Southern Roundup 2012

Sorry that I am a little late posting this but life got in the way.  Well once again we had a wonderful time in Panama City Beach for our second annual Southern Roundup.  I, obviously have to travel the furthest to get there but it was a good trip.  I left on Thursday afternoon from Crescent City, CA and arrived in PC at about 8:30 am on Friday morning.  Gary and his beautiful wife Claire got up at 3 a.m. to drive from Georgia to pick me up.  They were waiting for me when I got there.  We couldn't get into the condo until 2 p.m. so we drove around for a while and then went to our favorite restaurant, Hunts Oyster Bar.  Gary and I love oysters so we had a few.

Here we are outside of the restaurant after our feast.

We got into the condo and then everyone else started to turn up.  CindyLepp decided that she was bringing a whole grocery store with us.  Guess she thought that we might have a hiurricane and we needed to stock up

We were too tired to go out that night so we stayed in the condo and had tacos, a few cocktails and a lot of laughs

The next morning I got up early and took a walk along the beach, it was absolutely gorgeous.

Here is a picture of the girls, Robogramma, CindyLepp, Staci and Claire Derr.

For the "actual" roundup we all met at Salty Sue's for lunch.

From left to right you will see GDerr, his wife Claire, CindyLepp, (unseen is JNB, and Amanda's mom Colleen) then Arich, her boyfriend Tim, Phil, (Sherri's hubby) Sherri, Staci and Robogramma.  We had a great time and great food.

These are just a few of the selections that we had for lunch.  If I showed them all we would be here for a month.  This will end part one of our Southern roundup.  Stayed tuned for part 2.

A Second Chance

As AllStars Brand Ambassadors, we are lucky enough to be asked to try out different products and give our opinions on them.  This month it is Al Fresco Chicken Sausage.  And Oh boy does that make me happy.  When we were first asked to try these products back in April, I was very sceptical as I could not envision how chicken sausage could take the place of pork.  I was proved very wrong and I am happy to say that we have been converted.  We use this product regularly in our house now.  I just wish that we could get the full product line, not just a few of the sausage flavors.  Here is what I made with the sausages this time around.

This is  the Garlic Chicken Sausage Vegetable Saute.  We really liked this except that we thought it would have benefited greatly from having a sauce.  I did have some left over spaghetti sauce in the fridge so I heated that up and for us, it seemed to improve the dish.

The second dish that I made was this

This is the Roasted Garlic Chicken Caesar Salad.  YUMMMM.  This was a great recipe and turning my favorite salad into a dinner meal by adding this sausage is a great idea. 
 I for one can't wait until we get some different flavors of this product in our stores.  Try it I think that you will like it.

I am an Allrecipes Allstar Brand Ambassador(a voluntary position) and I’m not compensated for my work with Allrecipes.com. Products received from advertiser are only used for experienced-based reviews on AllRecipes.com - Thoughts from my Kitchen. The reviews, content and opinions expressed in this blog are purely the sole opinions of me, pelicangal aka Jan Elton 

A little help in the Kitchen

Part of our assignment this month for the Brand Ambassador program was to make recipes using Progresso Recipe Starters.  This is a new product of sauces to help us put dinner on the table with a minimum of time spent in the kitchen.  I decided to make Progresso Easy Chicken Cacciatore because it is one of my hubby's favorite meals. Here is a photo

To make this I used the Progresso Recipe Starters Fire Roasted Tomato Sauce.  Hubby loved it.

The next recipe that I tried was Progresso Curry Chicken.  For this one I used Progresso Recipe Starters Creamy Roasted Garlic with Chicken Stock.

This one was not quite so successful.  I think that it definitely needed more spices than just curry powder, maybe some garam masala  would have rounded out the flavors.

Well back to the kitchen to try out some more flavors of this new sauce.  I still have Creamy Three Cheese, Creamy Portabella Mushroom, and Creamy Parmesan Basil to try.  I'll let you know how they turn out.

Disclosure:  The information and free Progresso Recipe Starters products were provided by Progresso through the AllRecipes Brand Ambassador Program

Have you all checked out the new videos on AR.  There are tons of them.  I am having family come from California in a couple of weeks and thought that I would like to try something new.  You can actually find whole meals if you want or get ideas for different courses.  I love breakfast and although I don't care for sweet things every one else does so while they are here I think that I am going to make Buttermilk Pancakes II.  Here is the link to the video
http://allrecipes.com/video/932/buttermilk-pancakes-ii/detail.aspx.  Then another day I thought that I would make a french toast casserole.  (Just bought a loaf of Texas Toast bread which I think will work great)  Another link for you  http://allrecipes.com/video/911/french-toast-casserole/detail.aspx.

Then because we live on the coast and get some awesome fresh fish (I just got some beautiful Ling Cod right off the boat last week)  I thought about making Fish Taco's.  Again another video was available to show me step by step instructions.  Here it is http://allrecipes.com/video/912/fish-tacos/detail.aspx.  I also love tartar sauce so I thought that this would go well with the tacos. http://allrecipes.com/video/934/tartar-sauce-i/detail.aspx.  I also love to make tartar sauce as a dip for french fries. Yum.   So if you haven't already found these gems on AR please go and look.  You might find a yummy dinner right there with foolproof instructions.  Enjoy

AllRecipes, Our Mother Ship

A few years ago, after being a lurker on AR I had become part of "The Buzz".  Then one day, I think it was a Saturday Oh no!!! OMG!!! no AR.  what could have happened.  No one knew.  All day we all tried and tried to get on and couldn't.  What on earth were we all going to do.  We had plans, we had dinners to make and nowhere to go for our recipes.  We started e-mailing to each other, What is happening? people were saying, Where is AR.  Literally dozens of AR peeps, from all over the country,  were in contact trying to find out what on earth could be keeping us from our very favorite addiction.  People were surfing the "net" It didn't matter, who you were, what you did, where you lived,  if you were part of the 1% or the 99%, we needed our AllRecipes.  Then one person finally found a story.  There had been a fire in AR's building.  It wasn't too bad as I remember, but had closed down the building.  We all vowed that from now on we would print all of our recipes just in case.  I wonder how many of us have done that.  I know that I haven't.  1467 recipes would make a pretty big book.   Just hope that nothing like that ever happens again.  I am waaay more addicted now than I was then.

Sausage!!!! Pork Or?

I love making my own sausage.  Some of you that have been with AllRecipes for a while will have seen some of the pictures of sausages that I have made (even the disasters). 

This is my Andouille sausage before smoking

For the most part I use pork, I have used some beef but usually it will be pork.  We were asked this month to try various chicken sausages from Al Fresco.  I have to say my hubby and I were very sceptical about chicken sausage, but were willing to give it a try.  We were so pleasantly surprised.

The first recipe that I made was  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/grilled-sweet-italian-chicken-sausage-with-tomato-cream-sauce-over-linguine/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=al%20fresco&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Recipe%20Search%20Results

This was a delicious recipe and from the first bite my hubby asked what kind of sausage this was and that it was "yummy"  My second recipe also used the Italian chicken sausage but was a soup.  Here is the link.  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/sweet-italian-chicken-sausage-and-tortellini-soup/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=al%20fresco&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Recipe%20Search%20Results

This soup was so good that I had some for breakfast this morning.  I have to say that I did add a few more veggies to the recipe but I don't think that I hurt the recipe at all.

The final recipe that I tried was this
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/grilled-chipotle-chorizo-chicken-sausage--shrimp-kabobs/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=al%20fresco&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Recipe%20Search%20Results

This was so good that my hubby had the leftovers of this for breakfast this morning. lol

I know that this month's activities have given me a whole new view on sausage and I may even try making my own now using chicken.  I will certainly be on the look out for more varieties of Al Fresco, so that I can try some of their other recipes posted on AR.  All in all we have had some great food this month.

I am an Allrecipes Allstar Brand Ambassador(a voluntary position) and I’m not compensated for my work with Allrecipes.com. Products received from advertiser are only used for experienced-based reviews on AllRecipes.com - Thoughts from my Kitchen. The reviews, content and opinions expressed in this blog are purely the sole opinions of me, pelicangal aka Jan Elton 

 

Butter or Shortening?

My first memory of making pastry is from when I was about 12 years old.  We had cooking class at school and we were making apple pie.  The recipe is the only one that I have used for shortcrust pastry since then,   well with one exception, which I will talk about in a minute.  The recipe is very simple.  2 cups all purpose flour, 1 cup butter, a pinch of salt, and enough ice water to bring the pastry together. that's it.  Chill for an hour or so and voila, enough shortcrust pastry for a double crust pie.

The exception that I mentioned, happened just a couple of weeks ago.  I was making a recipe (which shall remain nameless) from this very site.  The recipe called for making pastry using half butter and half shortening.  I decided on a whim to actually follow the recipe lol.  Made the pastry according to directions.  Put it in the fridge to chill.  Rolled out the pastry and disaster.  Every time I tried to pick up the pastry to turn it or to continue with the next part of the recipe the pastry tore.  Didn't matter how much flour I used or whether I chilled it longer, no way was I going to be able to use this pastry.  I even put it back into the fridge overnight.  The disaster still tore  every time I tried to move it.    Luckily, I still had enough butter in the fridge to make my old standby. 

Apple Pie with All Butter Shortcrust Pastry.

This pastry can also be used for savory pies.  This is AllRecipes Steak and Irish Stout Pie

So as you can see, it is butter all the way from me. You can find some really good recipes using butter at this site:  http://goboldwithbutter.supranet.net/

 I am an Allrecipes Allstar Brand Ambassador(a voluntary position) and I’m not compensated for my work with Allrecipes.com. Products received from advertiser are only used for experienced-based reviews on AllRecipes.com - Thoughts from my Kitchen. The reviews, content and opinions expressed in this blog are purely the sole opinions of me, pelicangal aka Jan Elton