Apple Nachos

I think I pinned this one before baby was born, which was 2 1/2 years ago! Just now getting to it. Kind of.

I went my own direction with this but got the general idea from this pin...

This calls for peanut butter. That is the yumminess you see drizzled on there. Well, I had just made apple cider caramel sauce that I found in a Southern Living Magazine. I didn't know what I was going to use it for but I made it anyway. It looked tasty!!

After stewing on it a bit, I realized that I could make apple nachos since I thought I had everything in the picture. I had the apples, coconut flakes, chocolate chips, pecans (chopped) and instead of peanut butter, I drizzled my caramel sauce over them. I had a blast putting this together! I was expecting fireworks in my mouth!! Take a look at the final product...

They LOOK good, right?! Meh. Instead of fireworks, I had a big fat "pffffff". Totally lame. Two bites and they went in the trash. I am sure the original recipe is 10x better than this pile of junk.

http://www.allysonkramer.com/2011/10/apple-nachos/

White Chocolate Cinnamon Pretzels

I was in a making mood today.

So far, I have made...

1. Apple cider caramel sauce
2. Apple nachos
3. Trix treats
4. These yummy things!!

Don't these look tasty?

As I think I've mentioned before, cinnamon is my favorite thing in the world. This calls for sugar, cinnamon and best of all, CINNAMON SUGAR!! It took probably a total of 10 minutes to make with no baking. The thing that took the longest was melting the white chocolate on the stove. Other than that, this was ridiculously easy.

I made these about an hour ago and they're almost half gone. SOOOO good!!!

Look at that deliciousness

http://www.yourcupofcake.com/2011/02/white-chocolate-cinnamon-pretzels.html

Potato Topped Mini Meatloaf

I follow a Pinterest board from Kraft and have recently pinned a lot of recipes from them. I tried this one out a couple of weeks ago.

I was hesitant to try it out only because I know Husband's fondness for real mashed potatoes over instant mashed potatoes but I told myself that if he didn't know they were instant, maybe he wouldn't notice.

My first problem that I encountered was finding the stuffing mix. I searched the whole store twice then finally caved and asked someone (I have a slight phobia of talking to strangers). She pointed me to the bottom corner of an aisle and there were about 40,000 choices for stuffing. The recipe just says "stove top stuffing mix" and there was not ONE box that said simply that. It was either herbed up, for pork, for chicken, with this flavor and that flavor so I just got the stuffing mix for cornbread.

Unfortunately, Husband noticed the empty bags of instant potatoes and made a comment. I had a two word reply for him.

I tried to get the final product to look as close to the original as possible. The meatloaf held up pretty well considering I have no clue if I got the correct stuffing mix or not.

Mine could almost pass for the original!! When we all sat down and ate, I asked Husband how he liked it. The first comment out of his mouth was "I wish they were real potatoes". After my backlash, he had nothing but nice things to say so this recipe is a keeper and the next time I make it, I will still be using instant mashed potatoes :)

http://thepinningpirate.blogspot.com/2014/03/potato-topped-mini-meatloaf.html

Vegan Banana Ice Cream

Vegan or not, this looks GOOD!!

Let me start by saying that this is attempt #2. Ummmmm, attempt #2 because although I am quite book smart, I have a common sense deficit.

The recipe calls for 5 ripe (yellow with brown spots) bananas and those are totally ew so I used 5 semi green bananas. I read over the recipe extremely quick (b/c that's how I get to do things with a needy toddler; extremely quick) and I remember it said to freeze the bananas. So I did. I plopped them in the freezer. I proudly announced to everyone that I was going to be making banana ice cream later!!

That night, I got the frozen bananas out and pulled up the directions. I learned I was supposed to peel and cut the bananas before putting them in the freezer. So I had fully frozen, fully unpeeled, fully uncut bananas sitting on the counter. My husband laughed at me and said "Really?"

A week later, I had new bananas. They got peeled, cut, and placed in the freezer last night. I pulled them out this morning, ready to make some yummy ice cream. The recipe said to put the bananas in, the vanilla in, then to start with 1 c. of the vanilla milk. Everything finally got blended together after about 10 minutes of shoving a fork into the blender to move stuff around.

The final product?

Slush. WHERE IS THE ICE CREAM PART OF THIS, YO?!

Back into the freezer it went. After about 2 hours, I scraped the top with my fingernail and it was nice and hard, ready to be scooped into beautiful, solid balls of ice cream.

I got the scoop.....


dug in.....


scraped for about 1 second......


then......


The top collapsed in on the gooey center and smoothie remnants shot out of the bowl at super banana speed!! A few choice words spewed out as well  BUT I was able to form balls with the hard ice cream I had.

Too bad it kinda tasted like crap.

http://berryripe.com/recipes/vegan-banana-ice-cream-recipe/

One Pot Mexican Skillet Pasta

How good was this?

Well...

'Nuff said.

http://flavorofjoy.com/one-pot-mexican-skillet-pasta/

Brown Sugar Chicken Wings with Roasted Red Pepper

Although I have my favorite wing recipe, which I wrote about here, I'm always down to see if there is a recipe out there that can trump it. I believe this is my second attempt at something new. The original picture looks extremely tasty... (you will notice I am now too lazy to do my pictures side by side)

The sauce is what really perked my eyes up because it looks yummy and it is made from red peppers, which I love. LOVE. I also wanted to try this because unlike the wings I always make, these can just be put in the oven and you're done with it. With mine, after they bake, I put them in a skillet with extra seasoning stuff and top them off. But that's totally worth it because they're delicious.

Anyway, on to the results.

Once I got all the seasoning in the bowl, it was time to throw the wings in to coat them. I started out with trying to mix it all with a spoon but I gave up and just got down and dirty with my hands. For some reason, it was exhilarating tossing around raw chicken in a bowl of goodness!! It looked and smelled heavenly. Yet I found myself in a predicament when baby was adamant that I hold him so he started tugging on me and about pulled my pants down which would have rendered me helpless since my hands were filthy.

I stuck them in the oven and on to the sauce I went. This was extremely easy to make. I cut up the peppers, put them in a skillet to brown them up then put everything in the food processor and mixed it up. It didn't have NEAR as much flavor as I would have thought. It was actually kind of boring.

Wings were done, sauce was done, aaaaaaaaaaaaaand??

There was nothing fantastic about it. They were just ok. We agreed that they are not worth making again and I will just stick to my other wings. But of course, if you haven't had amazing wings (like mine), then these might be good to you but since I've had better, these didn't make the cut *insert scissor gesture here*

http://damndelicious.net/2012/05/29/baked-brown-sugar-chicken-wings-with-roasted-red-pepper/