When Our Girl Comes Home and She's Not Helping Her Daddy...

We visit. We laugh. We share music we've discovered. We talk about books. And life. And we cook. And bake. A lot.

I had to work on Monday and I told college girl to dig through some recipes we've collected and have wanted to try and send me a grocery list. One of her friends said that was the best chore ever. :)

So I shopped and lugged home ingredients and we hunkered down in my little kitchen...with music. And this is some of what we made during the week:

 These little cheesecake cupcakes were yummy! College girl's boyfriend's Mama shared the recipe with us and I quickly added them to my collection of favorite recipes - thank you S! I ate the last one for breakfast the other day and it was to die for.

We made these cookies:

I'm sorry to say these did not make the cut. Ick, but yes, I know they look amazing. :) They were a Banana - Peanut Butter - Chocolate Chip cookie. Epic fail.

But these were good:

Lemon Sugar Cookies? Yes. please! However, I expected to taste more lemon and I think I'll add some lemon extract next time around.

Loved these pretzels too and had to make them twice because they were the perfect UFC Fight Night snack on Saturday and the first batch had disappeared. The recipe for these can be found here. We baked ours at 250° for about 10 minutes because we wanted to eat them immediately. :)

DH and I were somewhat skeptical about this next recipe. The look on DH's face when he saw his girl pull these out of the oven was priceless, but we loved it.

Spaghetti Squash Lasagna Bowls. We're trying to cut down on starches and carbs and this dish was surprisingly satisfying and made it to my cookbook.

Then Baked Portabello Mushrooms were on the menu - loved these! The only thing we will change the next time is to cut back on the salt - otherwise - perfect!


 -Photo from One Perfect Bite -

And  Cajun Chicken Fettuccine was next!

This one was a home run! If you come for a visit, this may very well be on the menu.

And we made this wonderful Chicken and Rice dish. Judy over at Patchwork Times posted this a few weeks ago. I remember this from my childhood and hadn't had it in years. I never really had a recipe for it, but now I do and its tucked inside my cook book now. Thank you, Judy - this was delicious, but I forgot to take a picture.

We also made Sangria:

I'm on the hunt for the perfect Sangria and this was the first batch. It was OK, but not what I had in mind so on to recipe #2.

Then we whipped up some homemade barbecue sauce from a recipe a friend shared:

It was out of this world! Thank you Pauline! Pauline has shared many recipes with me - she has her own section in my cook book. :)

It was a guinea pig week in the kitchen and so much fun! We have some new favorites and dishpan hands from washing mountains of dishes, but the memories are priceless and I've added a couple extra miles to my morning trot. :)