Tag Archives: comfort

Pioneer Woman chocolate sheet cake

baking, dessert 11 Comments

It’s time to speak the truth about the Pioneer Woman:

She is out to make us all overdose on chocolate.

And I love her for it.

The Yankee bought me her cookbook for Christmas and it’s fantastic. This chocolate sheet cake (also on her site here) was the first recipe I tried out of the book and it certainly didn’t disappoint! Try it yourself.

Pioneer Woman chocolate sheet cake

Ingredients

For the cake:
  • 2 cups flour
  • 2 cups sugar
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 4 heaping Tbsp cocoa
  • 2 sticks butter
  • 1 cup boiling water
  • ½ cup buttermilk
  • 2 whole eggs, beaten
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
For the icing:
  • ½ cups finely chopped pecans (I omitted; Yankee is not a fan)
  • 1 ¾ sticks butter
  • 4 heaping Tbsp. cocoa
  • 6 Tbsp milk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 pound (minus 1/2 Cup) powdered sugar

Instructions

Make the cake:
    1. Combine flour, sugar and salt in a bowl
    2. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add cocoa and stir
    3. Add boiling water to saucepan and boil mixture for 30 seconds, then remove from heat. Pour this mixture over the flour mixture and gently stir to cool it off.
    4. In a separate boil, mix together buttermilk, beaten eggs, baking soda and vanilla; stir this mixture into the chocolate mixture
    5. Pour batter into a jelly roll pan (I used a 9×13 Pyrex for thicker layers) and bake at 350F; a jelly roll pan will take about 20 minutes; add about ten minutes onto that for a 9×13
While the cake is in the oven, make the icing:
  1. Finely chop pecans, if using
  2. Melt butter in a saucepan (same pan from earlier is fine) and add cocoa, stirring to combine
  3. Turn off heat, then add milk, vanilla and powdered sugar. Stir, and then stir in pecans if using

Nutritional information: one bazillion calories (roughly) per serving. And worth it.

Creamy crockpot chicken

lunch, supper 5 Comments

You know what I hate? When a recipe tastes SO GOOD but photographs SO POORLY. Le sigh.

Shall I just spare you the picture? Because really, it doesn’t do it justice. Just try this (it’s so crazy easy — you just have to try) and then come back and tell me what you thought.

Creamy crockpot chicken

Ingredients

  • What you need:
  • A slow cooker
  • 1 can of corn
  • 1 can of black beans
  • 1 jar of salsa
  • 1 block of cream cheese
  • frozen chicken breasts — I used 2 but you could do up to 4 or 5 without adjusting ingredients and be fine

Instructions

  1. Put chicken breasts, corn (drained), beans (drained and rinsed) and salsa into the slow cooker and stir it up a bit
  2. Cook on high for 4-5 hours or until chicken is cooked through
  3. Add in block of cream cheese and cook another 30 minutes
  4. Stir up mix to make the whole thing creamy, then serve chicken and sauce together

Do you see how easy that is? And that you must try it? Please do. Make it, eat it, love it, and agree with me that a picture of it is no indication of its actual greatness.

Lissa’s baked jambalaya

soup, supper 16 Comments

Oh I wish I could make this look as good as it tasted!

My fabulous friend Lissa makes this so often that she doesn’t even look at the recipe anymore. That’s the sign of a good supper! She told me how to make it while The Kiddo and I were visiting last fall, and I can’t believe it took me this long to make it. It is absolutely phenomenal, really. You must make this as soon as possible.

Lissa’s baked jambalaya

Ingredients

  • 1 stick butter, melted
  • 1 lb. smoked sausage, sliced
  • 1 can Rotel
  • 1 can french onion soup
  • 1 can beef consomme
  • 2 lbs. uncooked chicken, turkey or peeled shrimp
  • 1 bunch green onions, chopped
  • 2 cups uncooked rice
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 14 ounces (or 1 can) chicken broth
  • I also added some chopped dehydrated red peppers out of the freezer from last summer’s garden

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350F
  2. Mix all ingredients and bake in buttered casserole, covered tightly (I did a tight cover of foil then a lid on top of that) for one hour; stir and cover, then bake 30 minutes more or until rice is done

It’s only one step. Don’t you love that? This expands a lot as the rice cooks and soaks up the chicken broth so allow yourself plenty of room in the casserole dish (I totally pushed my luck there; overflow crisis narrowly averted).

I served this with shredded cheese, hot sauce and cornbread. It went fast. 🙂

Chicken & dumplings

lunch, soup, supper 8 Comments

Another classic Southern comfort food dish. Ahh…. so fabulous.

I learned to make this dish when I was just out of college and had a job that was more handling customers than washing diapers. For the record, I’ll take Cheerios over conference calls any day. 😉  This was one of those “oh I use some of this and a little of that and sometimes those — should I write this down?” sort of things, so I’m doing my best to turn it into an actual recipe.

Chicken & dumplings

Ingredients

  • 4 chicken breasts or one roasted rotisserie chicken
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1/4 cup butter, cold
  • Chicken broth — about 2 quarts
  • 2 Tbsp. or so cornstarch
  • Salt, pepper, onion powder

Instructions

The chicken
    1. Either boil or slow cook the chicken breasts, saving the water it was cooked in, or (time saver alert!) buy a lovely already-roasted rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. Viola, my Grandma would wittily say, you’re halfway there. With either method, wait till the chicken is cooled and chop it into chunks; set aside for now.
The dumplings
    1. While the pot of broth is heating up, cut the butter into the flour like you’re making biscuits using either a pastry blender, a fork, or a few pulses of the food processor. Now sprinkle in some salt and pour in chicken broth, a little at a time, till the dough holds together enough to be able to roll it out — this will take somewhere around a cup or cup and a half, but it’s not a science. When the dough holds together, roll it out very thin and cut into strips about an inch wide, and two inches long. A pizza cutter is great for this! These, obviously, do not have to be anywhere near perfect.
    2. Returning to your chicken broth: get a big pot of chicken it simmering — either the water you reserved from cooking the chicken breasts, or some homemade you might have in the freezer. If you’re using quarts of chicken broth, pour in one full quart plus whatever is left after making your dumplings. Bottom line: you want plenty in there so the dumplings have room to cook.
    3. After the broth has come to a nice simmer, start carefully dropping in the dumplings; they’ll all sink to the bottom at first and that’s fine. Let them simmer gently for about half an hour, swirling the pot around every so often. You don’t want to do too much stirring because the dumplings are delicate as they’re cooking and you don’t want to make them all into a giant ball of mush; some gentle moving around with a wooden spoon is fine.
Thickening time!
    1. Whisk about 2 Tbsp. of cornstarch into 1/4 cup of cold water till it’s all dissolved and there are no lumps. Pour this mixture into the pot of dumplings and stir gently, then add in your chopped chicken.
Seasoning
  1. Sprinkle in some salt, some pepper and some onion powder, bring the whole mess back up to a simmer, then reduce heat so it’s just below simmer. Let it cook another half hour or so to give the cornstarch time to work its magic and thicken things up and for all the flavors to get to know each other properly.

Now serve! This is crazy good with green beans (cooked with bacon fat, duh) or just on its own. It also freezes like a dream so I make a giant pot once a month or so and freeze quart size bags of it.

Hot chocolate

dessert, drinks, kids 5 Comments

The Kiddo loves him some Polar Express. He loves the hot chocolate song and wanted to make some to enjoy while we watched the movie. And by “enjoy” I mean “direct me to drink on his behalf” because he has very strict rules about drinking anything other than milk and water. Alrighty then.

This is actually so easy that it barely deserves to be called a recipe. Don’t you love that kind of recipe?

Stir together in a mug:

  1. 3 teaspoons cocoa powder
  2. 3 teaspoons sugar
  3. Pinch of salt

Now add either boiling water or steaming hot milk and stir. Add marshmallows at will.

Feel free to entertain your taste buds by adding peppermint syrups, Bailey’s, cinnamon, etc.

That’s all. Isn’t that easy? Don’t you want to quit buying those little packets?

Stay warm! 🙂