Author: ajeanneinthekitchen

It is hard to think of foods that can survive a long car ride, but I came up with a couple of good things to take with us to our recent trip to Hays, KS. Both were successful transports and were enjoyed by all. Along with the Parmagiano herbed carrots, Roasted Parmagiano and Herb Carrots, we also brought the makings for some crab stuffed mushrooms with us too. The carrots were served with dinner and the mushrooms were appetizers.

I made the crab stuffing at home and brought it with us and then I stuffed the mushrooms once we got to Hays.

Mushrooms are a staple in our house. I can use mushrooms in just about anything, and do too. 🙂 And crab, well that goes without saying. I love anything with crab. I also added some of my leftover sausage and spinach mixture that was leftover from my breakfast tortelets. A New Year’s Breakfast

Crab Stuffed Mushrooms

1 lb mushrooms

7 oz jumbo crab meat

5 green onions, sliced very thin

1 jalapeno pepper, diced fine

1/2 red bell pepper, diced fine

1 TBSP garlic

salt & pepper to taste

a dash of dried thyme

dash of dried oregano

dash of dried marjoram

dash of dried basil

1/2 cup Parmagiamo cheese

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/2 cup cooked sausage crumbles, optional

Mozzarella cheese for topping

paprika and parsley for topping

Combine everything together and mix well. There is no right or wrong way to do this, but I prefer to mix my spices and mayonnaise together separately then carefully fold it into the crab and vegetable mixture.

Preheat the oven to 350* F or about 190*C.

Wash the mushrooms and pop out the stems. Generously fill the mushroom caps with the filling, then top with mozzarella cheese. Sprinkle the tops with the paprika and bake for about 15-20 minutes or until the cheese is completely melted and the mushrooms are hot. Add the parsley and serve immediately. You want these hot, straight out of the oven. Eat as many as you like. They are fairly healthy, at only about 167 calories per mushroom and are full of different nutrients.

Happy New Year Everyone. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.

Side dishes are often overlooked when preparing or serving meals, yet they are just as important as the main part of the meal itself. The parts complete the whole. You need the side dishes just as much as you need the main protein portion of the meal in order to make a complete meal.

I was originally preparing some roasted Parmigiano and herbed carrots for our Christmas Eve dinner, however, I learned that one of our guests was bringing a carrot dish so that plan was scrapped. Unfortunately, I already had the carrots prepared and they just needed to be popped into the oven to roast. No problem though. I quickly activated Plan B, and put everything in a plastic freezer bag and popped them into the freezer until our trip to Hays. This was a great plan and it worked out very well, since all I had to do to transport them to Hays was to take the the whole bag. They were a big hit with Larry’s family and not a carrot was left. I did not get a picture of them before we started to eat though. Sorry about that, but they will look very similar to how they looked before putting them in the oven.

Parimigiano Herb Roasted Carrots

2 lbs carrots, peeled and cut into sticks about 3 inches long

1/2 stick melted butter

1 TBSP garlic

1 tsp dried orgeano

1 tsp dried basil

1 tsp dried thyme

1 tsp dried marjoram

salt & pepper to taste

1/4 cup Parmigiano cheese

chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 400* F or 200* C.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Combine the melted butter and seasonings together then toss the carrot sticks into the mixture, making sure to thoroughly coat the carrots.

Spread the carrots out onto the prepared sheet pan in a single layer. Top with the Parmigiano cheese and bake for about 30 minutes, or until the carrots are tender.

Top with the chopped parsley and serve. These are a guaranteed winner and are so easy to make, using just simple and basic ingredients. They will pair well with anything you choose to serve beside them. Besides, you can’t go wrong with carrots, right?! 🙂 this recipe was inspired by Cooking with Mima and My Meals are on Wheels. https://www.cookinwithmima.com/ https://www.cookinwithmima.com/ Thank you both for this wonderful idea.

Happy New Year Everyone. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.

Happy New Year Everyone! I hope your New Year celebrations were fun and safe. I always love the celebrations that ring in a new year. It wipes the slate clean and allows us all new beginnings and new possibilities for the upcoming year.

We just returned home from Hays, KS last night. Kansas is a plains state and is pretty flat, especially western Kansas, though there is not much difference between eastern Colorado and western Kansas. The differences are very subtle indeed, though they are there.

Western Kansas is known for three major industries – agriculture, cattle ranching and oil, although there are also a lot of wind farms popping up as well.

Hays is about 341 miles east from us, and is about a 4 1/2 hour drive. When we left, we still had a ton of snow left in Colorado. We still have a ton of snow, with the possibility of more to come today too.

The further east we went, the less snow there was. The roads were very clear, all the way both going and coming. On our trip home, it was the opposite. The further west we went, the more snow there was. Kansas had no snow at all.

We went to celebrate the holidays with Larry’s family. It is always good to visit, but it is always good to come home too. Our fur babies were all very glad to see us, even though we were only gone for a couple of days this time. It was still an eternity to them though. It’s good to be loved and missed so much.

I contributed a few things to the Billinger feast, but it is hard to travel with prepared foods. I made easy things, that were easily transportable. I will share them with you later. But I am home and back in the kitchen once again. Tomorrow you will kitchen experiences once again.

Happy New Year Everyone. I hope 2023 is kind to all. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.

This year, our church decided to do something different for the New Year’s Day service. Instead of the normal cakes, cookies and breakfast treats, they decided to do a breakfast for everyone. Even though I will not be there, I am still cooking and providing some of the goodies for everyone to enjoy. Per request, I made my pumpkin, spinach and chorizo tortelets. I have made those before, and as you can tell by them being requested, they were a popular item. Spinach, Pumpkin and Sausage Tortelets

I made 4 dozen of these delicious, hearty tortelets for everyone to enjoy and to ring in the New Year with. These will be served with a variety of other goodies that will be provided by some of our other patrons.

Happy New Year Everyone. I hope 2023 is a good year for all. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.

It has only officially been winter for about 10 days now, and we have already had 3 winter storms, each dropping a lot of snow. This is actually our 4th or 5th snow already, but a couple were still technically in fall. It started snowing again about 5-6 PM last night, and we got about 8-9 inches out of it. Everything looks so beautiful in it’s heavy winter blanket of white. Larry was just out clearing the sidewalk and driveways before going in to work.

This is from our back deck last night.

And this is what I woke up to this morning. This is from my bedroom window.

And this is from my office, on the other side of the house.

It is truly a winter wonderland. I think it is supposed to snow again this weekend too.

We are leaving for Hays, KS early tomorrow morning, weather providing. From what I understand, it should be OK going out, but we are expected get more snow and heavy winds coming back, which means we would be leaving earlier to come home. We are definitely leaving 2022 with a blast; a big blast of snow and cold weather that is.

Happy New Year Everyone. Stay warm, stay well and stay safe. ‘Til next time.

We have such a wide variety of critters and birds around our lakes. I love seeing them all and I get really excited when either I “meet” new friends or see those that don’t frequent our lakes much. We do have Northern Shovelers around here, but we don’t see them all that often, and I see the females even less. Yesterday, when I was out on walk-about, I saw a female Northern Shoveler enjoying our waters. The males are brightly colored, but like a lot of bird and duck species, the females are more subdued and not as colorful. It was a cold, cloudy overcast day, so the colors are not that great.

The Shovelers are known for their long, spoonlike beaks. It helps them “shovel” in their food and “shovel” the waters around to get to the food.

Have a great day Everyone. ‘Til next time.

With a new year coming just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to see how other countries celebrate. There are some pretty interesting ways of ringing in the new year too.

1. Ecuador – Citizens parade around the city with scarecrows built to look like popular politicians and cultural icons—and at the stroke of midnight, said scarecrows are burnt to a crisp to cleanse the new year of everything evil.

2. Brazil – It’s customary to light candles and throw white flowers into the water as an offering for Yemoja, the Queen of the Ocean, who is a major water deity and is said to control the seas, to elicit her blessings for the year to come.

3. Spain –  Locals will eat exactly 12 grapes at the stroke of midnight to honor a tradition that started in the late 19th century. Back in the 1800s, vine growers in the Alicante area came up with this tradition as a means of selling more grapes toward the end of the year, but the sweet celebration quickly caught on. Today, Spaniards enjoy eating one grape for each of the first 12 bell strikes after midnight in the hopes that this will bring about a year of good fortune and prosperity. 

4. The Netherlands – They eat Oliebollen. Ancient Germanic tribes would eat these pieces of deep-fried dough during the Yule so that when Germanic goddess Perchta, better known as Perchta the Belly Slitter, tried to cut their stomachs open and fill them with trash (a punishment for those who hadn’t sufficiently partaken in yuletide cheer), the fat from the dough would cause her sword to slide right off. Today, oliebollen are enjoyed on New Year’s Eve, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a Dutch food vendor in the winter months who isn’t selling these doughnut-like balls.

5. Russia – They plant underwater trees in the freezing water. For the past 25 years or so, it has been a Russian holiday tradition for two divers, aptly named Father Frost and the Ice Maiden, to venture into a frozen Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake, and take a New Year Tree—typically a decorated spruce—more than 100 feet below the surface. Though the temperature is normally well below freezing in Russia on New Year’s Eve, people travel from all over the world to partake in this frozen fête.

6. Italy – Italians wear red underwear. Italians have a tradition of wearing red underwear to ring in the new year. In Italian culture, the color red is associated with fertility, and so people wear it under their clothes in the hopes that it will help them conceive in the coming year.

7. Greece – The Greeks hang onions on their front door in order to promote growth throughout the new year. Greek culture has long associated this food with the idea of development, seeing as all the odorous onion ever seemingly wants is to plant its roots and keep growing. Onions are a symbol of rebirth to the Greeks.

8. Chili – New Year’s services are not held in churches, but are instead held in cemeteries. This change of scenery allows for people to sit with their deceased family members and include them in the New Year’s Eve festivities.

9. Japan – In Japanese culture, it is customary to welcome the new year with a bowl of soba noodles in a ritual known as toshikoshi soba, or year-crossing noodles. Though nobody is entirely sure where toshikoshi soba first came from, it is believed that the soba’s thin shape and long length is meant to signify a long and healthy life. Many folks also believe that because the buckwheat plant used to make soba noodles is so resilient, people eat the pasta on New Year’s Eve to signify their strength. 

10. Denmark – In Denmark they smash plates against people’s front doors. People take pride in the number of broken dishes outside of their door by the end of New Year’s Eve. It’s a Danish tradition to throw china at your friends’ and neighbors’ front doors on New Year’s Eve—some say it’s a means of leaving any aggression and ill-will behind before the New Year begins—and it is said that the bigger your pile of broken dishes, the more luck you will have in the upcoming year.

Some of these traditions sound fun, others are a bit to out there for me. But do whatever floats your boat. I personally enjoy the way we celebrate here in the United States, England and Australia, with the big ball dropping, the countdown and fireworks, but most importantly, celebrating with family and friends.

No matter where you are in the world or how you celebrate, I hope 2023 is indeed a Happy New Year for all. May you be safe, healthy and prosperous all throughout the upcoming new year. Happy New Year Everyone.

The squirrels are out playin and having fun. the snow and colder weather has eased up just a bit, and they are outside taking advantage of the slightly warmer weather.

I tried to get more pictures of the two squirrels, but one quickly ran up the tree then disappeared. The other one was having fun posing for the camera.

Have a great day Everyone, even if it is a bit squirrely. 🙂

I am taking a wee bit of a break from cooking at the moment. I have been in the kitchen non-stop, pretty much all day, since Thanksgiving. So I am taking it easy for a few days.

For Christmas Day, after we had breakfast with Janet and Bob Merry Christmas – 2022, it was just the two of us, so it was just a simple dinner made from our Christmas Eve leftovers. I had made my Argentine salad The Empanada Party – Part 3 – Una Gran Ensalada Latina and we had just enough leftover to recreate it into a pasta dish. I used some of the chicken Larry had smoked and served it all over pasta to make a festive Christmas pasta dish.

The salad was roasted peppers with artichoke hearts and hearts of palm with an herbed vinaigrette. So all I needed to do was to add some cream and protein and a starch, and it was transformed into something completely different. It went from this

to this is just a matter of minutes.

Larry is always amazed at how I can recreate so many different leftovers out of my firstovers. He said he never would have thought of turning it into a pasta dish, but he was very pleased with the results. I am a Jeanne in the kitchen after all. Never underestimate what I can do with my magic wooden spoon. And, I am the Queen of Leftovers too. 🙂

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. Now it is time to start focusing on the new year that is about to come. Happy 2023 Everyone. ‘Til next time.

On Friday, Christmas Eve’s Eve, our church had two services. That is why I was so busy making so many cookies. The two services were both very well attended and the cookies were all a big hit. After the two services, a few of us all went out for our own little Christmas celebration. As always, there was a lot of fun, a lot of laughs and a lot of love.

The Christmas Gang 2022

Zoe and Anthony

Wendy and Marc

Karen and Chris

Lauren and Mike

Jeanne & Larry

Christmas Day has now come and gone, but it is still the Christmas season, and Larry and I still have a bit more celebrating left to do before we call this season a wrap. We will be leaving for Hays, KS., to spend a belated Christmas with Larry’s family on Friday. Then we can call this very busy, very festive season officially over for us.

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and I wish you all a very Happy, Healthy New Year. I hope 2023 is a great year for all. Out with the old and in with the new.