I was in the mood for an iced coffee today, but I wanted something different than the same old, same old, ya know? I checked on our coffee bean supplies and we still had some wonderful Manitou Blueberry from Leelaunau Coffee. I poked around a bit in our freezer and found some frozen Michigan blueberries. It didn’t take me long and I had a pretty sweet idea percolating .

So, here’s what I did to make a super delicious Chocolate Covered Blueberry Iced Coffee Smoothie:

• Brewed up a pot of extra strong (throw in a few extra scoops) freshly ground Manitou Blueberry coffee
• Chilled the coffee in the fridge (not necessary, but this way the iced coffee is guaranteed to be refreshingly cold)
• Filled the blender about 1/3 full of icy frozen blueberries
• Poured in cooled coffee around the 1/2 to 3/4 mark of the blender
• Topped off the blender with milk and chocolate syrup to taste
• Blended until the blueberries were pulverized

Enjoyed my Chocolate Covered Blueberry Iced Coffee Smoothie in the shade of the back yard. I am definitely doing this one again. It was SO good! Plus I supported a few Michigan businesses – Meijer milk, Michigan blueberries, and coffee roasted up in Glen Arbor. To make it a complete Michigan iced coffee I should use some Sanders hot fudge next time.

We picked a bushel of apples yesterday at Hubbard’s Corey Lake Orchards. It was a gorgeous day and the slight breeze wafted the fresh smell of grapes growing next to the apple trees. If you have never smelled rows and rows of ripening grapes you won’t really know what I am talking about. It’s this intoxicating fragrant pure grape smell – sorry best I can do to describe something you smell .

Anyway, I digress. This post is about an apple sauce recipe I just came up with in the kitchen this morning. With all of those apples (and the opportunity to pick a bunch more) we wanted to make up large batches of apple sauce and store them in the freezer in quart-size bags for easier storage (and defrosting). Rather than stand over a pot of sliced apples and stirring them occasionally I decided to come up with a crockpot recipe for apple sauce.

This is so simple, yet so delicious you won’t want to buy mass manufactured jars of apple sauce again. I guarantee it.

What you need:

• 16 peeled and sliced and diced apples
• 3/4 to 1 Cup of sugar (or whatever your tastebuds appreciate – I like the natural sweetness of the apples to show through so I use less)
• 1 Tbsp. ground cinnamon
• Sprinkle of Apple Pie Spice (semi-secret ingredient in my apple sauce)

To make this easier we bought an apple corer, slicer, peeler for $8 I believe. If you are going to want to be baking pies, making apple sauce, apple butter, etc. then you will want one of these. They work pretty slick and save tons of time and effort. I was able to buzz through 16 apples and dice them up in about 10-15 minutes with my four-year-old son “helping.”

Put the diced apples in the crockpot, add the sugar, cinnamon apple pie spice, and stir it up. Set the crockpot on High and cook for 4 Hours. I opened the lid and mashed them up a bit with a wooden spoon about halfway through.

The batch is done now and I can’t stop “tasting” the apple sauce. It is SO good. I think I’ll put some hot apple sauce on a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream for further taste testing .

Have a Great Monday, and Happy Fall to All!

I made up the recipe for these cute little pizzas this evening and they were great.  I’ll try to post a picture the next time I make them.  I didn’t think of it until they were almost gone tonight.

Ingredients

• 8 frozen dinner rolls (dough)
• 1/2 lb. ground beef
• 1 tsp. grill seasoning (I used a combination of steak and barbecue seasonings)
• pizza sauce
• 1 1/2 c. shredded mozzarella cheese
• 10 chives, chopped
• real bacon bits

What you do

• Thaw dinner rolls according to package directions.  When thawed, flatten with the palm of your hand and arrange close together on a cookie sheet in a flower pattern (one in center and seven around to create the petals) .  Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.  Let the dough rise another 15 minutes or however long it takes your oven to heat.
• Bake dough for approximately 10 minutes.  You want it to just barely start to turn golden brown.
• Brown the burger and season it.  Drain the grease.
• Assemble your flower power pizza by topping with pizza sauce, cheese, chopped chives, and bacon bits.
• Bake another 10 minutes or until the cheese is melted and delicious.

I clipped this recipe out of a magazine years ago and finally tried it this year. I don’t know what took me so long – it is delicious and so easy!

2 c. blueberries
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. lemon juice
Combine above ingredients and place in a greased 8-inch square baking dish.

1 c. flour
3/4 c. sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 c. milk
3 Tbsp. melted butter
Combine above ingredients in a small bowl and spoon over berries.

3/4 c. sugar
1 Tbsp. cornstarch
Combine above ingredients and sprinkle over batter.

1 c. boiling water
Slowly pour over everything.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes or until the cake is done.

Enjoy!

While I was at the local grocery store over the 4th of July weekend I was struck by inspiration. I had a hankering for grilled burgers and while I had the burger in one hand I glanced up and saw breakfast sausage. They have their own recipe and make the sausage back in their butcher shop (can you believe that they still have an on-site butcher? I love it!) so it is fresh daily.

Anyway, I would consider the sausage variety to be on the mild side. That’s okay with me as I don’t care for overly spicy sausage.

Alright, back to my tip – I was inspired to mix the burger with the breakfast sausage and see what kind of grilled burger it would create.

The results were excellent. With the added charcoal flavor (yep, no propane grill for me) my sausage burgers were quite possibly the tastiest grilled burger I have ever had. No, I’m not exaggerating – they really were.

So there you have it. My burger grilling tip. Enjoy

When I was a kid, nothing could quench my thirst on a hot summer day like a drink from the hose or an ice cold glass of lemonade. As an adult and parent of two busy kids – nothing quenches my thirst and gives me some much needed energy like a high octane iced coffee.

As a parent of two kids, I also don’t have a lot of time so in order to enjoy an iced coffee I improvise a bit from what some might consider the proper way to fix iced coffee.

What You Need:

• Brew up a strong batch of coffee. I have a coffee scoop that I use where normally I put one scoop in for each cup of water. When I brew coffee to have as iced coffee I make it strong by adding an extra scoop or two.
• Coffee syrup (Torani is my favorite brand) or good old chocolate syrup if that’s what you have handy. Yesterday I made a caramel chocolate iced coffee that was out of this world. Just add the amount of syrup that suits your taste buds.
• Milk – the amount is up to you. It also depends on the size of your glass. I tend to make a giant quart-sized iced coffee so that requires a bit more milk than a regular glass.
• Ice, of course. I don’t have the time to crush and blend my ice/drink in the blender so I just drop in a bunch of ice cubes. Not using the blender also saves on cleanup time, too .

All you need to do is brew up the coffee (let it cool for a bit), grab a glass, add the ingredients, stir and enjoy!

Bonus Tip – if you think of it, the next time you have some coffee leftover in the carafe fill up an empty ice cube tray and make coffee ice cubes. Then, the next time you make an easy iced coffee you don’t dilute your wonderful drink with regular ice cubes. I’d like to thank my wife for that idea.

This dessert was inspired by our 3 year old. One night he and I made a pumpkin pie for Papa. I let him eat some of the pie filling straight out of the can. He loved it so much that when he was given a piece of pie the next day he told his Papa that he liked it better the night before!

What you need:

• 1 package of mini graham cracker pie crusts
• 1 small box of vanilla pudding, prepared
• 1 small can of pumpkin pie filling
• 1/2 container of cool whip

Directions:

• Put one large spoonful of pudding in the bottom of each pie crust. Spoon pie filling over it. Top with a dollop of cool whip.
• Enjoy!

This recipe comes from Lovina Eicher who maintains a homestead in rural Michigan with her husband, Joe, and together they are raising their eight children. Lovina contributes snippets of her traditional Old Order Amish life in a weekly column, Amish Cook, that appears in various newspapers across the country.

Rhubarb Butter Crunch
Ingredients:

• 3 cups fresh, finely chopped rhubarb
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 tablespoons flour

Topping:

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 1/2 cups raw rolled oats
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/4 cup butter or margarine

Mix rhubarb, sugar and flour well and place in a greased baking dish. Combine the topping ingredients and sprinkle over rhubarb mixture. Bake at 370 degrees for 40 minutes. Serve warm with milk or cream (or ice cream – yum!).

Watch a video tour of the Eicher house when it was under construction –

. . . I have ever used. Ever since college when I tried to bake my first batch of chocolate chip cookies (instead of just eating the dough) I have been searching for a great chocolate chip cookie recipe.

It seemed that every time I baked a batch of cookies there would be something not quite right. Was it the oven, the cookie sheet, me, or the recipe?

Evidently, it was the recipe.

I finally used my great aunt’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I have had this recipe for years, but for some reason it had slipped through the recipe cards and I never used it.

Unless I ever find a better recipe for chocolate chip cookies, this is the recipe I’ll be using from now on. This recipe makes about 4 dozen (good-sized cookies – I don’t waste time making tablespoon-sized cookies) cookies and we are already down to the last dozen (in fact I am munching on a couple as I type this – gotta watch out for crumbs in the keyboard).

Great Aunt Florence’s Chocolate Chip Cookies:

What you will need:

• 2/3 C. light brown sugar
• 2/3 C. granulated sugar
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 small pkg. chocolate chips (I just dump in as many as I want)
• 1 C. Crisco
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/2 C. flour
• 1 T. boiling water

Combine the first seven ingredients and mix well. Add flour and water and beat well. Now, I am not sure why the water should be boiling, but I used boiling water and had great success so that is how I guess it should be done.

Drop whatever size you want (recipe says teaspoon, but I prefer more of a dollop) on a cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Be sure not to over bake!

There really is no bad chocolate chip cookie. Unless it is a burnt chocolate chip cookie!

Happy Baking!

The wind is gusting and snow is falling. It is a perfect day for meat loaf. I know a lot of folks don’t care for dishes with the word “loaf” in the title, but this is quite possibly one of the best tasting meat loaf dishes I have had.

So, without further ado, lets get to the recipe.

What you will need:

• 1 lb. lean ground beef
• 1 egg
• 1 (8 oz.) can tomato sauce
• 2 C. packaged her seasoned stuffing (think stove top stuffing)
• Salt & pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine meat, egg, 1/2 C. tomato sauce, stuffing and seasonings. Shape in loaf in a shallow baking dish. Bake 1 hour.

Remove from oven and pour the remaining sauce over the loaf. Bake additional 10 minutes.

When my wife cooked this last week we didn’t have tomato sauce so she substituted some three cheese spaghetti sauce. I have to say it made this rather tasty.