"Pie-oneer Woman"

I love the Pioneer Woman.  I have used many of her recipes and used hers to create some of my own.  I love to cook, so I follow quite a few cooking blogs, but hers is my favorite.

Today she is going to be on the Food Network at 8pm- doing Throwdown with Bobby Flay!  My DVR is set!

Anyway, right now she is doing a series on holiday pies.  I am a pie person and prefer it to cake almost any day.  (Except my birthday when I get a white cake with pink cream filling and cream cheese frosting from Costco!)  I had been talking with my mom about inventing a new pumpkin pie.  I like pumpkin pie, but it's not my favorite.  My husband on the other hand is in LOVE with pumpkin pie and could finish a whole one himself- and has.  More specifically, he loves his mom's pumpkin pie.  I've tried to make it from her family recipe, he says it's good, but not like his Mama's. I hope I have a pie that Will is going to say that about someday!

Back to my pie idea.  I think what I don't like about a pumpkin pie boils down to 2 things:  the crust and the absence of something crunchy on top.  I'm more of a graham cracker crust kind of gal.  So my idea was to do a ginger snap crust with some kind of candied nut topping.  Apparently I'm not that original in my thinking because when I Googled it there were many examples.  Oh well.  I still plan on making this and will let you know how it goes!

One of the pies the PW made lately was this Pumpkin Creme Pie.  It looks amazing and I will be making that one soon too.  Also, there is talk among her followers of a mysterious chocolate bourbon pecan pie.  I will be waiting to see what that looks like!

Let the pie making begin!

Once A Month Cooking

So a couple friends and I are trying out this idea of "Once a Month Cooking". We really only made 7 meals (this month is mostly an experiment) so obviously we'll have to cook more than once this month, but it will be nice to have some pre-made meals in the freezer for when I need something quick. They are all chicken recipes and should only require dumping the ingredients into a dish and baking it. We split up the shopping and then spent about 4-5 hours on a Saturday afternoon assembling the meals. Each meal is put into a freezer bag with the cooking directions on the outside. So far I've tried two of the meals and they weren't too bad. It did take some time to assemble them, but I really love the idea of having dinners on hand when I'm just too pooped to do anything else. The idea and recipes came from Recipezaar (although I just found a new site dedicated to this idea- see button in left column) Each of the 'cooking sessions' is already planned. It's really great b/c there is a master ingredient list that you can remove items from if you already have them. A detailed step-by-step plan is also included to help you stay organized and on track when assembling the meals.

Here is a list of the meals we made:

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Baked Honey Mustard Chicken

Herb Wine Chicken

Honey Sesame Chicken

Golden Honey Chicken

Sangria Chicken

Chicken Bruschetta Casserole

Monterey Chicken

A couple pics from the day

My cooler full of dinners!