Hawaiian haystacks – Pile it on and enjoy
The girls always love when I make haystacks, or rather, they get to make them, because the ingredients are rarely the same twice, and they each get to customize their “chicken sundae.”
Hawaiian haystacks aren’t even from Hawaii, by the way. It’s just that pineapple is a common ingredient and that’s connected to the Hawaii name.
Anyway, if you’ve never made them before, you should. Haystacks are a great way to finish off a bunch of ingredients that you only have a handful of, and if you have picky eaters, no problem…..only add the items each person wants.
Hawaiian Haystacks Recipe:
- Rice
- Chicken, chunked or shredded (leftover chicken works great)
- Chicken sauce/gravy (recipes below)
- Any number of diced/sliced/chopped ingredients including pineapple, olives, green onions, green peppers, chow mein noodles, mandarin oranges, cheese, avocado
Pile on in order and enjoy. Yep, it’s that simple.
Chicken Sauce Recipe Ideas:
(The links are to recipes that don’t use canned condensed soup, if you’re like me and try to avoid it….but the canned soup version is tasty and fine if you’re okay using it)
- 1 cup chicken, 1 can cream of chicken soup, 1 cup water, salt and pepper (you could also add sour cream, cream cheese, chicken broth, or milk in addition to or in place of various ingredients….really, it’s not an exact science….work with what you have)
- Mel’s Kitchen Café
- Real Mom Kitchen
- Your Sacred Calling (this one uses coconut milk
Here’s some of the ingredients from another time I made them:
So colorful. The second item on the top row is chopped almonds, by the way….they give a nice crunch.
Shared with Blog Hop
Broccoli raisin salad – Recipe or no recipe?
I was recently denied from a food blog site because I didn’t post enough recipes. So fine, here, have a recipe, pfft. :P
Broccoli Raisin Salad
Dressing:
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1/4 cup sugar
Mix together first and let set while you make the rest
Salad:
- A head of broccoli (maybe it’ll be 2 cups, maybe it’ll be 4 cups)
- The half an onion that’s sitting in your fridge (or maybe that small red one you didn’t have plans for yet)
- The rest of the raisins in the box (about 1/2 cup, if you really want a number)
- 1/2 cup of almonds…or walnuts…or both….or maybe 3/4 cup if you like nuts…or maybe chop a whole cup ‘cause you’ll likely eat half of them while you’re making this
Mix together. Add dressing. Mix some more. Make more dressing if you think you need it or like it creamier….or don’t. Maybe add some salt. Maybe don’t. Maybe sneak the kids some broccoli while you’re at it ‘cause they’ll think it’s a treat at this point…not a veggie. Put in the fridge until ready to be served. The mayo/sugar dressing gets better with time and nothing in the salad can really get “soggy” with it, so don’t be afraid to let it set for several hours or even overnight. Or eat it now. Whatever.
And that’s why I don’t do many recipes. I don’t *remember* the recipes. I didn’t *follow* the recipe I found online in the first place.
As much as I hated my mother always telling me “until it looks right” (and still do! how do I know what it’s supposed to look like if I’ve never made it before??), that’s how I end up cooking a lot of times. I work with what I have in the fridge or pantry….I adjust to taste a lot….I leave out ingredients (this likely called for bacon or something….and vinegar in the dressing) or add other ingredients.
In the end, if it tastes good, we eat it, and nobody cares if it was supposed to be walnuts instead of almonds or if the recipe called for red onions instead. It just works. But it really doesn’t translate well to publishing a recipe online. :P
Combining Canada Day and 4th of July – Pinwheel swirl cookies (Picture heavy)
An awesome thing about Canada Day and Independence Day being so close together is that the color scheme is so similar that I could logically be lazy *and* resourceful all in one.
So on July 1st, Canada, I mixed up my colors and made half of my cookie lollipops into red and white Canada cookies, and the other half into American red, white, and blue ones. Score!
I have quite a few pictures, so I’ll try to keep the text minimal here. Check out SugarBelle for the original inspiration, although I didn’t try to make mine look exactly like hers. Where’s the fun in exact replicas? Anyway, pictures:
Breakage happens, shhhh….
Twist and shout! This whole process was so much like playing with Play-Doh. Except this I could steal bites of without grossing myself out. Did you ever eat Play-Doh? Yeah, not recommended…
A little rugged, huh? Oops!
Can you see the crystals? I ran out of flour and “floured” my countertop with sugar for half of them to keep ‘em from sticking.
Before and after shots….sorry for the sucky lighting…but look how much they grew:
Oh yeah, I ended up with a bit extra of the red/white, so I did some candy canes and a snail creature. No sense in wasting it!
I didn’t bring popsicle sticks with me, so I ended up using skewers, breaking them in half for some and leaving them whole for others. They would’ve looked better if I had bigger or flat sticks, but it worked.
And for my mini-lollypop swirl, I decided he looked kinda like a cross between a snail and a worm, but either way, he got a face and a toothpick base.
This one may have gotten a little, uh, crispy around the edges.
Am I the only one that looks at the bottom of cookies, too? Probably.
The red/white/blue ones ended up not looking too blue on the outside, but rest assure, the insides were much more equally distributed.
Yeah, probably the only one to snatch a cookie pop from the eater’s hands to go take a picture of the inside, too, huh? At the very least, I could’ve waited until I was eating my own cookie and taken a picture of that one, but nope, had to take theirs, hehe.
All in all, great success. This is the sugar cookie recipe I used, except I cut it down to 16 servings instead of 60, left out the vanilla, and split it into roughly 4 cookies (plus candy canes, and minus the dough I ate).
Find other red, white, and blue treats at Cupcake Apothecary.
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