Design Inspired Ideas for Budget Conscious People: Kitchen Talk!

From My Kitchen to Yours!

Meatloaf cupcakes

These are just darling. Made them tonight and the kids went crazy. We ate a whole 12 between the four of us. My kids don't usually like meatloaf but they LOVED these. These would be super cute set on a plate with ketchup drizzled on it. Get the recipe here.

Supper Club Tonight

I am a member of an all girl Supper Club. Each girl hosts once a year in their homes and would be in charge of the entree. We get to pick our own themes for the months that we host. Tonight I will be going to my good friend Susan's house for a French themed meal. Each girl brings a dish that pertains to the theme. I will be bringing French Onion Soup tonight. I used a recipe I got off Pinterest. The hostess will be making 2 different types of Quiche. I can't wait to see what other wonderful foods will be available tonight. I am hosting in March and my theme is Pinterest (yes I am addicted to Pinterest). Each girl will have to find a recipe off of Pinterest and bring it.

Mushroom Soup

I was feeling a bit under the weather today. I couldn't decide what I wanted for dinner but soup is always a good idea when one is feeling ill. So I got on Pinterest and found a recipe for a tantalizing homemade mushroom soup. It was fabulous. I did double the ingredients and thank goodness because even doubled it only made two large bowl fulls (and Lance and I ate it all).

Jamaican Spiced Chicken and Cauliflower Pancakes

Every weekend I let the kids choose something from my Pinterest recipe board to make for dinner. This week they chose the Jamaican Spiced Chicken and the cauliflower pancakes. I have to say that they were both delicious. The cauliflower was a lot more work than I anticipated. I mean how do you mash cauliflower without milk? Not very easily that's how. It was worth it however and I will definitely make both again. Click the links below for the recipes.

Jamaican Spiced Chicken (I used chicken breast and cooked these on the grill)

Cauliflower Pancakes

The Best Blueberry Muffins Tonight! Yeah Baby!

I got a hankering for some blueberry muffins tonight. I used to be addicted to these blueberry muffins I would get at Cuisine D'Art (a local luncheon place). However, Cuisine is not very convenient to my house AND the muffins were $4.50 a piece! So I went on the hunt to replicate them and finally after many attempts I succeeded (actually now I like mine better). This recipe makes 8 muffins for a cost of about .50 cents a piece. Here is the recipe:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup vegetable oil
milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla flavoring
1 1/2 cup blueberries
melted butter (optional)
Sugar in the raw (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease or line muffin cups.
Mix flour, sugar, salt and baking soda in a bowl.
Mix oil and egg into a one cup measuring cup. Add enough milk to make exactly one cup of liquid. Mix.
Add the oil mixture with the flour mixture. Add blueberries. This will be a lot of blueberries, if you prefer less use only 1 cup.
Fill muffin cups all the way to top.
Bake in oven for 20 minutes. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle on raw sugar. Enjoy! Makes 8

Right before they went into the oven!

Look at that golden color!

Chocked full of blueberries!

Smore Smore's Please!

Last night Zachy wanted ice cream and it’s all he talked about for 2 hours. We didn’t have any in the house and I was already in my p.j.s. and there was no way I was leaving the house. He tried to convince me that we could make ice cream using water and some ‘mixture’. I started searching our cabinets for anything we could make that would get his mind off of ice cream. This is what I found.

So I made this huge production about microwave Smore’s to get Zachy excited. I had him open the chocolates and place them on the graham crackers while I cut the marshmallow into thirds. I let Zachy push the buttons on the microwave. This is what we had 20 seconds later.