JennyJones

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE butterscotch pudding and you may not know just how easy it is to make. It takes just ten minutes to make and only uses five ingredients, items you probably already have on hand. You can make it with low fat milk or whole milk, just not fat-free milk. I usually make mine with 1% low fat milk but I had some whole milk left over this week from making my chicken pot pie, and homemade pudding is richer tasting when made with whole milk. Of course it won’t be as low in fat but I will take butterscotch pudding any way I can.

I use light brown sugar and remember that cornstarch is not the same as corn flour. Cornstarch is very powdery and is the perfect thickener for homemade pudding. There is no reason to ever buy a box of pudding mix filled with ingredients you can’t pronounce. Make your own healthier homemade butterscotch pudding. It’s so yummy good! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

When hash browns are just right, there’s nothing better with breakfast… crisp and golden on the outside (especially those crunchy edges!) and moist and tender on the inside… that’s how they should be. And you can do this!  This may be my only recipe with just ONE ingredient so you know it can’t be hard. There are just a couple of things that can make them foolproof every time. You’ll see… Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

You can turn my easy one-rise dinner rolls into bunny buns for Easter. Kids will love them and grown ups will enjoy the tasty bread rolls. This recipe is super easy but it will take a little time to put the faces together. This is almost the exact same recipe as my easy dinner rolls but you’ll need a couple of extra tools.

I use two cookie/biscuit cutters that are 2 1/2 inches and 4 inches across. The small circle is for the faces and the bigger one for the ears. To cut out the little noses I use the top of a lipstick tube. You’ll also need raisins and it helps to put together matching pairs or raisins in advance that are the same size and color. You might not notice but a box of raisins has many different sizes and shades.

Now for my photo tutorial. First, you roll the half of the dough into a 6 x 12-inch oval and this is how you cut the circles. The smaller ones are the faces and the bigger ones will be for the ears:

Put the small circles on your baking sheet (I make 4 faces per sheet) and then this is how you cut the ears from the two large circles:

You cut the nose using the top of a lipstick – it’s about 1/2-inch wide:

You tuck the ears slightly under the top of the head, place the nose, and push in the raisins for eyes. This is how they look before baking (four per sheet):

Once you make four bunny faces you cover the baking sheet with a towel and let it rise in a warm spot until doubled. That takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. While they rise you put together the other four bunny buns. They bake at 375° F for about 10 minutes. For the leftover dough, I roll it into a few 2-inch balls, rise and bake the same way.  I hope someone sends a photo!  Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

No knead bread is the easiest method there is for bread making. I’ve made it plain, multi-grain, fruit & nut, whole wheat, and now I’m sharing my whole wheat Greek olive bread recipe. I use the overnight method where you take 5 minutes the night before to mix together the batter with cool water, let it stand on the counter top overnight, and the next day, you bake the bread.

Here’s how easy it is. You just combine the flour(s), salt, yeast, and olives in a big bowl. Greek kalamata olives come in a jar, already pitted, so I just coarsely chopped and patted them dry with paper towels to add to the mixture. Then you add the water, mix it together, cover and let it stand overnight. Five minutes of work! By the way, olives are a good source of heart-healthy fats. The next day, you bake it in a Dutch oven. My Dutch oven is enameled cast iron. Actually, I have two, a 3-quart and a 5-quart, and I have made no knead breads in both of them.

I made this hearty bread yesterday and had it with a big bowl of soup and today for lunch I used it to make a grilled cheese sandwich with my reduced fat cheddar. Here’s lunch:

I’ll be working on even more variations of easy no knead breads because I am such as bread person so the more variety the better. If you try the olive bread, keep in mind it needs less salt than other breads because the olives are salty. Click here for the recipe. And if you’re Greek…. “Opa!” – Jenny Jones

Like most people, I’m often short on time to cook dinner and a stir fry is usually my solution. Last night I made my quick & easy orange sesame chicken. You should see the reaction I get when I serve it to company. “How did you make this?” “Is this takeout?” “It must take forever to make a sauce like this!”

Actually, it takes 20 minutes… not just to make the sauce but to make the whole meal. That’s why I love to cook Chinese for dinner. Making it at home is always fast and it’s never deep fried, at least not the way I make it. The chicken is briefly marinated and then lightly sauteed and the sauce is so simple you won’t believe it. I make it with…

–  fresh orange juice  –  rice vinegar  –  soy sauce  –  garlic  –  sugar & salt.  It’s thickened with cornstarch and once it cooks you drizzle on some toasted sesame oil at the end. Wow! Make sure you use toasted sesame oil and not plain because the flavor when it’s toasted is intense. Then a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds and you have something so much better than takeout and so delicious, it might be your newest 20-minute meal.

By the way, some steamed broccoli on the side goes perfectly with this. I love it! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Do you miss Fettuccine Alfredo? Avoiding it because you don’t want to die? My Alfredo sauce has no heavy cream and no butter, in fact it’s made with 1% milk and it’s deeelish. And you can be eating it in five minutes. That’s how long it takes to make the easiest Fettuccine Alfredo ever, and the healthiest too.

This is the same sauce I use in my Creamy Chicken Asparagus Bow Ties recipe but if you just want pasta alone with a creamy, easy sauce, this is it. Alfredo sauce is traditionally served with fettuccine but today, I’m making Bow Ties Alfredo. Put it on bow ties, elbows, or any pasta shape you like. You won’t feel weighed down after this light sauce… or tired from all that 5 minutes of work! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Pecan pie doesn’t have to be complicated. Mine is simple and you don’t need any fancy ingredients. And it’s healthier too, with an olive oil crust. I used to make pie crusts the old way with either shortening or butter and ice water but an oil crust is so much easier. It’s quick and you can just pat it into the pan or I roll it between wax paper and then transfer it into the pan. By the way, the pan is never greased when you’re baking pie.

In this case I use a standard 9-inch pyrex glass pie pan and not a deep dish pan. My pecan pie filling is super simple. Everything goes into one bowl, stir for one minute and boom. Done. It uses less butter than most along with brown sugar, white sugar, and corn syrup but keep in mind that corn syrup IS NOT high fructose corn syrup. They don’t even sell HFCS to the public.

If you’re trying to bake without butter, I also have a completely butter-free pecan pie in my Baking Without Butter category. My two pies are exactly the same recipe except one uses butter in the filling and one uses a trans fat-free spread. For my butter-free filling I used Benecol. I baked both pies today for a blind taste test and I served a small slice of each one on the same plate. Guess what? Nobody could tell the difference! They are both so delicious, filled with lots of toasted pecans and a sweet, gooey filling. I’m definitely making my pecan pie for Thanksgiving this year, and probably Christmas too, and maybe my birthday… then there’s tax day… and well, you get the picture. Enjoy! Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

Believe it or not, you can make this amazing cake with no butter at all. Baking without butter has become my specialty. The cake is simple. It’s my easy one-bowl yellow cake but with half the vanilla and with added fresh lemon zest. (To keep the edges of the cake from over-baking, I suggest using a cake strip.) While the cake bakes, you make a super easy lemon curd for the filling. Then you spread the curd on a big dinner plate to cool.

And now the frosting. I make an old-fashioned seven-minute frosting because it has no butter, and because it’s light and fluffy and delicious. But seven minutes is a lie!  It actually takes abut nine minutes to make and here’s why. You need to be at the stove with an electric mixer and you beat the frosting in a glass bowl, over a simmering pot of water. It’s basically egg white and sugar and it makes a beautiful, light and airy frosting that tastes like billows of meringue.

The cake is sliced in half to fill with the lemon curd and then the top of the cake goes back on and it’s frosted all over with 7-minute frosting. After that you sprinkle the top with sweetened shredded coconut and press more coconut on to the sides. The just wait for the raves, especially from lemon-lovers.

If you don’t want to make the frosting and want something simpler, you can slice and fill the cake and just spread it with the lemon glaze that I use on my lemon brownies and sprinkle the top with coconut. Here’s how that looks…

Either way you make it, you’ll have a delicious dessert without butter. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

My dad used to make hunter’s stew but he called it kapusta, which means cabbage in Polish. Hunter’s stew, also called bigos, is based on sauerkraut  and it usually has added meats including kielbasa. This recipe does not belong only to Poles. There are many varieties of hunter’s stew in eastern Europe but they almost all include sauerkraut and various meats.

Bigos has been around for centuries. People used to cook big pots of this stew for hours, even days, adding all kinds of meats from beef, pork, ham, sausages, venison, even rabbit – after all it was a “hunter’s” stew.

I’ve been working on finding a simpler way to make bigos and now I’m sharing my own recipe, which doesn’t require a lot of ingredients or a lot of work, and there is less focus on meat and more focus on the sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, mushrooms, and lots of flavor.

The recipe starts with store-bought sauerkraut and the best kind to buy is the one they sell in the refrigerated section and I use store-bought chicken cooking stock (unsalted) because there is plenty of salt already in the sauerkraut. I have also made my hunter’s stew with homemade beef stock but I am not a fan of store-bought beef stock, only chicken.

Hunter’s stew, like most stews (and like me) gets better with age 🙂 so try to make it a day or two ahead and let it marinate in the refrigerator before serving. Some people serve it with rye bread but we always had it with mashed potatoes. The strong flavors of the stew and the mild potatoes goes really well together.

It takes a lot of chopping and shredding but otherwise, this dish cooks with virtually no effort after that. Smacznego. – Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones

I’m posting my new simpler way to make one of my favorite one pan meals. This no-fuss dinner cooks in one pan and it takes almost no work. Plus the whole house smells divine with all the spices as they cook. Both the chicken and the potatoes are coated with a mixture of aromatic spices & olive oil and as they’re cooking along in the oven, you have plenty of time to make a salad or cook a side vegetable.

What I like most about this recipe is that the two foods can be separated at the end if either the chicken or potatoes need a few more minutes. Chicken thighs come in all sizes – sometimes I get four in a pack and sometimes six. So smaller pieces will cook faster.  And depending how big you cut your potato wedges, they may need more or less time. So at the end, you can separate the chicken from the potatoes and cook just one of them a little longer if needed. I only had to do that once.

The broiler-type pan is important because chicken thighs have a lot of fat and all the fat cooks off and stays in the broiler pan, not touching the chicken, and not spreading onto the flat part of the pan where the potatoes cook and that keeps the potatoes crispy.

I had posted this recipe before when I used to cook asparagus on the same pan but it was too much trouble so now I just cook my green vegetable separately. This chicken dinner goes really well with asparagus and I’ve had it with broccoli and brussels sprouts, too. Click here for the recipe. – Jenny Jones