Jolene's Recipe Journal

Trying to bust out of a cooking slump, I pulled this recipe from my to-try file on Sunday.   Unfortunately, I was outvoted by the guys pizza craving, and it got pushed to last night.    With the chaos of a weeknight going on around me, I'm not sure I gave it justice.   My kitchen was a disaster when I was finished, but I had a smiling happy family, and that's what really matters to me. First I got the chicken soaking.   Critical error- I'd forgotten to buy buttermilk.   No problem, I'll just use regular milk and some vinegar.    Uh, no white vinegar, only apple cider vinegar.   In it went.      I used Sriracha for the hot sauce component. While the chicken did it's thing, I made the waffle batter.   Bacon in waffles around here has been vetoed in the past, so I cooked it up to serve on the side.   I used dried chives instead of green onions, it's what I had on hand.    Someone had eaten the last of the cheddar, so I used a fiesta cheese blend.     Batter

Game day and we wanted a cheesy treat.    We've got several large bags of cheese sticks in the freezer, and visions of crunchy mozzarella sticks danced in my head.   I made up my assembly line, starting with a pie plate with flour in it.   Then a 2nd one with 2 beaten eggs.    I combined panko and regular bread crumbs, added some Penzey's Italian Herb Mix and put that in the 3rd pan.      Once they were breaded, I put them onto a half sheet pan and put them into the freezer.   For a test bake, I preheated the oven to 400º.  I sprayed a small pan with Pam, put 2 sticks on, sprayed the tops with Pam.  Baked 5 mins, flipped, then another 6 mins on the other side.     They were good, but I had left my sticks whole and they flattened out significantly.    I was missing that supercrunchy golden outside and oozy melty inside.   I had to fry. I heated about an inch of vegetable oil in a skillet to 350º and fried them in small batches.   When they reached the color I wanted, I mov

My husband was a big fan of Flaky Puffs, which were puff pastry with a creamy filling and a layer of  jam. I love a challenge, so I set out to recreate them to surprise him for Valentine's day. I mentioned it to a fellow foodie friend and she shared her cream filling recipe with me. I've seen other copycats out there that use store bought or homemade whipped cream, and you could definitely do that instead. But this cooked cream filling is more structured and spreadable and doesn't going squirting out of the sides when you bite down on the pastry. You can do the puffs in the traditional way, which is to cut 3 strips out of each sheet and then cut each strip into 3 squares.  This makes 18 assembled puffs.  Or you can get fancy and use cookie cutters to stamp out other shapes like hearts.  Assembly goes easily with cookie scoops and a small offset spatula.  I like to put the jam on the bottom half of the puff. Sometimes I use raspberry jam, sometimes I use strawberry. Then I