HomeSpunHealers

A large cast iron skillet works best for this recipe.  How large? I use one that’s large enough to fry a whole chicken at one time.

Ingredients:

3 cups of shelled peanuts

2 cups sugar

1 cup water

dash or two of salt

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. vanilla

Directions:

Line a cookie sheet with wax paper and set aside.

Pour water and sugar into cast iron skillet, and stir to dissolve sugar a bit. Turn burner on high. Add vanilla,cinnamon, salt and mix in. Add peanuts and constantly stir until all liquid has evaporated, only sugar crystals remain, and the sugar is sticking to the peanuts.  Process probably takes about 20 minutes.

Pour the sugar coated peanuts onto the cookie sheet lined with wax paper and separate peanuts so that they dry individually.  Cool and store in air tight container.

(photo by Jim Lee)

My husband and I love to share one of these when we go out and eat Mexican food.  So, we decided for New Year’s Eve to make them at home.  We didn’t have a recipe, but we did it anyway.  They are easy to make and delicious!  Here is what we did:

Ingredients

1 package of ten 8-inch flour tortillas (burrito sized)

1 tub of Philadelphia Cheesecake Filling

Enough oil to fill a deep fat fryer (or a pot on the stovetop)

1/2 cup regular cane sugar

1 Tbsp. ground cinnamon

Smuckers Chocolate Sundae Topping (any chocolate syrup would work)

Vanilla icecream

Can of whipped cream

Jar of maraschino cherries

Preparation:

Wrap the tortillas in damp paper towels and microwave for one and a half minutes to heat through.  Fill each tortilla with about 2-3 tablespoons of the filling, rolling them up and sealing the ends as in making egg rolls.  Refrigerate the chimichangas for at least two hours.  Preheat your deep fat fryer oil until ready to cook.  You can use a regular pot on the top of the stove, but we used a small deep fat fryer because we had one.  Our deep fat fryer would acommodate four chimichangas at a time.  Remove from the hot oil when they reach a golden brown.  Place them on a plate with paper towels to drain the excess oil.  While they are still hot, sprinkle them liberally with a mixture of cane sugar and ground cinnamon to make cinnamon sugar.  Place a drained and sugared chimichanga on a dessert plate.  Cut the chimichanga in half and separate to accept a scoop of vanilla icecream between the two halves.  Drizzle with chocolate syrup and a squirt of whipped cream.  Garnish with one more sprinkle of cinnamon sugar over all and a maraschino cherry in the center of the whipped topping.

Yesterday, my in laws had their holiday family get together.  I had been told earlier that we were supposed to arrive at 5 pm.  I had planned to fry up a huge platter of fried chicken to share.  However, yesterday at 11 am, I got a call to alert me that the time had changed for our family function, and we were expected to be there at 2 pm.  There was no way I could fry that much chicken in so short a time. I had to come up with a different plan.  So, it was Chicken and Dumplin’s to the rescue. (Another bonus was that I didn’t have to buy as much chicken!)

Before I get into this recipe, please note that some of my stew pots look more like vats than pots. My husband and I both have a lot of people in our family and these vats get used often. I used a huge soup pot for this recipe that probably holds about 12 quarts. (I did say this recipe serves a crowd, right?)  With that in mind, you better pull out the biggest pot you can find. You might need to buy one.

Ingredients:

3 whole chickens ( Hint: If  your stew pot won’t hold three whole chickens with room to spare, then your pot is not big enough.)

12 cans of refrigerator biscuits (the kind you whack on the counter to make the can pop open)

Chicken bouillion ( I used the loose kind, and not the wrapped cube kind. I used nearly the whole small jar. You can use it to suit your own taste. You do not add salt when using this much bouillion.)

Pepper ( I sprinkled pepper until the whole top surface was lightly covered with pepper.)

Water ( Add enough water to float those three chickens. I would say that half that vat should be filled with water. Just make certain that those chickens are covered with water and that they float slightly. When you take the cooked chicken out, you will need to add enough hot water until the pot is half full of broth.)

Directions:

Rinse chickens and put them in the stew pot.  Add bouillion, pepper, water and then cover. Boil the hell outta those chickens for 1 hour or until done and tender.  Remove chickens and place on a platter to cool.

Keep the chicken broth simmering. Open one can of biscuits at a time. Pinch each biscuit in two and drop in. After you have added one can of biscuits, give a gentle stir. Repeat the process until all 12 cans of biscuits have been added.  Stir occassionally while simmering to keep biscuits from sticking and burning on the bottom. You will know the dumplin’s are ready when they all stop floating on the top, when the chicken broth has thickened to a gravy, and the dumplin is cooked through. I would say this process takes about twenty minutes.  Remove from heat.

Debone chicken and add the meat to the dumplins. Stir and serve.

Serves 25 - 30 easily.

Talk about some comfort food? This is it! It was a hit at my husband’s family dinner.  Some even commented that it tasted as good as their grandmother’s chicken and dumplings and they were shocked to learn that I used refrigerator biscuits.

This is not exactly a recipe; it’s more like an idea for what to do when desserts don’t turn out the way you want them to.  My husband and I have been baking and baking the past couple of days.  We both enjoy cooking, and we enjoy doing it together.  One of our baking tasks was to make two cakes to take with us when we go visit his brother and sister.  We’ve been looking at recipes for cakes for days.  Finally, I decided I’d bake a lemon/pineapple inside out cake.  I left the choice of the other cake to Jim.  He finally decided on a chocolate praline cake.  It sounded delicious as we read the recipe, and it smelled really good as it was baking.  Everything went very well until he placed the second layer on top of the first after he had iced it.  We really don’t know what went wrong, but the cake started to split and ended up in two irregular halves.  Jim made more icing, thinking that the extra icing could hold the cake together like glue.  Wrong. What we ended up with was an exploded cake with tons of icing on it.  We considered trying the recipe again and making it a sheet cake instead of a layer cake, but finally, we just decided to take the cake as it was, explain what happened, and offer it as something that didn’t look too good but was sure to taste good.  We dubbed the cake “Avalanche Cake.” 

One of the ideas that we had when trying to figure out what to do with the messy cake was to make a trifle.  I made a beautiful black forest trifle last Christmas, which was not only magazine pretty, but was delicious as well.  I had never had a trifle that did not have some kind of fruit in it, but I kept thinking of how to turn that cake into an edible trifle dessert.  Then I had an inspired idea.  Jim didn’t mind me tinkering with Avalanche Cake, so I ended up doing this:

I peeled off a good deal of the icing and put it aside to ice some cookies with later.  A little chocolate was mixed into the buttercream frosting, but I was going to ice chocolate cookies, so no big deal.  Then I crumbled up some of the rich devil’s food cake with the luscious praline topping into a clear glass bowl.  I made some more caramel sauce by boiling butter and brown sugar and a little half and half, and I drizzled some of that over the cake.  I toasted some pecans and sprinkled some of those over the caramel sauce.  Then I repeated with more cake, more caramel sauce, and more toasted pecans.  I covered the second layer with some Cool Whip I had in the refrigerator and made a final drizzle of caramel sauce, finishing with a few more toasted pecans.  It fit perfectly into the cake taker, so that’s our second dessert for the family dinner on Friday.  I had enough cake to make a smaller trifle that we can sample tomorrow after our Christmas dinner.  I know it will be very rich.  But I bet it will be very good, too.  And it really does look elegant sitting in the refrigerator tonight. 

They say that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but you can make a trifle out of any wrecked cake.  You just have to figure out what you want to layer the wrecked cake with.  And trifles are always elegant looking.  I wanted to call my new dessert The Accidental Trifle, but Jim insisted that Incidental was a better choice because we didn’t create the dessert by accident; instead, it was the accidental avalanche of the cake that ended in an incident upon which we decided to create the trifle.  Believe it or not, these are the things that two English teachers talk about in earnest!

This is a great recipe to serve at Christmas time. It makes a great first course for your Christmas dinner, or to serve to your family and friends while they are waiting for you to finish cooking dinner, or even to serve on Christmas Eve.  I did a test run on this recipe tonight to make sure it was edible to serve to my family as a first course to our Christmas dinner. It was a hit with my family. I even liked it and I don’t especially care for oysters.

Ingredients:

8 cups of milk

1 large family size can of cream of mushroom soup

1 small finely diced onion

1 tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

2 large cans of mushroom pieces, drained

1/2 bag of diced frozen hash browns (do not use the shredded kind)

3 (8 oz) cans of shelled oysters

1 stick of margarine

2 tblsp. of worshershire sauce

Directions:

In a LARGE crockpot mix the milk and cream of mushroom soup together. Add onions, mushrooms, hash browns, salt, pepper and stir again. Set the crock pot on high and cook for 2 hours or until potatoes are tender.

Melt butter in a large skillet, add worchershire sauce, drain the liquid from two of the cans of oysters while reserving the liquid from one of the third can of oysters and add the oysters and liquid to the skillet. Saute until the oysters just start to curl around the edges, then add the ingredients in the skillet to the crockpot.

Serve with little oyster crackers.

Serves 10 ( or 5 really hungry oyster greedy folks LOL)

Note: You can speed the cooking process by cooking this in a soup pot instead of a crockpot, but you will have to be sure to stir often to keep the potatoes from sticking and the milk from scorching. Also, if you want to turn this into a delicious seafood chowder, you can also add shredded clams when you add the hashbrowns, and add shrimp to the mix just before serving. YUMMY!!!