Catz in the Kitchen

menu icon
search icon
×

Weekly Menu For the Week of June 29th

By Leave a Comment

Weekly Menu for the Week of June 29

I hope you all had a great last week and weekend. You may have noticed that we kind of disappeared last week and then showed up in your email on Saturday with this grilled pork chop recipe. There was a reason for our absence. On Sunday (Father's Day), my dad called to inform me my Grandma had taken a turn health-wise and there was deep concern that she wouldn't last more than three or four more weeks. On Tuesday, we began making weekend plans to head down to California to get a chance to say goodbye if they could get her moved somewhere that would allow visitors (COVID-related restrictions). Then on Wednesday we were told to hurry and come Thursday.

Unfortunately, my grandmother passed on Thursday before I got the chance to say goodbye, but since we were already headed down to Northern California to see her, as was much of the rest of the family, we all met up down there briefly anyway. It was a quick trip - left on Thursday and were back home by Friday evening. Funeral arrangements are still being made, but the whole family will be headed back down to California for the funeral soon.

I'm sad and disappointed that I didn't get to say goodbye, but she is in glory with her Savior and back in the arms of my Papa, the husband who loved her more than anything else in the world. How can I be too terribly sad about that?

Needless to say, that at this point I haven't gone grocery shopping since getting home and after completely cleaning out the entire fridge on Sunday, it's looking a little bare, but I still put together a menu for us and for you!

Here's what's cooking this week!

[Read more...]

Pork Chops with Blackberry Sauce

By 1 Comment

These grilled pork chops with blackberry sauce are a delightful whirlwind tour of your palate’s capabilities and a must-grill this season!

These grilled pork chops with blackberry sauce are a delightful whirlwind tour of your palate’s capabilities and a must-grill this season!

This post originally appeared on Catz in June of 2013. It's quite delightful, and we realized, seven years later, that the recipe card and photos were outdated and in need of some attention! We've remade, reshot, and updated the recipe - we hope if you haven't tried it yet, you will! If you're here in the Pacific Northwest, berry season is coming up quickly, so get your grills, blenders, and freezers ready!

Chels came across this totally delicious looking recipe from Season with Spice on Pinterest. I can see why it caught her eye. Blackberries are always beautiful, of course, and up here in the Northwest, they are also ever-present. Seriously. We fight to keep them out of our yards. We had to use machetes and a chainsaw at my dad's house the other day to reclaim a patch of land long surrendered to the constant forward march of the blackberries. But, even though they are a headache, come late summer, we remember why we love them. Everywhere you go, alongside roads, in parks, and, yes, even your own backyard, this aggressive foliage offers up its definitively redeeming quality - fresh blackberries.

Suffice to say, when "blackberry season" comes around, we snack on them, make pies (and even empanadas) with them, make cobblers with them, put them on ice cream, add them to our smoothies, crêpes, and salads, put them on cereal, and just generally try to enjoy them enough to remind us why we don't burn them all with fire when they're choking the life out of our gardens. One last thing we do is freeze them. A small bag of frozen blackberries at the grocery store out of season will run you a good three to four dollars. An enormous bag that you picked yourself and stocked away in the freezer last August? Why, that would be quite free of charge. This year, our freezer is still stocked with the marvelous little berries thanks to the picking efforts of Chels and Gracie last summer. Blackberry smoothies? Check.

mashing blackberries in a bowl [Read more...]

Weekly Menu for the Week of June 22nd

By Leave a Comment

Weekly Menu for the Week of June 22nd

Okay, it cannot be just me! This past weekend FLEW BY! I think I got whiplash from how fast it went by. I hope you all had a nice Father's Day. Our weather was so (unexpectedly) nice! I made two Lemon Cream Pies + 4 mini pies for my dad, Josh, and the kids and Josh grilled peanut butter burgers - which sounds really weird, but trust me.
THEY WERE SO GOOD!

I'm going to keep the menu and my blabbing short this week just because of how late this post is getting out to all of you. Sorry about that btw, I know you guys like all the dinner Inspo! Feel free to follow me on Facebook where I post recipes every day and also on Pinterest where I'm constantly pinning to all of my food boards!

Onto this week's menu - which was a bit of a struggle for me, honestly...

[Read more...]

Magnolia Table Silo Cookies

By 17 Comments

From Volume 2 of Joanna Gaines' cookbook, these Magnolia Table Silo Cookies are not only outrageously good, they are full of memories for our family!

From Volume 2 of Joanna Gaines' cookbook, these Magnolia Table Silo Cookies are not only outrageously good, they are full of memories for our family!

While this lockdown period has been inconvenient and stressful at times, it has also given me quite a few things to be grateful for. I won't give you the list of everything, but I will say this: I've had a huge opportunity to focus on cooking out of some of the cookbooks I've bought and haven't made time to cook from!

The exception to that is the new Magnolia Table Volume 2 cookbook I had preordered months in advance and was eagerly anticipating cooking from as soon as I got it, and cook from it we did! In the amount of time that I've had this cookbook, we've made 17 out of the 145 recipes that it offers. I think we probably made mostly breakfast and dinner recipes - and later in the post, I'll share the honorable mention recipes that almost made the cut to being featured here on the blog, but in the end...it was the infamous Silo Cookie that eventually won out (though we could still blog about some others later on!).

[Read more...]

Weekly Menu for the Week of June 15

By Leave a Comment

Here we are in mid-June! Can you believe it? Time is just blowing by so quickly! I hope you guys all had a wonderful weekend. We went to a wedding, finished up a project in the kitchen, and Grace went car shopping on Sunday. It was a full weekend, to be sure!

We have a bit of rain in the beginning of this week's forecast, but today, it's actually dry - which means we grilled outside and tried this meatloaf recipe from Traeger.

I'm looking forward to the rest of the week's weather - sun and warmer temps...yes, please! How's the weather where you're at?

On to this week's menu - I got a little bit of everything this week - so hopefully there is something for you in there too!

[Read more...]

Weekly Menu for the Week of June 8

By Leave a Comment

Hey guys, thanks for understanding as we took another (unplanned) week off from blog posts and social media. We really just wanted to take some time to listen to what was being said, and being quieter seemed like one obvious way to be able to do that.

This weekend we just took it really easy, frankly. It rained most of the weekend so we actually stayed home, played games, finished watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended version, of course) and ate good food. I made muffins with the kids Saturday morning, Josh recipe-tested a dessert Saturday night, and I made our Layered Taco Dip for a snack on Sunday, mostly because I was craving Mexican food and didn't want to go out in the rain for it!

This is shaping up to be a fun food week here at our house! Eden (11) came to me a few weeks ago, having found some recipes in one of her cookbooks and wanted to make dinner for us. She'll be cooking for us this week, and also, I'm cooking from mostly one cookbook this week to get ready to share two cookbook reviews with you. While I don't have the ability to share all the recipes we're making this week, I'm going to share meals that are similar!

So here's what's cooking this week!

[Read more...]

Weekly Menu for the Week of June 1

By Leave a Comment

Hey friends! We're back from a week of out of town. Vacation for most of us, except Josh, who still had to work, but we all had a relaxing time in Central Oregon. We went on a lot of bike rides, read outside in the sun (it got hot outside!), grilled, saw some friends, and played games. I think we all feel a little more relaxed and ready to take on a fairly normal schedule again.

We did eat out a few times, but I thought I would share a few recipes we did make while we were gone. The night we had some friends over, we made our Teriyaki Pineapple Burgers - which are so good! And then we tried a new recipe, these Hawaiian Hot Dogs from The Endless Meal. They were delicious and so easy! We did leave off the red onion and jalapeño for the kiddos, though.

[Read more...]

DIY Farmhouse Kitchen Counter Crossbucks

By 2 Comments

As part of our ultra-low-budget kitchen refresh, we're sharing our DIY experience adding farmhouse crossbucks to the end of our kitchen counter bar!

DIY Farmhouse Kitchen Counter Crossbucks

We’ve just completed an ultra-low-budget “refresh” of our kitchen, which ran us about $500 all-in. This post about adding "crossbucks" to the end of your kitchen counter is the second in a series of about five articles sharing our learnings and experiences from this little project, which would be an easy, affordable one to tackle in any kitchen that needs a little breath of fresh air! 

The first post was about painting our kitchen cabinets with white milk paint, and we used that same milk paint to finish the crossbucks in this post as well. I'll be super honest and say I'm not thrilled with the photos here. I was working on this little project while we had contractors in our home replacing dry rot in the back wall, plus it was November, which means very little good light for indoor photos! At any rate, maybe I'll try to update them this summer!

About this project - this is one of the simplest, cheapest, easiest, and fastest projects I have ever taken on. All in, it was maybe an hour of my time (not counting waiting for paint to dry...). I used "discarded" MDF from Home Depot (boards that have been cut to the wrong length, marked up, broken, etc), so my total materials cost here was about $7. Yep. A fun, decorative farmhouse-style accent in your kitchen for about the price of a good burrito. Or a plate of street tacos. Maybe a small chimichanga.

[Read more...]

Apple Bacon Brie Grilled Cheese Panini

By 10 Comments

This apple bacon brie grilled cheese panini elevates the classic with apple butter, creamy brie cheese, bacon, and fresh apple slices!

Apple Bacon Brie Grilled Cheese Panini Recipe

This post originally appeared on Catz back in May of 2012 - one of our older recipes, for sure! Back when we were a family of four and all of our photos were phone photos! Some of these older recipes, though, are certainly worth updating with current photos, recipe cards, etc, so they don't get lost, and this is definitely one of them! We still make a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches and panini as a family, and this one is hard to beat. The combination of being quick, incredibly simple, and absolutely delectable is a winner every time. If you don't have a panini maker, you could also make this on a grill pan or in a skillet...but if you don't have a panini maker, well...why don't you have a panini maker?!

I feel like lately I have been spending a lot of time making meals that require...a lot of time. And I don't mind that. Spending two or three hours preparing a meal and then relishing the culinary triumph of flavor, texture and appearance is exhilarating. No problem there. Of course, sometimes, I spend two or three hours preparing a meal only to experience the agony of culinary defeat, but that's another story (I'm looking at you, grilled shrimp bruschetta). Regardless of the success or failure rate of one's more complex food-related undertakings, there are certainly days when I just want to whip something up in five minutes. And, of course, while that is all well and good, it's not very rewarding.

Sometimes it's nice to find middle ground - a meal in which the preparation is neither underwhelming or overwhelming, success is a guarantee, and the finished product is simple yet totally pleasing. Our recently discovered Apple Bacon Brie Panini is such a meal. This panino has an elegance to it, with the slightly melted brie adding sophistication (or so we imagine), the lightly toasted Italian loaf adding texture, and the apples and apple butter adding a subtle sweetness. I can guarantee you this: unless you have some sort of freakish aversion to one of the ingredients, you will very much enjoy, and even crave, this sandwich. It is quite fantastic.ingredients for apple bacon brie grilled cheese panini [Read more...]

Weekly Menu for the Week of May 18

By Leave a Comment

Josh just reminded me that next week is Memorial Day week...which seems hard to believe. Wasn't it just March and April? Not sure what our weather is supposed to look like next week, but this week we've got more rain coming our way - which is a bummer because I thought we could grill this week.

Maybe next week??

Currently we're all hovered around the kitchen watching Josh attempt to make homemade crullers. I've never had one before...but we've run into a problem...or he has run into a problem. He placed too small of a tip on the pastry bag so it's proving to be a bit more challenging. I'm sure they will taste delicious regardless. (Editor's note: Questionable.)

Live and learn.

[Read more...]