The Cooking FamilyMeals

Ham Dinner

Recently we celebrated the birthday of our eldest son. As is our family tradition, the birthday person gets to request their meal. He opted for a spiral cut ham with the fixings, so here’s what we put together.

Main Course

Our main course was the ham of course. A nice addition to the standard ham you get from the store is to add a honey glaze to it. Now sure, you can find some with a sauce packet to add, or you can make your own as it’s not very expensive and easy to do.

Ham Glaze

Side Dishes

For our sides, we opted to keep it simple. Cinnamon apples and Beans. Now you can go a couple of different routes, like a Green Beans with Ham Bone (since you have the ham already) or something like a sweet baked beans.

Quick and Easy Cinnamon Apples

Both of these options will round out your meal nicely. We had hoped to have baked beans, but ended up with green beans this time.

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A Sweet and Spicy Meal

Combining different flavors is at the heart of cooking. One of the most combinations is a Sweet and a Spicy.

In this simple meal, we combine two of our favorite sweet and spicy dishes. Simply add a favorite vegetable for a third and you’ll be good to go.

Sweet

Let’s start with the sweet, because we love our sweets. For this we go with a sweet cinnamon apples.

Quick and Easy Cinnamon Apples

Spicy

On the spice side (although not too spicy) we go for something like the tasty steak bites. These are nice and easy to make.

Tasty Steak Bites

Finish this meal with a helping of vegetables like our Ham Bone Green Beans or Sweet Carrots.

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Valentine’s Day 2021

Like most people, we like to go out to eat for Valentine’s day (although we usually pick a different day so it’s not so crowded in the restaurant).

However, since we are still under quarantine because of COVID, and most of the restaurants are not fully open, we’ve decided to do our special dinner at home.

This is a great time to have a home cooked meal with some of our favorite foods. This will allow us to spend some fun time together cooking and eating.

Feel free to borrow our dinner plan, or search through our site to find some other options.

We’ll be using our smoker for our main course and one of our sides. Of course, you don’t have to have a smoker, as you can cook it in the oven, just make sure to adjust time and temperature settings.

This Valentine’s day, we’re going to have: (click on the name to go to the page for the recipe)

Main Course

Savory Smoked Roast With Au Jus

We’ve only smoked a beef roast a few times, but we’ve loved it every time. And it doesn’t take long all thing considered, so we can enjoy our time together instead of watching it cook.

Side Dishes

If we’re going to smoke our main dish, then we often like to smoke at least one of our sides. Smoked Mac and Cheese is our favorite way to have Mac and Cheese! So we’ll be enjoying this side dish with our roast on Valentine’s Day.

Smoked Macaroni and Cheese

Of course, not everything has to be smoked. Sweet carrots are a tasty side that goes with many different meals, and since we have a bunch of carrots, this will make a nice addition.

Sweet Carrots

Dessert

Of course, a full meal isn’t complete without a dessert. Cherry Crunch is one of my all time favorites, ever since my grandmother introduced me to it. Serving it warm, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream will always hit the spot.

Cherry Crunch

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Superbowl Party

It’s that time of year again. You know when everyone gathers around, eats food, and watches the best commercials…supposedly there’s a football game going on as well.

OK, so no matter whether you use it as a chance to hang out with friends, or watch a football game, Sunday is the day to have some yummy snacks. In fact, if you do it right, you can make a full meal of just snacks and appetizers. So we put together some ideas for you to use to make the most of your time, and keep you from having to cook long hours.

Queso Dip

Want something fast and easy, this is it. It takes less than 10 minutes to make, and can let nearly two dozen snack on this treat. Just add chips.

Queso Dip recipe

Fruit Dip

This fruit dip is a staple in our family gathering. Not just for Super Bowl parties, but any time we gather and want something easy to munch on that a little healthier.

Fruit Dip recipe

Sweet and Spicy Meatballs

This one takes a while to cook, but you let your crock-pot take care of that. Prep is simple, and done in just a few minutes with these sweet and sour meatballs. You can eat a bunch as a meal, or a few as a snack.

Sweet and Spicy Meatball recipe

Sweet Chicken Bacon Wraps

Warning! Making this might get you invited to all of the parties for the rest of the year. These delicious chicken bites take a little while to make, but they are oh so worth it. Just be prepared to have your friends stab one another trying to get the last one.

Sweet Chicken Bacon Wraps recipe

Glazed Pineapple Kielbasa Bites

Don’t have as much time to prep your snack bites as you want, well the Glazed Pineapple Kielbasa Bites just might be it. Takes half the time as the chicken bacon wraps, but is still totally delicious.

Glazed Pineapple Kielbasa Bites recipe

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Easy Christmas Meal

There is enough craziness going on around Christmas, between holiday parties, decorating, buying gifts, and the actual Christmas day events, you don’t need cooking an elaborate meal for a half dozen people, or less, to be one of them.

If you will be having a houseful of guests, we recommend people sharing the cooking load. As host you have enough to do with cleaning and prepping – cooking shouldn’t all on you if you can avoid it. (If you’re guests are from out of town, that’s a slightly different story.)

However, we’ve seen far too many times where there is 1,001 things going on, and someone is trying to cook an elaborate seven plus course meal for their family of four. It’s just tiring, and then you can’t enjoy yourself.

So instead, consider the following meal plan to keep things easy, so you can enjoy the whole of your day.

Main Course

A traditional Christmas dinner includes either Ham or (Smoked) Turkey. Since Thanksgiving was just a few weeks ago (for those in the United States), we opt for a Christmas Ham.

The nice thing is most hams are a set it and forget it for cooking. Very little prep work, and just adding a glaze at the end. We’ll start ours a little after breakfast, and it will be ready for lunch. And to make cutting easier, we using go with a spiral cut ham, which is half or more cut for you, to make it even easier than other types of ham.

Side Dishes

I like to vary the amount of side dishes based upon the number of people I’m having. The more people, the more variety, but hopefully someone can help cook some of them. We usually have 2 to 3 side dishes for six or fewer people.

Homemade Macaroni and Cheese is something that works if you’re oven is big enough. It typically needs to cook at or near the same temperature as the ham. Slide it on a different rack, and you’ve got two things cooking at once, and this is way better than mac out of a box!

Sweet Carrots – will easily serve up to 6 people, and gives you some color. With the added sugar, its more like a candy than a vegetable.

My wife likes her father’s Cornbread for Christmas, and it works well. It’s easy to cook, and serves 8. So it’s just enough if you want a little left over for the next day, or double the ingredients if you have a lot of people coming.

Option 2 for Bread: Now I prefer Apple Muffins. It makes more, and takes longer however. This means I get some the next day or two for breakfast, which I like, but its a lot more prep – so it may not be the best option for a simple Christmas meal.

Dessert

There are two ideas when it comes to desserts for the holidays. First is to have some something like a cake or pie, which you each at one time. Two simple ideas would be an Apple Dump Cake or a Cherry Torte. Both of these are extremely fast to prepare, and taste delicious.

The second idea is to have a snacky type of dessert which can be munched on throughout the day, like a cookie. We recently made Shortbread Cookies which were a hit. They’re small and easy to snack on, regardless of the size that will be at your house.

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