January 6, 2012

Happy New Year!!!! Are you ready for 2012? I think it is going to be a great year!!!

Starting off the new year, we tried a few new recipes this week, but only two were voted keepers. The kids were on vacation and had been asking for cinnamon rolls so Saturday morning we had some that were fabulous!!! I had seen an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown years ago where he made these, and I printed out the recipe (back in 2006!). I pretty much followed his directions except that I had a different kind of yeast so I had to incorporate that differently than he did in his original recipe. Additionally, the recipe created a cream cheese frosting which was probably great, but I had some vanilla frosting on hand, so I used that. Overall, the cinnamon rolls were big hit with everyone (I think Ryan even had about 4 over the course of the weekend!) and I would definitely make these again. Slowly but surely I will continue to use yeast in recipes and get over my fear of baking with it...(I even googled fear of baking with yeast but couldn't find an official term!)

The other recipe was just something I put together with ingredients from the pantry to go with pork chops. Nothing fancy about the pork chop and mushroom sauce that is listed here, but the kids devoured it and the pork was very tender. The sauce worked well as a gravy for mashed potatoes, though it probably would work equally well with rice, or even Cauliflower Rice!!! This recipe is an easy one that you might even be able to do in the slow cooker if you wanted, though it worked great cooking in the oven.

Just a note...next week there will be no posting, but I will be testing out recipes! So, perhaps Friday January 20th will have quite a few keepers... we shall see!!!

New Recipes
Overnight Cinnamon Rolls
Easy Pork Chops with Mushroom Sauce