Monthly Archives: June 2016

Pull-Apart Pizza Bread

Posted in Appetizers & Snacks, Breads by

This bread would be delicious to have with an Italian meal, for an afternoon snack, or part of a quick lunch. It tastes just like pizza but is made with prepared refrigerated biscuit dough. The fun part is pulling off the individual pieces, especially while it’s still warm.

I made this with my son yesterday after seeing the recipe in his children’s magazine. We put the bread on the dinner table and loved tearing the pieces off. There was one piece left over, but it didn’t last very long after dinner.

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1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1/3 cup pizza sauce
1 12-oz. can refrigerated biscuit dough*
3 Tbsp. butter
1/2 cup chopped red pepper
1 tsp. dried oregano

 

Grease a 1-quart Bundt pan or angel food cake pan with butter or nonstick cooking spray. Heat the oven to 350F/175C degrees.

Sprinkle 3 Tbsp. of the cheese and 1 1/2 Tbsp. of the sauce around the bottom of the pan. Separate the biscuits from each other and tear each into three pieces.

Place the butter in a small microwave-safe bowl and melt in the microwave. Dip half the biscuits in the melted butter and put them into the pan. Sprinkle the remaining cheese and sauce, bell pepper, and oregano on top.

Slightly stretch apart the remaining biscuit pieces, dip into the butter, and add them to the pan.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until browned. Remove from oven and let cook 5 minutes on a rack. Remove from pan and place, inverted, on a serving plate.

*For those not in the United States, you’ll have to substitute a homemade biscuit dough for the canned, refrigerated kind. Do a search for “Southern buttermilk biscuit recipe” to find one. I have not made this one, but I love Southern Living magazine, and the recipe is probably good. Complete the recipe through Step 2, then weigh the dough and use only 12 ounces of it. Then divide in half and just pinch off large chunks to proceed with the pizza bread recipe.

 

Tortilla Soup

Posted in Soups & Chilis by

20160531_185117This may be one of the easiest recipes I have in my cookbook. It makes for a filling meal, too, which means it’s a great idea for a weeknight dinner. I served it with small tacos, but only to make our plates look fuller and to entice my children to try the soup.

I clipped this from our newspaper more than 20 years ago! (I actually wrote the date beneath the recipe: Thursday, August 19, 1993.) That was the year I started collecting recipes in binders. It was actually one binder back then, and as the years have gone by it has grown to three. The paper said the recipe was from Southern Living magazine.

As for the ingredients, please don’t let them fool you into thinking this tastes cheap. Nearly everything comes out of a can, but trust me, it doesn’t taste like it. Perhaps the only canned clues are the way the chicken and diced tomato look. You can’t do much about the chicken (it won’t really show up anyway), and you can chop the tomatoes further if you think the pieces look too big.

This is also easy to double.

Makes about 4 cups

2 10.5-oz cans chicken and rice soup, undiluted
1 cup canned chopped tomatoes with juice
2 Tbsp. canned green chiles
3/4 cups canned corn, with liquid
1 cup (4 oz.) finely shredded cheddar cheese
2 cups crushed, lightly salted tortilla chips

Combine soup, tomatoes, chiles, and corn in a large pot and bring to a boil. Serve immediately, sprinkled with cheese and chips, or put the cheese and chips in bowls at the table and let everyone help themselves.