Dough for Brains

That pretty much sums up the past month of my cooking adventures.  Pillsbury, Pillsbury and a bit more Pillsbury.  My husband has requested a "Pillsbury Break", since I have been wrapping, stuffing and pretty much baking everything we eat with dough and that is just dinner, don't even ask about the deserts I have churned out this month.  I keep dropping plates of cupcakes on my neighbor's door steps just to get the sweets out of our house.  Of course the neighbor's don't know I am testing recipes so they probably think I am just a bad cook.  Some of my cupcakes have been very dense, but I give them away anyway.

I am enjoying my Pillsbury experiments, however it leaves little time or other topics for blogging.  April 18th is the final due date.  I hope to have some good non-Pillsbury posts over the next few months, but can't promise a large number of posts, we'll see what the future brings.

Till then... I am off to bake some Pillsbury goodness!  Wish me luck!

Contesting Update: Dough Boy Fever

I have Dough Boy Fever.  The blog has been forgotten in the past week as all of my brain power (which is not much since I am not sleeping due to a recent toddler bed upgrade), or what little brain power I have, has all gone to creating Pillsbury recipes.  A few good and a few pretty bad.  The entire bottom shelf of my fridge is full of Pillsbury products; crescent rolls, biscuits, French bread, pizza dough, sugar cookies, peanut butter  cookies and even gingerbread cookies (which incidentally do not qualify for the contest).  Oh and the freezer has 3 boxes of pie crust!  Here is a tip, make sure your Pillsbury tubes don't roll back and stack up along the back of your fridge as they will block the air flow and your salad will freeze.  Just a little something we have learned the hard way with frozen sour cream and other condiments.  As previously stated, I will not share my Pillsbury ideas until I win that million dollars, but I will tell you I have been baking with bananas and having fun!  And I might be the worst mother in the world because I keep making things with peanut butter when I have a peanut allergy kid in the house.  He is not so allergic that he can't be in the house with it, but I feel bad he can't eat any of the things I make so I just slice of a few pieces of that gingerbread dough and make him cookies.

A bit of travel in the next week so I am not actually sure how many blog posts I'll get out.  I should have some fun ones upon my return.  Heading to Seattle for wedding, will definitely have to do a Pike Market post.  Even though I have been all about the Pillsbury Blue & White, there are some other great contests out there right now.  Ritz Crackers has something going, Sun Maid Chocolate Covered Raisins and the big Gilroy Garlic Festival is taking recipes, just to name a few I have interest in and need to make time for.  So that is my update and why I am neglecting the blog.  Hope to have time for a good post this week.  Feel free to share any Dough Boy tips and I'll do the same.

Year in Review - Misses, failures and learning experiences

 Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. 

 ~Henry Ford

Big Christmas gap in the blog, but great news - Santa brought us a fancy new Nikon 3100D Camera.  Fabulous blog pics for 2011!  I have several posts working from the holiday fanfare, also working on a 2011 Blog Review/Resolutions post. I have big plans for my little blog in 2011, stay tuned and tell some friends.  Before we ring in the new, we must honor and review the past.  The following are my fun failures and contest misses.  I use the word failure with the utmost pride for I believe any good cook must have much failure to be great.  So here is to failing so we might success in 2011!

Not a failure merely a miss.  Egg and Sausage Empanadas:  Did not enter this in the Jimmy Dean contest.  It needs more testing. They were really dry.  I think it could be done, but maybe isn't super original and I need to find a way to keep them moist.

Cranberry Marinaded Pork Chops:  Nice chops, just didn't get the cranberry taste so I didn't bother entering them.  Just a miss for this contest, decent meal.

Shepards Pie experiment gone wrong.  Actually the color was not the bad thing about this, the orange side is Hubbard squash mixed with some mashed potatoes.  I played around with the meat mixture under the rainbow potatoes and that was not so good.  Squash topped pie - ok.  Sausage pie base - not so good.

Fish Soup.  Was suppose to be like the pho soups you find at the good Vietnamese noodle houses, but the Gordon's fish product had a seasoning of it's own that made for an odd flavored broth.  Not a good kind of odd.  The end result was ok looking, not so good tasting.  Probably should call this one a failure.

Cookie Dome.  I was playing around with Pillsbury cookie dough.  What did we learn?  You can't make molds out of Pillsbury cookie dough.  I tried a few things, inside a dome bowl, outside a dome bowl, in the bundt, outside the bundt; it just does not work.  Still experimenting and looking for my own original Pillsbury creation.

Monkey Bread gone wild!  Another Pillsbury miss, well I just used too small a pan, so not a failure.  Still tasted great.

Calamari.  I think myself adventurous in the kitchen and squid/calamari are not all that "out there" but to clean a whole squid and prepare calamari is not for the faint of heart.  I hate to admit it, but I actually gave up and put the squid back in the freezer for another time.  Uncle Joe is a real Portuguese, he can handle whole squid, I'll wait till he can help or make something yummy for me.  Not a fan of whole squid.  Failure. 

Kitchen Reveal

Welcome to my kitchen!  Penny at  Lake Lure Cottage Kitchen is hosting a Kitchen Reveal Day today.  She invited all bloggers to share their kitchens.  I was eager to participate.  I feel my house has been a bit over exposed this past year, but what the heck, it actually looks good by our standards, so let's share!

If you follow my blog or know me, you will know our house was featured on A&E's show Sell This House this past year.  Our kitchen was not one of the rooms they selected for the redesign, but they did repaint it for us so the 1st floor rooms could flow.  Our house did not sell after the show, the market still sucks.  We recently "moved back in" or rather stopped living the clutter free, staged life of a house on the market.  While the house still looks good, we don't keep up that tv-crew-ready look anymore.  We have two little boys, it was exhausting trying to keep up the designer finish.  The fridge is covered with magnets again and the living room is full of toys, but that is what makes it a home.

In the title line of my blog I state my kitchen is small; that is a bit misleading, it is quite big.  I should rephrase that to share the real truth; my kitchen is quite unorganized.  I need an organizational consultant.  Actually, I have a friend that does household consulting, she took one look in my cabinets and told me to box up all but 4 of each of the fancy glasses I have taking up an entire wall of cupboards.  Box up my wine, margarita and martini glasses?  I really had no other response to this advice but to kick her out of my kitchen.  Maybe my priorities could use some adjustment  which in turn would help my cabinet organization, but really... get rid of the margarita glasses?

This is the only cabinet reveal I will share, but it should give you the idea of how whacked my organizational process is.  Yes, this is the liquor/arts and crafts cabinet.  It remains locked at all times as we can't have the children getting drunk and playing with Play-Doh.

My dream home will have one of those cool "command centers" in the kitchen.  The desk where you can keep the family computer and cook books.  I have a tiny corner that I share with the fish, the bread box and the cookie jar.  This is where all blogs begin, they usually end on the couch after the kids go to bed.

The very best part of my kitchen is this little window into the living room.  So many of the houses we have looked at here in New England have terrible kitchen to living room layouts.  It is key to me that the kitchen have flow into the main living space so we can all be together even when cooking is going on.

Now you have seen the pictures of my kitchen all cleaned up and pretty, here is a typical day in my kitchen with a not so typical look for my husband.

MAD CHAOS!

That is my kitchen.

Contesting Update

Summer seems to be the "off season" for contests. Not a lot going on now, which is good, I don't really have the time or interest in the summer to work the contest circuit too hard. I have found a few interesting ones coming up. There are two sites I follow to find what contests are going on Foodreference.com and Contestcooking.com. The contests are listed in order of due dates which helps, the foodreference site seems to include more of the small and local contests so I check both sites to ensure I don't miss a thing. I should be entering every contest, but I pick and choose the ones that really interest me the most. The following are a few I am considering or thinking about now.

Aunt Nellie's "Say Yes to Beets!" 8/31 - With all the fresh beets in my fridge I should do something with this contest. There is a Beet Drink catagory.... beet mojito? Hmmm. Not sure where to go here, but will think about it. http://www.senecafoods.com/ourbrands/auntnellie_beetcontest.shtml

Hood New England Dairy Cook Off 9/31 - This is the first contest I ever entered, and of course lost. My odds have to be better since only residents from the 6 New England states can enter. I will work hard on this one to see if maybe I can't get my first win from my first interest. http://www.hood.com/promo/cookoff0610/

Some of the current Monthly Contests

Foodiekitchen.com - I have never entered this site's contests. Think I'll start looking at it closer. This month's contests look good, but I seem to have missed the due dates. Will follow more closely.

Athena Phyllo Dough - I put some real effort into this product last year. I am not quite a phyllo expert, but like to keep up with their contests. It is a fun product to play with, maybe we can make a phyllo emplanada? www.phyllo.com

This month the two categories are Corn and Grilling.

Mixing Bowl - I discovered this site this past winter and was very active for awhile. This week I noticed I am somehow the "showcase member". Yikes! I have entered several of their contests, still haven't won, but getting good feedback and I really enjoy the site. I could do this snack contest. www.mixingbowl.com

Quick & Easy Outdoor Snacks - due date 8/15

Best Lean Beef Recipe - 7/31

Blog in review

Blogging is a strange thing, I have been blogging now for about 5 months now and I still can't say that I totally get it or understand my draw to it. You can take two approaches to blogging; 1. writing for yourself or 2. writing for an audience. When you write for yourself, it is like journal and can be very therapeutic and easy to share your feelings, but it is also sort of creepy because it is out there for the world to read. It is like leaving the tiny key to your diary out at a slumber party, everyone gets access. Writing for an audience is a full time job. Oh and you have to collect an audience, count that as another full time job in PR and Marketing. I still am not sure what approach I am taking with my blog, maybe a mix of both. I am enjoying the writing, though I feel my writing skills are not up to par with other bloggers. Reading other well written blogs has been fun and gives me new recipes and ideas. Secretly I sort of do want blog fame, but why? And who will read it? There are a million stay-at-home-mom blogs. Who knows why I am doing it, I like it and I guess that is enough, so I am going to keep going and will add a few new features to the blog. May was a light month on the blog as we did some traveling and the excitement of summer's arrival took up much of my time. I am back in the game, there will be travel and many fun summer adventures, but I will try make time for the blog.

Contesting Update
The contesting is not going so well, but I am not giving up!! As I said, May was a slow month for me, I was cooking, but not much for contests. Currently there are not many contests running that I feel passionate about. I feel like when I try new recipes from cook books I am really just training and becoming a better cook which all helps me in my progress to contest success. I will win a contest someday!

New feature - CSA Community Supported Agriculture
My CSA starts tomorrow! I am very excited and slightly intimidated. It is crazy how nervous I am about the responsibility of using all this fresh produce. The CSA is my first step at being a responsible consumer and feeding my family safely grown foods. I really want to be one of those people, but change is hard. I feel very torn by the whole "organic & local" movement. I can't bring myself to buy organic milk for $6 a gallon when the regular milk is only $2.50. Why!?! Shouldn't my family's health be more important than saving a few bucks? The CSA will be a great introduction to the "healthy life" for us all and maybe it will help me begin to make that change. I will do a weekly blog on the CSA box: what's in it and what I make out of it. I would also like to invite my fellow CSA members to contribute their recipes and CSA success. I'll post pictures from our first box tomorrow!

New feature - Cooking For Fun
I love writing about my contest dishes, but we make great meals everyday. I have been holding myself to this silly strict rule that the blog is only about contesting. No more! I will begin blogging about good meals we cook just for fun.

So to wrap it up, I like my blog and am going to expand it slightly so I have more things to write about. Who knows if I will every achieve "blog fame". As long as I am having fun blogging and if I don't put too much stress on myself over it, we'll keep it going. Let's see what we can cook up this summer!

Skip!

I set crazy and unnecessary goals and deadlines on myself. I wanted to post something everyday this month on my little blog, but today I need a nap. I will just share a short update of my working contests.

I am about to start working on a new contest: Good Housekeeping's Cook Your Heart Out! So ready for this contest. I think I have put on 10 pounds already with my Pillsbury month. In this contest, all recipes must meet standards set by the American Heart Association. I am not traditionally a "healthy cook", but I like the challenge in it and figure it couldn't hurt our family. I hope to post some flavorful heart healthy recipes in the coming months. There is also a baby food contest that is actually very timely as I am dealing with food allergies with the one year old. Creating healthy, non processed foods for babies and toddlers is a big part of my life already. So there should be some fun tests in my kitchen!

I have 3 more Pillsbury recipes I will be making and sharing this weekend, still searching for the million dollar winner. Ok, nap time now! :-)

March Challenge - Test Winning Recipes

It is time to get serious about contesting! I need to find a way to take my recipes to a new level. Find that missing "something" that could make my recipe entries unique and interesting to judges and sponsors. I am dedicating the month of March to testing winning recipes. I will be making the recipes others have submitted and won in contests. What better recipe to kick off my March challenge then Carolyn Gurtz's Double Delight Peanut Butter Cookies, otherwise know as The Million Dollar Peanut Butter Cookie. Stay tuned this month, I hope to post many other winners and my reviews.

Goal: Pillsbury Bake Off

I have heard that if you write a goal down on paper, you greatly increase the odds of achieving that goal. Not sure anyone will look at this blog, accept my family and friends maybe once to be polite, but I figure if I put it in writing and track my efforts maybe it will help me achieve it. So here we go......

My goal: Participate in the Pillsbury Bake Off

As a "contester in training" I am entering everyt contest I can find. I will post all entered recipes on this blog and a few of my not so good ideas for a laugh. Since I began contesting about a year ago I think I have entered about 12 original recipes. Stay tuned, there are many more to come!