My Sister Kira is a great cook,but when Grant and  I were first married I couldn’t afford to make a lot of her recipes due to some more expensive ingredients like seafood and certain spices or sauces that the recipes tended to include. One dish though that she would sometimes make became a staple in our early marriage because it tasted great, was fast, and was VERY inexpensive to make. I don’t know exactly what she called it,but it stuck as Rice-a-Roni Dinner around these parts.
When we are eating carbs, one of my favorite dishes is roasted potatoes since they are super easy and are just stuck in the oven. I like these types of sides because I can be cleaning or doing other things while they are getting ready for us to eat. Oh, and of course they are amazingly tasty.
Grant is a very good cook,but his recipes tend to be Mac and Cheese when I am sick or don’t want to cook,but whenever he gets in the mood to really make something it almost always turns out amazing. He is amazing at grilling among other things. I can’t even list all of the ones he has made,but here are the amazing ribs he made for us once. Enjoy!
I sometimes feel like a broken record on this blog because most of the recipes that I post are from family and friends that I got them from. My sister Tanya is a great cook, and this is one recipe that she came up with after tasting it at Olive Garden. You can see her posted recipes HERE. I like to do the step by step photos because I feel it makes a dish less intimidating. If you see each step, I feel one is more likely to give it a try since there is no mystery of a certain word that you have never seen or heard of; hopefully you feel the same and I am not wasting my time ;p. This is the Five Cheese Alforno Olive Garden Copy Cat. If you want it to taste exactly like it, then use a spaghetti sauce that is as close to marinara as you can. I just use the same pasta sauce I use for lasagna to spaghetti to this recipe because it is easier to buy one type.
When my Cousin Simon and his Wife Sarah were in town one time, Sarah mentioned how she had been making homemade granola bars. She was telling me about all of the different recipes she was trying. We weren’t buying that many granola bars at the time, but I kept my eyes open for a good recipe. This Blog posted a recipe that looked pretty tasty to me, and I happened to have all of the ingredients so I gave it a shot. I thought they turned out really really well. Next time I make them, I will make a few adjustments, but those are because of personal preference not because I didn’t think the original recipe wasn’t good. If I had kids, I would definitely make these one a regular basis to put in lunches or for snacks.
Rachel is a lady in our young marrieds group who always has amazing food at events. This is one of the dishes that she made, and explained the steps to me. It was spicy and not that unhealthy, and all of the men there ate some since it was so good.