Broiled blackened catfish

Hi everyone!  If you ask my husband what his favorite fish is, he'll say, hands down, catfish.  Followed, probably, by salmon.  But yeah, he loves catfish.  For years, I would fry it, but I'm not a huge fan of fried catfish; it usually turns out kind of greasy, in my opinion.  So it wasn't something I would make very often.  However, one day, I just decided to pop it under the broiler, and we haven't looked back!

Putting the catfish under the broiler gives it the same effect as frying it, without all of the greasiness that frying gives.  Since I tried this, we've been eating catfish way more often!  I like mine with a squeeze of lemon juice, but my husband just eats his straight up, as is.

Roasted garlic chicken alfredo fettuccine

Hello everyone!  Yes, this is another chicken post...what can I say?  I love chicken!  It is affordable, and versatile and healthy and....and....and I just like it!  When I was a teenager, I also loved alfredo, until I woke up one day and realized it has no flavor.  So, one day, I wondered if I could figure out a way fix that.  Let me ask you this, what can garlic not fix?  They even have garlic ice cream, for goodness sake!  

Pressure Cooker Boiled Peanuts

Hi y'all!  College football season is in full swing down here in the south, and if you ask me what says college football, my instant first answer is going to be: bourbon.  But, a close second would be boiled peanuts!  I have many, many memories of watching football, while shoving boiled peanuts into my mouth as fast as I could shove them in!  
As much as I love them, though, they do take quite awhile to cook on the stove top, and when I want boiled peanuts, I want boiled peanuts now!  What's a girl to do?  

Lime garlic shrimp

I love shrimp, but beyond scampi and frying it, I'm usually at a bit of a loss as to ways of cooking it.  I love garlic with shrimp, so when I was thinking of this meal, there was no doubt that garlic was going to be involved!  I was rummaging through the fridge, and stumbled across some limes that I honestly had forgotten about!  Oops!  So, yes, I had limes and a lot of garlic...sounds good to me!

Spatzle with jager sauce

I love cooking foods from different areas in the world.  As much as I love to travel, I don't often get a chance to do so; however, I can travel through food.  And I do that way more often!  As I said in my pork schnitzel, my husband gets to travel to Germany about once per year, and he comes home raving about the food.
The first time he came back, he told me about the schnitzel, and the spatzle.  I had no problems whipping up the schnitzel, but I had no idea how to go about making spatzle.  I asked him to help me find a recipe, but nothing ever came of that.  I could find recipes, but I wasn't sure how things were supposed to look, taste, or cook.  Not helpful.  Thankfully, after a few trial and errors, I have it figured out, and am excited to share a few tips and tricks that I have picked up along the way!  

Roasted garlic, lemon chicken soup

Hello everyone!  I'm sure school has started in your neck of the woods, and as we all know, when school starts, your child starts to bring home illnesses along with mounds and mounds of paperwork!  This has been the case in our house, as our daughter brought home a cold last week.  Great.  When someone in our house has a cold (or whatever else), my go-to is instantly chicken soup.  I have a couple of variations of it, but this is one of my favorites.  Why?  It has lemon.  It has roasted garlic.  It has orzo.  What's not to like??

Banana Pudding Cake

Hi.  I have something that I need to admit.  I love baking cakes.  I may have mentioned this here in my Chocolate lavender cake, and here in my Nana's carrot cake  They are so much fun!  Once you have the base recipe down, you can change things up any way you want!  A couple of weeks ago, my sister tagged me on Facebook about a banana pudding cake, and, as a good Southern girl, I knew this had to be in my life.  

Banana Bread

One of my favorite things to do in the kitchen, is bake.  I love reading over a recipe, and adding a little of this, taking a little of this out, thinking, "Hum...this is good, but how would it be if I changed this??  I'm going to try this next time!"
And, yes, you could do that with any recipe, to do it with a baked good, to me, is to really make it your own.  

Baking does need to be an exact science, with the basics.  You can't take out a cup of flour, and expect the recipe to behave the same, but you can, for example, add chocolate chips, and have a whole new experience with a recipe!  

Brined, Bone-in Chicken Breasts

In case you can't tell by now, I love to cook chicken.  I know I've mentioned it a few times, and have posted some of my favorite chicken recipes in the past, and have quite a few more in the works!  However, I know that bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts can present a bit of a problem to someone who is unfamiliar with cooking them.  A couple of the pros of cooking with bone-in meat, are that the meat has more flavor and the meat tends to be more moist; however, one of the cons is that it takes longer to cook, and while the end result is worth it, it is easy to want to cook it for a really long time, with the end result being a dried out, sad piece of meat.  

However, I'm going to share with you a step that I do almost every time I cook a piece of meat that has a bone left in.