Wannabe Pioneer Woman: Loaded Cornbread

Lately, Texas got this idea that it wants to be cold.  I hate cold.  Hate it.  But it keeps coming, so warm food must be made!

On one of our recent freezing spells, I put a bag of beans and ham hocks in the crockpot before I left for work, and whipped up Ree's cornbread to go with it.   

The cornbread is so colorful!  It's basically a normal cornbread recipe with a bunch of peppers.  

 Look how pretty!  These can be cut ahead of time, too, to save you valuable time trying to get dinner on the table.  

Her cornbread could be made in the skillet or oven.  I chose to do the peppers in the skillet, and put everything in the oven. 

It came out looking beautiful!  

It was fairly tasty, too.  I prefer a sweeter cornbread, so this wasn't my favorite, but  it went well with the beans.  

Now if that isn't a good Southern meal, I don't know what is! 

Wannabe Pioneer Woman: Spicy Whiskey BBQ Sliders

This is my favorite recipe of hers thus far.  Oh my word, delicious!  It's fairly easy, which is good, since I cooked them for a Monday night dinner, and fairly quick.

I love sliders, because they're tiny.  Who doesn't love a little tiny food?!  Also, you can eat 15 or so, because they're so small...who will notice if you have another?

 After making these tiny burgers, you cook a wonderful little sauce with onions, bbq sauce, and whiskey.  (It can be made without the whiskey, but this really gives it a tasty flavor.)

Let me give you this one important tip.

Cook.the.whiskey.out.

Give it more time than you think it needs.

Do not ask me how I know this.

Anyway, I served them on my favorite slider rolls - King's Hawaiian Sweet Rolls (SO good!) and sauteed some squash as a side.

There's sauce all over my plate, but these smelled so good I just couldn't clean up the plate for a pretty picture!

Wannabe Pioneer Woman: Green Smoothie

I am not a smoothie person.  They're tasty, but they just don't seem like real food.  As a snack, I think they're great.  As a meal, no.

I decided to make this on New Year's Day for lunch.  We were going to have a big dinner that night, so we needed to cut some calories out the rest of the day.

This smoothie was chock full of fruit, which I loved!

 Look at all that tasty fruit!!  Also, I need a bigger blender.

WP wasn't really sure about the noise of the blender.

 

I liked everything in this one, but the texture of the kale.  Again though, I think it's because I don't have a big enough or strong enough blender to really mix all this together.

 

I served the smoothies up in my vintage Baylor glasses, since it was the day of our bowl game.  Kyle was a fan, and I would make them again as well (sans kale!).  

Wannabe Pioneer Woman: Dr Pepper Cupcakes

One of the big challenges I took on this year is to cook through the ENTIRE cookbook I got for Christmas, Ree Drummond's The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays.  I decided to pull a whole "Julie and Julia" thing and cook the entire cookbook and blog about my experiences.  Julia is not really my style, but Ree Drummond and I could probably share a Dr. Pepper and eat some chicken strips or some other kind of normal food.

My mother in law gave me this book for Christmas, and knowing me well, had this page bookmarked for me:

 

Of course this would have been one of the first things I would cook in here!  Baylor had a bowl game on New Year's Day, so I decided to make these for our watching party.  

My kitchen has never been messier.  

And yes, that is a Gerber baby cereal container holding open my cookbook.  You do what you gotta do.

I also realized during these that I had no clue about some of the spices she used.  (Cardamom?  Is that when a mom looks too young to buy booze so you card her?)  These took quite a bit longer than popping open a box mix, but they were also more fun to make!

The finished cupcakes!  I had to wait for them to cool, but that's fine, because the frosting takes FOREVER to make.

Yummy!  The recipe calls for 24 cupcakes, but I split the recipe to make 12, because Lord knows my butt does not need 24 cupcakes.

 

Since I was making these for a bowl watching party, I decided they needed sprinkles.  Baylor colored sprinkles.

They definitely had a different flavor to them than store bought or box mix cupcakes, and I don't think they tasted like Dr. Pepper, but they were tasty!

Want to cook along with me this year?  Buy the book here.  (And no, Ree nor Amazon paid me for this endorsement.)