I hate wasting food, especially something as expensive as cheese. Tonight I attempted to make grilled cheese sandwiches, but I made the mistake of leaving them unattended, so they got burnt on one side =( I got mad and walked out of the kitchen for a bit to cool off. Then I just finished making the tomato soup and salads were were planning on having with the sandwiches. After dinner, I went back to the burnt mess and decided to try to salvage it. I peeled off the bread from the cheese inside as much as I could, so what I had left was 2 squares of cheese that had previously been melted, then firmed back up as they cooled. I just buttered up 4 new slices of bread and put the same cheese back in and made 2 new sandwiches. These came out fine, since I watched them the whole time and at least the whole thing didn’t end up in the garbage! The picture below shows what it looked like after I peeled the bread off the cheese.
I like peanut butter and syrup on my waffles, so today
I thought I would experiment with putting the peanut butter
right into the waffle batter. I just use a boxed
pancake/waffle mix that you add water to, then added about 1/2
cup peanut butter to the batter and mixed it up. I made enough
batter for one large square waffle. Then my son came into the
kitchen and suggested I also add chocolate chips, which which
I did.
Then while I was doing this, I decided to make another
separate batch of batter and add about 3/4 cup granola with
raisin cereal to the batter and baked the waffle with this in
it.
Both turned out good even without any syrup. My son didn’t
really care for the granola one, said he thought it was a little blah.
It probably isn’t something I will make again in the future, but it’s fun
to experiment.
Another time when I was experimenting with waffles, I decided
to make my version of Ihop’s banana walnut pancakes, only with
waffles. In my humble opinion, I think mine are better than
theirs. The commercial I saw showed their pancakes with sliced
bananas and chopped walnuts just sitting on top of the stack
of pancakes.
What I did is actually make a banana/walnut sauce for my
waffle. I melted about 2 Tbsp of margarine in a small skillet.
To this I added about a 1/4 cup of brown sugar and cooked on
low until the sugar dissolved and it was getting bubbly. Then
I added a sliced banana and a handful of chopped walnuts,
cooked a little longer until the bananas softened up a bit and
got warm. I poured this onto my buttered waffle. It was very
delicious.
Another experiment I tried after this one was to just add a mashed
banana, some brown sugar and chopped walnuts to the batter
before baking the waffle. This was really good also without any syrup.
I like my salads with Lighthouse brand Chunky Bleu Cheese dressing, but it’s 150 calories for 2 tablespoons and I usually use 3-4 tablespoons. So tonight, I thought I would try to lower the calories a bit. I poured 1/2 of the jar of dressing into a separate container and then added 1% lowfat milk to the jar to fill it back up (approx 6.5 oz) and stirred gently. This made a runnier dressing, but it tasted just the same and I actually needed less of it (about 2 tablespoons) to coat my salad completely. I got the same flavor but for way less calories, so instead of having 300 calories, I probably only had about 89 calories–75 calories for the 1 T of dressing and 14 calories for 1 T of the milk. And I got 2 jars of dressing for the price of one! How can you beat that? It would be interesting to try this with other flavors, but I really don’t like much besided Bleu Cheese or maybe Ranch. Let me know if you try other flavors!
I had made some truffles and cheese balls as a homemade Christmas gift and I had some chopped nuts left over from the cheese balls and some of the chocolate almond bark from the truffles. My son is also notorious for opening a package of cream cheese to have with crackers and not using up the same package before he opens a new one, so there were also 3 partial packages of cream cheese, so I got the idea to make up my own chocolate dipped truffle with the left over stuff. I put the cream cheese (there was probably about 1 1/2 cups total) in a bowl and let it soften, then I poured in some powdered sugar, about a cup. I added the leftover chopped nuts, probably about 1/4 cup and then I threw in about 1/4 cup of shredded, sweetened coconut and stirred it all up. I let it firm up a bit in the refrigerator, then formed it into little balls and placed on wax paper on a cookie sheet. I let these firm up a little more in the fridge, then remelted the chocolate and dipped them in, put them back on the wax paper and put back in fridge to firm up again. My son refused to eat any of them because it was made with ‘leftovers’. They taste delicious and I get them all to myself!
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