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Tonight I had a cooking class at my house with Chef Kristian Swint... Kevin bought it for me for Christmas last year!  The class was for four people, so I invited my friends Lisa, Katt and Steph.  We were going to cook Chicken Picatta, so I made a little appetizer to go along with it.  Of course, I forgot to take a picture of the actual chicken picatta, so that recipe will come at a later date when I make it again.  (Which I definitely will, because it was awesome and very easy!)

To make this pizza dough, I used Fleischmann's Pizza Crust Yeast... no waiting for it to rise, and it's not elastic, so it's easy to roll out.  I just followed the recipe on the package and added a teaspoon of homemade Italian seasoning.  Some cherry tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and fresh basil... that's all it is. Serve some balsamic vinegar on the side for dipping, and it's a great way to start a meal.

These cookies are a complete and total rip-off of Lila Loa's Halloween squares.  The only thing I did different was to put ears on the cat.  And maybe not do them as well. :-)

I think Frank is my favorite, but Mr. D with his tiny fangs is a close second.  He's such a friendly little blood sucker.

Did you know that you can freeze corn syrup icing?  I freeze all of my left over icing. If I have more than a couple tablespoons, I'll put it in a sandwich sized ziplock bag... you never know when you'll need just a little bit of a certain color.  Like the red for Dracula's mouth... left over from 4th of July.  Oh, and the flesh tone?  Totally forgot I needed that color and I had already mixed all my freshly made icing up with other colors.  Luckily, I had some white left over, again from 4th of July, so I was able to save myself!

If you have only a tiny bit of icing left, put all the colors together in one bag, and use it later to make black!  Which, as we know, is an absolute must during at least one month of the year!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Well, my new range finally got a workout today!  I made 5 loaves of banana bread, a pot of chili, and corn bread muffins!  I totally forgot that I have a double oven, and found myself waiting patiently for my first batch of bread to get done before I started the second one.

Anyway, sour cream is the secret weapon that makes this banana bread so yummingly moist.  You might as well double the recipe and put one in the freezer.  Or just eat them both... I wont tell. :-)

When I was young, I was a huge fan of red salad dressings; Russian, French, Catalina.  I also put A LOT of dressing on my salads!  I remember going with my Dad to a place called Charlie's, getting the chef salad and drenching that thing in French dressing.  I have no idea now how I could stand it, but we do strange things when we are kids.

I don't gravitate toward the red dressings so much nowadays, but on this night I was looking for a salad dressing I could make with what I had in my pantry.  This was quick, easy and tasted pretty darn good!

Who is Cousin Jim, you ask?  I have no idea.  I found this recipe on Food.com many years ago and it has been my go-to apple pie recipe ever since.  Normally I use granny smith apples, but this time a friend at work brought in a bunch of apples from the tree in his back yard.

I kind of have a love-hate relationship with apple pie.  I love apple pie.  But I hate the way the apples sink and leave a big empty space between the crust and the fruit.

So, the last couple times I've made this, I've tried two different techniques to ward off the "apple pie shrink".  The first one was cooking the apples down before putting them in the pie shell.  The second one, which I tried today, consisted of mixing the apples with the sugar and spices and then letting them sit for a while till all the juices drain out and the apples shrink down.  Then you boil the juices to reduce them down, and mix the reduction with the apples before putting them in the shell.

Both ways require a lot of time and effort, and the pie still shrinks anyway.  This pie wasn't so bad, but the second one I made still had a gaping hole, so I give up.  Embrace the apple pie, shrink and all!

http://www.food.com/recipe/cousin-jims-amazing-apple-pie-107608

I made these for my brother and his family who just moved to "Vegas Baby!" -- well okay, it's a town just outside Vegas.  I quickly determined that dice and playing cards were outside my range of talent, so here we have "moving" cookies.  I actually had a Nevada cookie, but I messed it up, so I ate it :-) 

This is Lila Loa's Vanilla Sugar Cookie recipe... usually I make the chocolate one, but I needed a light background for the mailbox.  Paired with Cookie Crazie's glaze recipe flavored with simple vanilla... it's simply... heaven.

My new adventure this time was silver luster dust, which you just mix with a little extract and paint right on.  It made a world of difference... especially with the mailbox... looks so much better than just the flat gray icing.  The words were written on the boxes with Americolor food color markers.

Isn't little Owen sticking his head out of the box just the cutest?  Thanks to my mom for the idea to put something in the box instead of just leaving it empty.  His face is a little pink, but I had to mix some leftover icing colors together, so I did the best I could!

Just got back from today's Pikes Peak Community Cupboard swap.  I brought Seasoned Goldfish Crackers as my offering, and here's the great stuff I came away with:

• Rosemary butter, perfect for a piece of crusty bread
• A cinnamon roll (sans raisins) for Kevin
• Peach Cobbler Jam (I have no idea what the difference is between peach cobbler jam and regular peach jam, all I know is: it's good.  And has half the sugar that the recipe originally called for.)
• Homemade lotion with tea tree oil - supposed to have good healing properties. This will be great for the winter when my hands are so dry that they bleed.
  
• A plate of tomatoes fresh-picked from someone's garden and a gorgeous handful of basil that smelled SO good when it came out of the bag.  I stopped by the store on the way home and bought some perlini mozzarella, so I can make one of my very favorite recipes, Caprese Salsa.

Some of the other offerings today were homemade pizza dough, fresh-milled flour and cornmeal, peach salsa, aloe plants, and loganberry vinaigrette dressing.  My mouth is watering just thinking about it!  I almost had some of the loganberry dressing, but that same person was also offering the hand lotion, so I had to choose one over the other.  Oh well, maybe next time!

This dry mix is a great alternative to using canned "cream of" soups in your recipes... no ingredients you can't pronounce!  There's also a free printable booklet of recipes you can use this with.  I made a yummy sauce with it last night -- caramelized onions, chicken broth and English cheddar cheese!

I'm warning you now... these are seriously addictive.  As a matter of fact, just forgot the 18 ounces, go for the big 30 ounce container, and just double the recipe.  You'll thank me :-)  I cut the oil way back on this... I think I used less than 1/3 cup instead of 2/3.  You really only need enough so that the spices will stick to the crackers.

I'm taking these to the Pikes Peak Community Cupboard food swap next week, IF I don't eat them all before then!