Venison Roast and Potatoes

So, I don't know if I wished on enough shooting stars the other night or if it was just a plain old lucky day, but we found more venison!! I'm sure for those of you who don't have venison or like venison you're probably saying, UGH! right about now! However, you can substitute beef/turkey/chicken whatever you like into these venison recipes to fit your liking! With that being said, I defrosted a great looking venison roast and threw it in the crock-pot, left it overnight, and by the time Dee Jay was home from work the next day we had a FANTASTIC venison roast with potatoes! It was so easy I almost felt ashamed that it tasted so good. (That is why you will see to keep it easy, we used paper plates instead of the real deal!) HaHa! So, just for kicks I looked up some better nutritional facts about venison! You can find it here at Self Nutrition Data (know what you eat)! Here is everything I did to make this melt in your mouth roast and potatoes.

I started with about 5 to 6 small potatoes and sliced them into thin rounds. I cut enough to cover the bottom of the crock pot (leaving room for the roast in the middle) and stacked them about 3 layers high! Next I poured about half a container of beef broth into the crock pot. I added the venison roast after we salt and peppered both sides. Next I added chopped red pepper, red pepper flakes (for a little spicy kick), a whole white onion, and 2 cloves of garlic minced! Left all of the ingredients in the crock pot on low overnight until the next day for lunch! When I woke up, there was no problem getting me out of bed, the smell alone made me want to eat the whole roast before DJ even got home! Good thing I didn't, I would have be in
T-R-O-U-B-L-E! I added some Brussel Sprouts for a side and we had a very lovely little lunch!
Side Note: There is not a lot in this picture because I seriously was so anxious to try it, then couldn't stop eating it, that I forgot to take a picture. Luckily I had a little extra at the end of the day, so I snapped a quick photo! :)

I'm sitting here thinking about it, and getting in the cooking mood so I think I'm going to head to the kitchen and make something delicious to share with you next time! I'm thinking some sort of cupcake so DJ can take them to the guys at work! Hope everyone had a wonderful, safe Labor Day weekend. Until we meet again... ~Happy Eating~ 

A little funny for your afternoon

ToonPool.com

Venison (or beef) Stuffed Peppers

Sadly, I have come to the end of ground venison from last hunting season. This is one of the last recipes I was able to pull off with what we had in the freezer! Good thing hunting season is just around the corner! So I pulled this off a friend's Pinterest site and went to work! You know it's good when your man takes one bite and looks up to say, "You can feel free to make this anytime you want". I totally agree!! The thing about cooking with venison vs. cooking with beef is no matter how "lean" you buy the beef, you still always get grease! When I popped these in the crock-pot, there was almost no grease at all which made the peppers very yummy and not soggy. If you make it with beef, let me know how it turns out! We wondered where all the grease would go. Here is how to fix up these delicious peppers...


First you are going to start with 4 bell peppers. (Any color will do...I used red, green and orange). Cut off the tops of the peppers and remove the stem and seeds. Save the tops because you're going to want to dice them up to throw back in! Dice half of a yellow onion, then pour one cup of enchilada sauce over the onion in a bowl and microwave for about 5 minutes. Pour 1/3 cup of water into the bottom of your crock-pot, then nestle the bell peppers in. In a large bowl you are going to combine one pound of meat, the sauce and onion mixture, the chopped up bell pepper tops, one cup of shredded cheese, 3/4 cup of cooked rice, one and half teaspoons of salt and a half of a teaspoon of pepper. Now spoon mixture into the the peppers and top it off with more shredded cheese. Cook these yummy peppers on low for 6 hours (I actually didn't have six hours so I cooked mine on high for about 4 hours). Remove them from the crock-pot and eat up! I served it up with some homemade guacamole and chips and they were a hit!

Happy Green Pepper on a Plate

You can find the original recipe on a cute little blog titled no. 2 pencil 

Here is the run down:

4 bell peppers
1 pound of 85 percent lean ground beef
1/2 of a yellow onion, diced
1 cup of canned enchilada sauce
1 1/4 cup of shredded jack cheese
3/4 cup of cooked Mexican rice
salt and pepper
sour cream and diced green onion for toppings

Finely dice the onion place in a bowl and cover it with enchilada sauce. Heat in the microwave for 5 minutes.

Cut off the tops of the peppers and remove the stem and seeds. Finely dice the tops of the peppers and place in large bowl.

Pour 1/3 cup of water into the bottom of your crock-pot and nestle the bell peppers in (It might be a tight fit...it's okay)!

In the bowl with your chopped pepper tops add, meat, sauce and onions, 1 cup of shredded cheese, 3/4 cup of Mxican rice (cooked), 1 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper.

Fill peppers and cook on low for 6 hour. Top them with sour cream and green onions and enjoy!

~Happy Eating~ 

Also, if you have a hunter in the family as well and haven't discovered Game and Garden you really need to head on over to Stacy's blog and check it out! We saw her the other day on the outdoor channel and I immediately went out and looked up all the recipes I could find by her, and put her cookbooks (she is releasing a new one) on my WANT list :) She has some great ideas!! I can't wait to try more of her venison recipes once hunting season starts back up and we get more venison! We are getting ready to try one of her fish recipes...check back soon to find out how it turned out!

Slow Cooked BBQ Ribs...MmmmHmmm

Alright, you all are going to get sick of me and my crock-pot haha...but I LOVE IT!! It's so easy and makes your home smell so good all day while it's cooking. So here I go with another one! One of our "meat deals" I was telling you about earlier was boneless ribs so I found a slow cooker recipe and went to work. We added a little of our own spices for extra flavor and left it in overnight on low and by the morning they were so tender we could barely pull one out with a fork because they just wanted to fall apart!! I found the recipe on SparkRecipes.com and it is delicious!

You start out with 4 tablespoons of brown sugar. I did "heaping" tablespoons because I like the sweet flavor! You add one cup of ketchup, one cup of BBQ sauce (we used Sweet Baby Ray's Sweet 'n Spicy), two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (again I used about 4 because we love our Worcestershire sauce), one teaspoon of salt, and one teaspoon of pepper. Mix all this together in a bowl and throw the ribs in the crock-pot then cover them the sauce.
SIDE NOTE: Our addition to the sauce was one teaspoon of garlic powder, one teaspoon of celery seed, and one teaspoon of marjoram. YUMMY!!
The recipe says to leave these in for 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high. I threw this together before bed, and left it on low until lunch the next day. We pulled it apart (and trimmed off the fat because ribs will have quite a bit of fat) and put it on a sandwich! It was so delicious and the left-overs taste just as good as when it came straight out of the crock-pot!

Right out of the crock-pot ready to be trimmed and pulled apart for a fantastic sandwich!

So, here is the direct link to the recipe and the ingredients one more time :)

4 Tbsp Brown Sugar
1 cup Ketchup 

1 cup BBQ sauce
2 Tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
12 oz of ribs (3 oz Per person)

(WE ADDED a teaspoon of garlic powder, celery seed and marjoram) 

Since this was so short and to the point, I'm going to share what I did on my Saturday afternoon! You can find it on my Pinterest page and it was so easy to make! If you are a baseball fan like me (GO CARDS) and have an extra baseball lying around your house you can follow the link to make a cute baseball bracelet or anklet (I made both). My note to self as I made them this afternoon was that after you take the stitches out of the water and stretch them out, you can put them under something heavy and pull them as straight as you can and it will lay flat instead of having the "curling" shape of the baseball!! Hope ya'll have a good weekend!! 

~Happy Eating~

A Roast and Mud Pie...First meal in our new home

So, I've been out of the cooking world for the last week because Dee Jay and I were moving so it was a lot of take-out and leftovers in our house the last week. We celebrated our 1 year anniversary on the 1st of June, so of course I had to get our kitchen ready first so I could make us a good dinner to celebrate! In true Okie fashion I made dirt pudding and chuck roast. If you have a Food Pyramid in your area, I think I should make it known that you can buy five packages of meat for $25. We got about $40 worth of meat for $25...what a steal!!! So I pulled out the boneless chuck roast and went to work.

This recipe can be found at Cooks.com after I googled what I had at home (I know the recipe says to use a dutch oven but I don't own one so I made do with my crock-pot), and found this little gem! You start with 3 to 4 pounds of boneless chuck roast and half a stick of butter. You're going to melt the butter in a skillet and brown the meat on both sides, then place it in the crock-pot. You will then sprinkle a half of a teaspoon of garlic salt, half a teaspoon of onion salt, half a teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of black pepper over the meat. Cover it with one can of mushroom soup and one tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce. (I used about 2 and half tablespoons of Worcestershire because I love the taste)! Add about 3 cans of water, and set the crock-pot on low and cook it for about 3 hours. You are going to want to check on it about an hour in to make sure there is still quite a bit of liquid. Now, you can eat it after 3 hours OR you can let it simmer on low over-night to give it time to soak up the juices and it will end up being so tender it practically falls apart as you scoop it out of the crock-pot! Either way is fine we tested it both ways and preferred the over-night deal but 3 hours was great too!

You can eat this with some veggies or pull it apart and serve up as a sandwich. Either way it's fantastic! Save the liquid in the crock-pot, you can use it as gravy! 

Here is the direct link to the recipe, as well as the run-down!

Boneless Chuck Pot Roast 

3-4 lb. boneless chuck roast
1/2 stick butter
1/2 tsp. garlic salt
1/2 tsp. onion salt
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. black pepper
1 can mushroom soup
1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

Cook in Dutch oven on top of stove. Melt 1/2 stick butter. Put roast in Dutch oven in melted butter, brown real brown. Turn over brown other side. Add garlic salt, onion salt, salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce. Pour mushroom soup on top roast. Spread over roast. Put 2-3 cans water into Dutch oven over roast.Cover and cook 2-3 1/2 hours on low heat. Check to see if you need to add more water in hour or so. Makes its own gravy. Serve 4-6 people. Serve with rice or cream potatoes.

Now, onto the dirt pudding. It's been awhile since I have made this so I found the recipe at  Food.com and whipped it up in no time! Before I start to tell you this particular recipe, I'm going to vent. You know how you buy 10 hot dogs and then have to buy 8 hot dog buns and then if you need to cook all 10 you have to buy an extra bag of buns, only to have buns left over and you wonder why they do that?? Well in this particular recipe if it called for 14 oz of something I could only find it in 16, or 3 1/2 ounces....I found it in 4+ ounces. Sheesh!! Why can't everything just be easy?? So, all that to say, it calls for two packages (3 1/2 ounces each) of vanilla pudding. I bought two packages that were close to that it worked out fine. So don't fret and don't over-buy! Save yourself some money because I'm here to tell you it will work out! Okay....start with one box of Oreo cookies (close to 14 oz) and crush them as much as you can in a big Ziploc bag and set aside. In a separate bowl you are going to mix 2 packages (as close to 3 1/2 oz as you can) of instant vanilla pudding with 3 cups of milk. (I am allergic to regular milk so we always have Almond milk in our fridge, and it works great). 

In another bowl you are going to mix together one cup of powdered sugar, one 8 oz package of cream cheese, and 1/4 of a cup of butter. Now add the sugar mixture in with the pudding and mix well. Take a 14 oz container of Cool Whip (or as close to 14 oz as you can find) and fold it in with the pudding/sugar mix. I whisked mine until I got all the lumps out. Now for the fun part!!! You will take about half of the crumbled cookies and place them in the bottom of a flower pot...

Now fill it up with the pudding mixture, but leave room on top for the rest of Oreo dirt! (We had leftover so I made a mini "pie" in the Ziploc container). Top the pudding with the rest of the Oreo's...(you can also add gummy worms sticking out of the top to make it look more authentic...this was fun as a child and fun for parties but I left them out this time). Stick a flower in your pot and presto-magic you have a fun dessert that looks great on the table before you're ready to eat! 

 Here is a direct link to the recipe and you don't have to use the regular Oreo cookies if you don't want. You can mix it up and use whichever cookie flavor you like! 

Dirt Pudding

1 (14 ounce) bag Oreo cookies
2 (3 1/2 ounce) packages French Vanilla Pudding
3 cups milk
1 cup powdered sugar
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
1/4 cup butter or 1/4 cup margarine (1/4 cup)
1 (12 ounce) container Cool Whip 

Break up cookies, put 1/2 on bottom of preferred dish and save other 1/2 for topping. Mix pudding and milk together, set aside. Mix sugar, cream cheese and butter. Add sugar mixture to pudding; fold in cool whip. Pour onto cookies, top with remaining cookies. I like to let it cool for at least a half hour if I have time. Let's it all meld together and it tastes better cool.

~Happy Eating~

Cinnamon Chicken in the crock-pot

Okay, I am a little late with today's blog (12:15 am), but I am still awake because our schedules are all messed up, so to me it definitely still feels like "Friday". I found this recipe on my Pinterest board and thought it sounded great...Crock-Pot Cinnamon Chicken, yum! The chicken was great, what I decided to serve it with, not so great lol. We live and learn my friends! Which is great for ya'll because I can tell you that I did not like it with rice. In my head I was thinking back to those days growing up when you pour milk and sugar with a little bit of butter in with your white rice, which is fantastic to me. So, since this recipe kind of made me think of that, I thought to myself, why not! Nope, the flavors did not mix well and I ended up taking the chicken off the rice and eating it by itself. Since I made this error in your favor (haha), I also decided to throw in a spa dip recipe I found while scouring through a recipe book! YUM! Both recipes are so simple it's kind of ridiculous! I'll start with the chicken and move on from there!

The recipe calls for five chicken breasts. Since there are two of us, I only used two chicken breasts (however they were extremely large and filled up the entire bottom of my crock-pot). I was easily close to a pound and half. You start out by peeling and slicing six carrots. I am not a fan of carrots and Dee Jay is, so I compromised and chopped up the baby carrots and threw them in and made sure to spoon them on top of his plate (yea, I'm a baby about carrots). On top of the carrots you will toss in the chicken. Then here comes the part that will make your mouth water every time you get a whiff of this cooking...spices!!! It calls for one tablespoon of cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves, 1/4 teaspoon cardamom, 1 (15 oz) can of light coconut milk, and one (15 oz) can of tomato sauce. (I am going to make a side note here: I did not have cardamom and when I went to the store I was sad to see it was almost $15 for one spice bottle. So I made do with what I had and searched for what you can use if you don't have cardamom. I minced up a little bit of ginger and tossed in a sprinkle or two of nutmeg.) You put all this over the chicken (I stirred mine around a little bit), turn the crock-pot on low and cook them for 4-6 hours (until the internal temperature of the chicken is 165 degrees and no longer pink). 

The chicken cooking (I promise it's somewhere underneath there)

Sit back and enjoy the smell that will fill your home, and then serve it up with some vegetables as a side and you have yourself a pretty healthy little meal! This recipe was found on a website called The Gracious Pantry. She has a lot of great recipes I can't wait to try out, and the direct link to the actual recipe can be found here if you missed it up above!

Now, on to the spa dip...I pulled this recipe out of Fellowship Bible Church, Tasteful Traditions, book I was talking about in an earlier entry. The lady that entered this into the book is Hilary Smith, and her spa dip is great!

You start with two (8 oz) boxes Cream Cheese (softened), and add two packages of dry ranch dressing, 4-5 green onions, and 4-5 slices of deli sliced smoked ham. You are going to finely chop the green onion and ham and mix everything together in a bowl and serve it up with some crackers (or whatever your choose).

She noted that it is best if made a day in advance so we threw it in the fridge and ate some the next day and it was delicious! See, I told you there were ridiculously easy recipes!! I know it's Memorial Day weekend and this dip would be great at an event you may be going to! We used Special K Multi-Grain Crackers because they are sooo yummy!

SPA DIP
2 (8 oz) boxes cream cheese, softened
2 pkgs. Dry ranch dressing
4-5 Green onions
4-5 slices deli sliced smoked ham

Finely chop ham and onions. Mix everything together. Serve with crackers. Best if made the day before.

I hope everyone has a safe and fun holiday weekend!!
~Happy Eating~

Make it before you Shake it...Tortellini Soup

So, last night I had my Shake it Fit dance class. I spent the afternoon on the phone with my best friend and of course lost complete track of time and realized I needed to do something for dinner for Dee Jay. I whipped this soup up in no time, turned the crock pot on, set the timer and took off! (Note to self: Don't mince garlic or onions or anything that leaves its scent on you for hours right before you go to a fitness class! I smelled garlic the ENTIRE time I was there lol)! Anyway, what is this easy and delicious meal you made you're asking?? Crock-Pot Tortellini Soup is it's name, and you won't want to stop eating it is it's game!! I found it on my Pinterest page after realizing I post A LOT of recipes on there that say things like, "200+ crock-pot recipes". So, I stumbled on to this one, and I'm so glad I did. Here's how I make it (before leaving to shake it)...

Take two cans (14 1/2 oz) of beef or vegetable broth (you can use low sodium if you want) and pour into the crock pot. Chop two cloves of garlic, one red bell pepper, and one medium sized zucchini and toss into the broth. Take one can (28 oz) of diced tomatoes and throw in the pot (juice and all).  Add 1/4 teaspoon of basil and a half of a teaspoon of garlic powder to the mix. (I know the recipe says to add corn and green onion, I totally missed that step in my "put it together as fast as I can" rush and it still tasted great. I make mistakes like this ALL the time, and most of the time it works out great)! Throw in one package (9 oz) of tortellini, I used the three cheese tortellini. And then you are going to brown one to one and half pounds of Italian sausage or beef, drain it and toss it in the crock-pot! (Note: I used Italian sausage which is very greasy, next time I will probably use ground venison or chicken because it will be less fat).

Presto! Turn your crock-pot on high and cook it for about 3 1/2 hours, serve it up and add some fresh grated Parmesan cheese and you have delicious tortellini soup for dinner!

~Happy Eating~

Kraft Crock-Pot Tortellini Soup

• 2 cans (14-1/2 ounce each) vegetable or beef broth
• 1 - 1 1/2 lbs. ground beef or Italian sausage; browned, drained & rinsed
• 1 can (15-1/4 ounce) whole kernel corn, drained
• 6 green onions, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed through a press or minced
• 1/4 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
• 1 can (28 ounce) diced tomatoes
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 2 cups chopped zucchini (about one medium)
• 1 pkg. (9 oz.) tortellini; any flavor
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic pepper
• Grated Parmesan, over the top for serving 

Mix together all the ingredients into a crock-pot (except for the cheese), turn on high and cook for 3 1/2-4 hours (ours did not even take the full 3 1/2). Serve in bowls with Parmesan cheese on top! (Don't wait too long or you will overcook the tortellini and it will be mushy)