I Cooked Somthing New

(A little blurry, sorry.)

I tried out a new recipe last night. My goal was to try a new one every week but that hasn't happened this month. This was an Italian tortellini soup I found here. I changed it up a bit. I used hot Italian turkey sausage instead of beef because it's healthier, and chicken broth instead of beef broth, because that is what I already had in my pantry. It made A LOT of soup. I should have halved it. You could get a good 8 servings from the recipe. I also made some yummy biscuits from here. These are my favorite biscuits to make when we have soup. They are DE-Lish and pretty healthy too! Actually I have gotten a lot of yummy, healthy recipes from this website (like this yummy chili).

This is mason eying us down as we ate it right in front of him. I think he knew he was missing out on something good!

What have you been cooking up in your kitchen?

Never Again.

Because one of my new year goals is to try new recipes I decided to try my hand at making a cake from scratch. My sister and her family and parents came over for dinner Saturday night so I thought that would be a good time to try it out. (By the way, we had pulled pork sammies and they were DE-LISH --finger lickin' good! Especially with my brother's homemade rub and b-b-Que sauce.) Anyways, so I learned that there is a reason cake mixes from the grocery store are so popular...making it from scratch is so gosh darn hard. I thought the hard part was over until I went to frost it. I was in the middle of making the frosting when I realized I didn't have enough powdered sugar. A cookbook I have says that you can substitute powdered sugar with granulated sugar and cornstarch. That is either a lie or it doesn't work for frosting because I tried it and my frosting was really grainy like it was made with granulated sugar (oh wait, it was). So, I drove to the store and bought store bought frosting.

I like this shot because you can't tell it turned out looking like the leaning tower of Pisa.

It was a good experience and I did learn a few things:

1. It is best to use powdered sugar when the recipe calls for powdered sugar.

2. You can mix milk with lemon juice to make buttermilk.

3. Betty Crocker does it best.