Darek + Stacie

I found this one in Better Homes & Gardens and instantly knew we had to try it. It calls for ground chicken or turkey, but we had chicken breasts on hand so we just used those. And I couldn’t find ciabatta bread, but found some version of the rustic Italian.

In progress:

The finished product:

Yum yum yum yum yum. Five-thousand stars. This was super good. Highly recommend.

Here’s the link for the recipe, although I think you’ll have to register to view it. If you do a google search you can find the recipe other places as well.

This was a recipe from Darek’s dessert class. Can’t go wrong with sugar and cherries (well, I probably could, but darek was involved so it was fine).

First we had to get all the pits out of the cherries:

Melting sugar and butter:

I can’t even tell you how good this tasted; I didn’t want to make it into cake:

The finished product:

Darek said it didn’t come out like it did in his class; the cherries were supposed to stay at the bottom. (Or the top?) But I thought it was very tasty anyway.

We tried out a recipe for barbequed chicken.

The ingredients…did not look pleasant:

Some tasty-looking onions:

Now that’s just disgusting:

Looking better once it’s all mixed and cooked:

Finished product:

Despite how gross it started out, it was pretty good. Better than the Kraft barbeque sauce we usually buy. I would link to the recipe, but I have no idea where it is.

Another magazine recipe – it must have come from one of my mom’s or something, because I don’t subscribe to Family Circle. Here’s the link.

We left out the mushrooms (yuck) but followed the rest of the directions as they were.

Peppers:

Peppers & broccoli in the pan:

And the finished product:

As per usual, it doesn’t really match the picture. But it was pretty good. I think we’ll keep the recipe, though I don’t know how often we’ll actually make it.

These kind of went together, but I’m counting them as 2. Because it’s my blog and my rules.

I found the recipe for spinach pesto online somewhere, or maybe from another recipe; I can’t remember. Costco sells a huge tub of spinach for pretty cheap and spinach is better for you than basil (right?), so I went this route.

A little bit of the spinach:

It’s supposed to be made in a food processor, which would have been nice, but I don’t have one of those. So I used the blender and kept poking the spinach down. It took awhile. Olive oil, pine nuts, and seasoning went in. Again, I forgot to take an “after” picture.

It was a crazy color, but tastes pretty good.

So then I used the pesto in the next recipe. The recipe’s full name is actually Creamy Pesto Gnocchi with Green Beans and Ricotta, and I found it in Real Simple. There’s the link. It called for store-bought pesto, but mine was way cheaper.

Gnocchi:

Green beans (riveting pictures, I know):

And the finished product, looking…well…

Very green.

If you looked at the link, you probably noticed that ours looked nothing like the picture. And honestly I was a bit disappointed. It was ok, but the flavors didn’t really go together very well. I don’t really like gnocchi to begin with…but Darek loves it, and he wasn’t crazy about this either. It probably would have been better if I used the expensive store-bought pesto and used a lot less green beans than the recipe called for, but you could just put pesto on gnocchi and have essentially the same dish, much simpler.

We didn’t save the recipe.

Oh well. Better luck next time.