Sue Chef's May Results

I didn't realize how hard the cake challenge would be It's kind of silly, when you think about it (I know it was my challenge, so sorry). But, throughout the month, I kept coming back to the same cake to make.......A Pineapple Upside Down cake. I like how you are basically taking a plain white cake and dressing it up. Like a jeans and a white shirt girl with a fun piece of jewelry or crazy accessory. The ordinary girl who likes to get a little wild once in a while. A little bit sweetness on top of mellow cake. Can you see the parallel?

Well, if you've never tried Pineapple Upside Down cake, you've got to do this one. It's so deliciously yummy. Seriously..... bake it. Super easy too!

All you need are:

1 box of white cake

1.5 cups of brown sugar

1 stick of butter

1 can of pineapple rings

cherries

And, a Cast Iron pan. Not sure why, but this is very important.

Melt the butter in the pan, then sprinkle the 1.5 cups of brown sugar over the melted butter. Put the pineapple rings around the bottom of the pan, and stick a cherry in the center of each. Prepare the white cake mix according to the box, but substitute some of the pineapple juice for the water. Yum. Then, pour the cake over the melted gooeyness. Bake according to the box instructions. (it took mine about an extra 10 minutes).

When done, let sit in the pan for about 20 minutes, then turn out onto a plate. And voila! Perfectly sweet, perfectly ordinary. You'll eat three slices yourself on the first night. I promise.

Now, to tackle the $15 challenge, I decided to do Inside Out Cheeseburgers, Corn on the Cob and Baked Beans. $5 for the meat. $2 for the cheese, 1 egg, $1 for the corn, $2 for the Baked Beans.

To make the burgers, you'll need to shape out 6 very thin patties (or use a basic hamburger press like I did). In between two patties, put your toppings. Usually I use Monterrey Jack cheese with Jalapenos, but today, I just used cheddar (sharing with Owen, you know). You can also jazz it up with whatever other toppings you'd like to include, like onions, bacon, etc.

Then, press the other patty on top of the bottom one and the toppings, and pinch the edges to make one large burger. See below.

I also made corn on the cob. I shuck the corn, salt and pepper, spread some butter and pour about a tablespoon of white wine on top, then wrap in aluminum foil. Throw on the grill for about 20 minutes, and turn frequently to avoid burning.

Here's the result on the burgers. Sometimes some of the yummy cheese escapes. Mmmmm.

And, plated up.....a perfect Memorial Day holiday meal. Followed by three slices of Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Enjoy.

My Hollaback to Olive's $15 Challenge: by Giada BeKiddingme

Stuffed Green Peppers
Feeds: 4 Hungry Adults!

Ingredients:
2 lb ground beef (or turkey if you want to be healthier) $5.99
4 green peppers $4.00
white rice $1.00
2 15 oz cans stewed tomatoes $2.00
garlic powder, salt, pepper (staple items)
tomato paste $0.50
1 loaf italian bread $1.00

Total cost with 2% NC food tax = $14.77

This did not include my staple items, which most households keep on hand.

My parents have been visiting and my mom suggested this meal for dinner the other night. I immediately took her up on it since it was one of my faves as a kid and I knew it would meet the criteria of feeding a family of 4 for under $15. Whether or not some would consider it a "healthy" meal is subjective however and I had forgotten that part of the challenge. So let's just say you can swap out the ground beef for turkey and use brown rice if you prefer more whole grains in your diet. But I do think there are worse things you can put in stuffed peppers, so compared to all the eating out we've done with family in town, this qualified as a healthy change for us!

Not only is this meal cheap to make but it is super easy. Here are step by step instructions with pictures:

Step 1: Chop tops off peppers and remove seeds. Then add peppers to a pot of boiling water to blanch. You will want to start cooking your rice at this point so it is ready when you need it, and add the ground beef/turkey to a hot pan to brown as well.

Step 2: When peppers have fully changed color in the water, pull them out and place them in a 9x9 baking dish.


Meanwhile, add the stewed tomatoes to the ground beef/turkey, along with a few generous tosses of garlic powder, salt and pepper.


Step 3: Add rice to beef mixture. No picture for this one!

Step 4: Stuff the peppers with the beef/tomato/rice mixture.


Step 5: Slather some tomato paste on top of each pepper and put in the oven at 350 to bake for 20 minutes.

Voila! Peppers are done and ready to serve. We had ours with some fresh italian bread and butter. Not too shabby for 4 adult sized dinners, and I just ate some of the leftover stuffing for lunch too. Challenge success!

May Challenge Results: Betty Bakes

Baking intimidates me. Maybe it’s because there are usually so many steps, and taking a short-cut, or getting distracting and missing one has some pretty catastrophic results. My tasty failures include a Nutella pound cake that wouldn’t part from its loaf pan, and a chocolate bundt cake that overflowed from the confines of the pan into the oven. Oops. That recipe was written for a 14-cup bundt pan, and mine was “close enough.”

I’ve learned from these mistakes though, and decided to put my proverbial toes back in the baking waters via the world of “cupcaking.” Since Avery doesn’t eat sweets, there are just two of us to eat my creations. Obviously, cupcakes are the perfect dessert for two. Why? Well, because you can easily unload half a batch to co-workers at the office, and that is somehow way more appealing than a half-eaten cake. They also travel easily and let’s face it, they are cute. So, it’s only logical that for the Ace of Cakes Challenge that I make some cupcakes, right?

Yesterday, I tackled Southern Living’s Key Lime Cupcake Pies. And guess what? I remembered to spray the cupcake liners, just as the recipe directs. The result? A delicious cupcake that pleased both my palette and my eyes. Yeah!
Recipe note: I did use low-fat cream cheese to cut a few calories. I also didn't buy enough limes, which meant I didn't have enough lime juice. Unfortunately, Greg was mowing and Avery was napping, so I had to sub in a little lemon juice. When I mentioned this to Greg later, he said that I should have used margarita mix instead of lemon juice. It was such a brilliant idea I wished I'd thought of it myself, and done it! My substitutions had no ill effect on this recipe, so feel free to make the same ones yourself, but definitely remember that margarita mix tip if you run out of limes, or just want to run out on purpose!

Now I know you are wondering….how do Key Lime Cupcake Pies fit my personality? Well, I think they represent my resilience, my willingness to try new things, and my health consciousness. They are also super witty and very smart, too ;)

Bonus Post: Betty Says Eat Your Veggies!

If you need a good excuse to eat your veggies this month, and let's be perfectly honest -who doesn't? - then try this awesome green bean salad recipe from none other than Rachel Ray. It's too good not to get it's very own May bonus post!

Green Bean Salad (4 servings)

Ingredients:
1 pound fresh green beans, washed and trimmed
1/4 red onion, sliced thin
1/4 European cucumber, cut into thin sticks resembling shape and size of green beans
1/2 pint grape tomatoes, halved
Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
1/2 lemon, juiced
Coarse salt and pepper

Directions:
Steam green beans in 1/2 inch boiling water covered for 3 or 4 minutes. Cold shock beans by running under cold water and drain well. Place beans in a bowl and combine with onions, cucumber and tomato. Dress salad with a generous drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and the juice of 1/2 lemon. Season salad with coarse salt and pepper, to taste.

That's it for now! I'll be back when I have some challenge results to post!

Crap!

I totally cooked my first challenge last night. Was very excited about it all day. Cooked it, ate it..... then I realized I forgot to take pictures. Crap! Oh well. I'll try again this week.

May Results from Olive

I love baking because I love to eat desserts. So for Sue's challenge I decided to try a recipe that I have made before for a soup swap although it was previously from a box mix. I got the recipe off a blog a while ago. I took two recipes and merged them together and fortunately had a special event to serve the cake.

The first recipe is a Golden Butter Cake:

3 cups cake flour (not self rising) I used all purpose

1 tbls baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup softened butter (2 sticks)

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and grease and flour the pans.

In a bowl mix the flour, baking powder and salt.

In a large bowl mix the butter and sugar at high speed for 5 min until light and fluffy.

Blend the eggs in one at a time on high speed.

Beat in vanilla.

Reduce mix speed to low and add flour mixture and milk alternately beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

For this recipe to be converted to the rainbow cake I doubled the recipe and divided the batter into six equal portions. With food coloring, I mixed the batter to make one purple (blue and red), one blue, one green, one yellow, one orange (red and yellow) and one red. Fortunately for me I had a helper to help mix everything.

I then baked each one for 20-25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Once cooled , put icing on the purple cake and the blue cake. I had help with this also.

Place the cake in the refrigerator for 2 hours or 1 hour in the freezer to set.

Continue to ice the green and yellow cake and refrigerate or freeze to set.

Finally, ice the orange and red cake and refrigerate.

Then you can serve this huge delicious cake. We served our for my big man's graduation from gymnastics. I hope he enjoyed it.

For the Healthy inexpensive dinner, I made two mustard chicken, squash and apples and a veggie confetti.

For the Two Mustard Chicken here are the ingredients:

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts (Mine was on sale see the sticker!! WHOOHOO!!) ($3.73)

2 tbls stone ground mustard ($2.89)

1/4 cup Dijon mustard (had on hand)

2 tbls honey (had on hand)

Combine both mustards and honey and coat chicken on both sides.

Cook for 25-30 min at 375 until done. (My chicken was thin cuts so only took me 10 min.)

220 calories

6 grams of fat

Price $6.62

However, since my chicken was thin cut, I believe that it was less calories and fat.

For the Apple & Squash here are the ingredients

1 squash ($2.03)

2 apples ($2.14)

1/2 cup water (On Hand)

1 tbls butter (On Hand)

2 tbls sugar (On Hand)

1/2 tsp ground Cinnamon (On Hand)

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg (On Hand)

The directions tell you to peel the squash with a vegetable peeler. This sucked and made me realized I definitely need a new peeler. Then you slice the squash in half and scoop out the seeds.

Cube the squash and put it in a dish with the water and cover. Microwave for 5-7 minutes until tender. You heard me microwave.

Peel and cube the apples and add to the squash with the remaining ingredients.

Microwave for another 2-3 minutes and serve.

70 Calories

1 Gram of Fat (recipe stated 0 but there is butter which I feel would amount to some fat..??)

Price $4.17

Vegetable Confetti

1 pepper chopped ($.57)

1 cucumber shredded ($.65)

1 cup shredded carrots ($.89)

Add together and add 2 tbls Fat Free Italian Dressing and pepper to taste. (On Hand)

35 Calories

0 Grams of Fat

Price $2.11

I then decided that I would make a jello rainbow.

I just took 5 different jello colors and made them one at a time letting it set and then adding the next color.

The recipe I found was called Jello ribbons and included yogurt but I did not want to over do the calorie so I just used Jello. Although the colors were a bit hard to see, once it was cut you were able to see the different layers. The kids loved it and it was super easy. I would probably rearrange the colors a bit next time since I let the kids decide what colors to do this one.

50 calories

0 grams of fat

Price $2.95

In all the dinner was super easy and some what cheap and very colorful. The hubby said that he liked it but I am not sure I believe him.

Total Calories: 375

Total Grams of Fat: 7

Total Price: $15.87

Although I did go over budget, the calorie count is in range and I got to eat all this food!!!

Catching Up: Giada BeKiddingme’s April Results

So sorry for the delay in posting my April cooking challenge results. It has been crazy at the BeKiddingme household lately. We moved into a new place last week and while that didn’t stop me from completing the challenges, it did manage to keep me from finding the time to tell you about them. But never fear—our Internet connection is now back up and running and I am slowly digging myself out of boxes in the kitchen so I will be back in business in no time!

I did another two for one in the interest of saving time this month: A lemony seafood risotto with shrimp and scallops paired with Shingleback sparkling shiraz. I really thought I trumped Betty Focker on the BSD front until I got a call from her after her trip to Total Wine. Oh well! At least I managed to find a sparkling red, although I must agree with Betty that I prefer a nice prosecco to the shiraz, especially this time of year. The Shingleback was different and fun, but I doubt I’d shell out $20 again for another bottle. I actually liked it better the second day when it was still just a bit bubbly. But I am classy like that!

Moving on to the risotto, I was anxious to use the homemade seafood stock I had in my freezer following March’s challenge, so I carefully selected a seafood risotto recipe that was highly rated on allrecipes.com. It turned out quite well for a first try, although I did end up adding more stock than the recipe called for and cooking it a bit longer than suggested. While I wouldn’t necessarily have plated and served it to Gordon Ramsay , the hubs was quite impressed and the plates were both very empty at the end of the meal.

I have a boatload of leftover Arborio rice in my new pantry and am dying to try Betty’s risotto so stay tuned for an update on my next foray into risotto-land! I mean when you put bacon in it how could it go wrong?

Here are some risotto photos (ba dump ump) including a picture of my “helper”:

May Challenge #2 - Ace of Cakes

Pound cakes, Angel Food Cakes, Pineapple Upside Down Cakes....cakes, cakes, cakes. I could eat one every day! These days, it seems like it's so much easier to just buy the cake at the grocery store or local bakery. But, there's nothing like the way your house smells when you're baking a cake in the oven. So, my challenge to you this month is to bake a cake (from scratch, of course) that best represents your personality. Take pictures, blog about it, and allow us to vote on how well the cake you baked exemplifies you!