 Tbs chili powder
1 jar Pace Black Bean and Roasted Corn Salsa
2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese
2 cups Shredded Lettuce
1 Roma tomato, diced

Spread the cream cheese on the bottom of a casserole dish (I always use the Pampered Chef large oval stoneware dish). Note that the entire bottom of the dish will not be covered in cream cheese. Just spread it the best you can (or use more cream cheese if you wish!)

Mix the chili powder with the cooked chicken breasts and layer on top of the cream cheese.

Pour the Pace Black Bean & Roasted Corn Salsa on top of the chicken layer.

Add the cheese and place in a preheated 350 degree oven. Bake for 30 minutes or until cheese is bubbly.

Garnish with lettuce and diced tomato. Serve hot with tortilla chips or baked pita chips.

Would you like to know what happened to me while I was at church yesterday? I was sitting in mass when my 3 year old told me she needed to go potty. I took her back to the ladies restroom, she did her thing, I bent down to help her pull up her panties and before I know it, the automatic flusher flushed the toilet. My face was down, toilet high and surprise…I had toilet water splash up in my face… pre-flushed toilet water, I might add.  You can bet that it was not the most joyous moment in my life.

It is a great thing that I started my day off with these tasty muffins or I may have been just grumpy enough after that to be in a bad mood for the rest of the day. The muffins were such a hit with my family and with the touch of citrus were refreshing enough to start my day off on the right foot. A little toilet water in the face was not about to make my mood go down the drain, so to speak. I can’t guarantee you will have the same “take on the day” feeling I had after eating these muffins, but a little citrus sunshine in the morning is sure a great way to attempt a great start!

Blueberry Sunrise Muffins

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar
4 Tbs unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 large egg, beaten
3/4 cup plus 2 Tbs milk
1 Tbs fresh orange zest
Juice of 1/2 of a medium orange   1 cup fresh blueberries

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a muffin pan with 10 paper muffin cups or spray with nonstick cooking spray.

Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Stir in the sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted butter, egg and milk. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients and whisk until just blended (mixture should be slightly lumpy).

Add the blueberries to the bowl and stire them in just enough to combine.

Divide the batter evenly among the prepared muffin cups. Bake the muffins until golden, 18-24 minutes. Remove the muffins from the pan and transfer to a wire rack to cool. Serve warm.

I am typically an early riser. Not necessarily because I want to be but because I have been forced to be by a husband who chooses to go to work at 5:30am and kiddos who somehow inherited some insane early rising gene. Why is it that even when they go to bed late, they still wake up early? No matter how late we tuck them in at night, they are up and at ‘em by 6:00am.

Changes are happening around here though, and I’m excited about it! For the past couple of weeks, we have become a bunch of lazy morning people. We have been playing so hard during the day that my kids are now not rolling out of bed until 7:30 or 8am. It has been heavenly to be able to catch a few more moments of sleep before starting the day, especially since the baby seems to really like my company in the middle of the night.

Now, when they wake up, they come into my room, climb up in my bed and it seems like we collectively just spend too long of time oogling over Leah. (It is so neat to see how much the big kids love her!) We watch her sleep, we watch her when she’s awake, and before we know it, another hour or so has zoomed by. By the time we shower, get dressed and roll downstairs for breakfast it is at least 9:30!

Like I said the other day, I am trying to plan out our breakfast and lunches a little better. When I saw this recipe for Eggadilla in the Sunday newspaper edition of Relish Magazine, I knew it would be a great recipe to serve for lunch or breakfast. It is so easy it fits our new lazy lifestyle. In fact, I think the simplicity of the recipe will match perfectly for when  reality hits and we have to start waking up again to be someplace early in the morning. It is easy enough to make during those hectic morning hours. For now, however, I don’t even want to think about those days because they will be here all too soon. We are going to sit back and enjoy the lazy days of summer!

Eggadilla (from Relish Magazine)

Ingredients

Instructions

Nutritional Information Per serving: 340 calories, 19g fat, 240mg chol., 19g prot., 25g carbs., 1g fiber, 570mg sodium.

recipe courtesy of Greg Johnson

This is the first in a series of interviews that will be running a couple of times a week on Dine & Dish. In conjunction with Adopt a Blogger, I will be introducing you to the Adopt a Blogger #3 matches and giving you a little peek into their adoption experience. I hope you will enjoy the interviews. Make sure to stop by and say hi after you have read what they have to say. Oh - and if you are participating in Adopt a Blogger #3 and want for you and your match to be featured in an interview, let me know.

Also, make sure to check out the end of this post for the Effortless Egg Rolls recipe from Simple and Delicious magazine. So good, so easy and so worth trying out!

Interview and recipe after the jump:

Interview with Adopt a Blogger #3 Matches - Jennifer of Jenn Cuisine and Amy of Playing House

Continue reading →

I love summertime…absolutely love it. I love having my kids home. I love the warm weather, the sunshine, and the impromptu neighborhood gatherings that happen when we are all hanging outside. I love not having to be any place in particular by 8am…lazy mornings of snuggling in bed and reading books before we all get up to start the day.

There is one thing I don’t like about summertime and that is that my kids need food for breakfast, lunch AND dinner. The nerve of them wanting to eat three square meals a day! Having to feed them totally interrupts my “lets just live by the seat of our pants” summertime mentality. I could get by with just grazing when I’m hungry during the day, but the little creatures I gave life to think that we must sit down to a meal for breakfast and lunch. Saying “just go get something out of the pantry” doesn’t work for them, so I actually have to put some effort into feeding them.

Lately I feel like we have been doing way too many bowls of cereal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch. I have decided to actually start menu planning for breakfast, lunch and dinner while they are home for the summer. That way, they can feel comfortable knowing that yes… mom is going to feed them and I can feel prepared with food on hand when they bring my lazy summertime days to a screeching halt with their “Mommy I’m hungry” cry.

This morning it was buttermilk biscuits with butter and honey and a bowl of fruit. Easy enough and I can actually use the leftover biscuits for Canadian bacon and cheese sandwiches for lunch!

How do you keep the hunger monster at bay for your kids during the summer? I’d love to hear about any recipe ideas you have that would not interrupt my ideal summer day too much, but that will fill the need to feed the kiddos.

This is the recipe my mom always used to make biscuits. It is from the original Betty Crocker cookbook.

Baking Powder Buttermilk Biscuits

1/2 cup shortening
2 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup buttermilk (I always use buttermilk substitute… 1 Tbs lemon juice for each 1 cup of milk)

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Cut shortening into flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt with a pastry blender until mixture resembles fine crumbs. Stir in milk until dough leaves side of bowl (dough will be soft and sticky).

Turn dough onto lightly floured surface. Knead lightly 10 times. Roll or pat 1/2 inch thick. Cut with loured 2 1/2 inch round cutter. Place on un-greased cookie sheet about 1 inch apart for crusty sides, touching for soft sides. Bake until golden brown, 10 to 12 minutes. Immediately remove from cookie sheet. Makes 1 dozen biscuits.

When I was growing up, we lived in the country, 3 miles south of a very small town. Most all of my friends lived in town. I was always so jealous of the conveniences my friends had because of the fact that they lived in town. They could walk to each others homes to hang out while I had to wait for a parent to be home to take me in (which means I often missed out on a lot of the socializing). I was also jealous of the fact that if they wanted a candy bar or special treat, they could just walk to the local Casey’s General Store and grab one. It made no sense at all for my parents to drive me all the way into town just for a candy bar!

When I got out of the small town I grew up in and went to college, I finally lived “in town” for the first time in my life. I was so thrilled for simple things like pizza delivery and 24 hour convenience stores. Living in the dorms my freshman year was also quite a thrill because socializing with my friends could happen any time of day… no need to wait for someone to take me into town so I could “play”.

The one thing each town that I have lived in has lacked and I have wished for is Chinese food delivery. Sure, we have Chinese food nearby where I live now but it isn’t very good and it cannot be delivered. The lack of Chinese food delivery has meant that I have had to discover the next best thing…creating my favorite Chinese food dishes at home! I have never used a wok (although I keep thinking I would like to buy one) but making delicious Chinese food at home is quite simple and typically does not require a lot of obscure ingredients. By combining a few key items, you can create the flavors you are looking for without a trip to a specialty market.

One other thing the towns I have lived in are missing is the beach and the ocean. I’m not sure I can remedy that situation as easy as I could this one!

Beef and Broccoli Stir Fry

1/2 cup soy sauce
2 Tbs lemon juice
1 Tbs Cornstarch
1 Tbs firmly packed brown sugar
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp black pepper
2 Tbs vegetable oil, divided
2 pounds flank steak or top sirloin, sliced 1/4 inch thick
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 medium heads broccoli,cut into florets (approx 4 cups)
2 tsp grated fresh gingerroot

1. In a small bowl, combine soy sauce, lemon juice, cornstarch, brown sugar, garlic and pepper. Set aside
2. Heat 1 Tbs vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add beef and stir-fry until almost cooked through (about 2 minutes). Transfer beef to a plate and cover to keep warm.
3. Heat remaining oil in the skillet. Add onion and stir-fry for 5 minutes. Add broccoli to the skillet with 1/2 cup of water. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 3 minutes.
4. Return beef to skillet with soy sauce mixture; add ginger. Bring to a boil and cook, stirring constantly, until sauce thickens, about 2 minutes. Serve hot over rice.

I’ve been blogging for close to 3 years now and apparently I haven’t learned a darn thing in the time that I have been doing this. One of the rules of blogging, according to such pros as Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, is to have a plan for your blog if you are taking a blogging break. Have guest writers, plan some posts in advance to launch while you are on your break, return to your archives and share posts from the past… all of these options are good ones if you plan on taking a vacation from blogging.

If I was thinking ahead of time, I certainly would have done any one of these. The truth is, I didn’t think I’d be gone for long. I thought that I would maybe even be blogging from the hospital bed soon after the baby was born! Then this sweet little pumpkin entered into my life and I suddenly found that I had other things I wanted to focus my time on. The challenge with food blogging is that even if you have the desire to write, the desire to cook may not accompany the writing desire. It seems as if that is the case for me anyway.

Well, for those of you here for a food and the blogging, you will be happy to know that the desire to write and cook is finally returning! I am still completely smitten with our newest addition, but after 2 weeks (can you belive Leah is already 2 weeks old?) we are slowly getting into a bit of a routine and I am finding some time to get back to some normalcy, which includes cooking and writing.

For now, you will have to suffer through some fairly quick and simple recipes as I am not dying to go all gourmet on you right now.  This recipe for Tasty Tilapia is so easy, and like many Tilapia recipes, is perfect for a family who is looking to get something delicious and nutricious on the table without taking away from the escaping hours in the day.

Thanks for sticking around during my little blogging break. I can’t promise that my posts will be all that consistent over the next little while, but I will get back to regular blogging very soon! Oh, and if you haven’t recently, make sure to head over to the Mommy Madness site to check out my current posts and videos. If you are in Kansas or Missouri, I’d love to earn your vote!

Tasty Tilapia (from Recipezaar)

11 min | 5 min prep

SERVES 4