Katie Richey's Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bars

Here is a great recipe from a friend in our BYU 93rd Ward... where Mary and I attended while newly married.  Celeste was less than a year old at the time.  This easy-to-make treasure is from a friend of ours, buried in our Ward Cookbook all of this time.

Although the recipe calls for a chocolate cake-mix, it has the consistency of brownies, similar to most other "bar" confectioneries you may have tried.

Ingredients:

• 1 Chocolate Cake Mix
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup Chocolate Chips (semi-sweet)
• 1/3 cup Vegetable Oil
• 1/2 cup Chunky Peanut Butter
• 1/4 cup Water

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees
2. Mix together cake mix (dry), eggs, and oil.
3. Mix in Peanut Butter
4. Stir in Chocolate Chips
5. Pat the mixture into a 9" x 13" pan.
6. Bake 14 - 17 minutes or until golden brown!

Please note that I added water to the mixture, which the original recipe did not ask for.  Depending on elevation, cake mix, and size of your eggs, this may not be necessary.  If you don't like how it turns out, try dropping/altering the amount of water you use.

Swedish Pancakes

This recipe is special to me for several reasons. First and foremost because I have many fond memories of Dad making this tasty recipe for breakfast! I also connect because I have Swedish blood in me! And since my father served an LDS mission in Sweden, he got to taste how the Swede's make it.

Now that I have made it for my own family, they love this recipe too! Celeste, Samuel, and Ruth all devour the pancakes, made more healthy by the wheat flour my Dad has chosen to use. Most recently, Ruth even ate six pancakes filled with a variety of jam's! Quite a healthy appetite she has for a little girl of two years! I've cooked up Swedish Pancakes at least four times this year, and I keep tweaking the recipe to match that which I remember my father making. With this version of the recipe, I have gotten very close.

When we went to visit my parents last Saturday, Celeste and Samuel excitedly told their Grandpa that Daddy made Swedish pancakes! I spoke to Dad about it, and he said that the choice to use wheat flour was his own. Many of the Swede's cook them with white flour, which allows them to be even thinner... much like crepe's. Of course, many Swede's are only getting started with the jam. They often sprinkle powder sugar on top before rolling them up.

Ingredients:
  - 1 cup wheat flour
  - 2 tsp cinnamon
  - 1/2 tsp salt
  - 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  - 2 eggs (beaten)
  - 1 tsp vanilla
  - /4 cup sugar
  - 1½ cups milk
  - 1/3 cup melted butter

Directions:

1. Pour wheat flour into a medium mixing bowl. Stir in cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, and sugar.


2. Beat eggs until lightly mixed. Add vanilla and stir.


3. Combine egg mixture to flour mixture. Stir until blended.


4. Add milk and stir until ingredient compounds are sufficiently integrated.


5. The pancake batter should be runny. Thicker batter creates thick pancakes; you want the pancakes to be fairly thin so that they can be rolled up once the jam is spread. Add additional milk if necessary to reach the desired consistency. You'll have to experiment based on altitude, humidity, and personal preference.


6. Melt butter in Microwave; add to the pancake batter and mix.


7. Cook on electric griddle at 275 - 300 degrees. You can also cook them in a frying pan using medium heat over the stove. A grill is preferred for heat consistency.


8. Using a small measuring cup, pour batter as circles 4" in diameter.


9. As with most pancakes, flip when the bubbles start to pop.

Serve: Hot! Spread a line of jam or jelly down the middle of the pancake, and roll it up like taco. Then consume! Instead of meat, your taste buds will be greeted with the sweet flavour of your favorite jam or jelly. I have used apricot, peach, strawberry, raspberry, boysenberry and grape. But my favorite has always been apricot!


Notes: This recipe is not a perfect recreation of what my father recited to me over the phone several years ago. The recipe that my Dad gave me called for many approximations, making it a very inexact science. For instance: a dash of salt, a bit of nutmeg and vanilla, and "enough milk to make it runny." ;-) Certainly with such a fantastic and tasty breakfast dish, I wanted to distill measured ingredients that I could consistently make them myself. I have been tweaking the recipe every time, and now the pancakes cook up very close to the way I remember Dad making them.

I've also cut the recipe back... almost in half. Dad's original recipe calls for a full 2 cups of wheat flour! I quickly learned that while it doesn't initially seem like too much, the amount of batter grows dramatically as you add the other ingredients. If you choose to use 2 cups of flour, don't forget to double everything else in the recipe. After adding "enough milk to make the batter runny," you will fill a large mixing bowl! It's fine for a hearty family of two adults and five teenagers, but if you have a smaller family like we do, 50 pancakes is a tad too many! Unless you have a duck pond nearby that you can take the left-overs to feed! :-) So I recommend the measurements that I have used, and then calibrate the recipe to your family's appetite thereafter.

Don't forget to mix in the melted butter at the end. My father adds it to keep the pancakes from sticking in the frying pan. It's not a problem on my stick-free electric grill, but I still use the butter because it adds a touch or richness to the flavour.

Last of all, I have a special request for Dad: Please try my reduced recipe, and comment on how close I am in both flavour and consistency. I'd be very curious to get your feedback since you are, after all, the one who perfected it while we were growing up. Michelle, Nathan, and Thayne: Feel free to critique it also! After all, you each grew up eating it too. :-)

Classic American Meat Loaf

This is the basic Meat Loaf--all beef, with a touch of green pepper and onion, topped with strips of bacon--instantly recognizable as the all-American diner/hash house standard! This comes from a book of meat loaf recipe's... without a doubt the most unique wedding gift that Mary and I received ten years ago. According to the author of the book, this recipe was inspired by one diner cook whose secret was to make this meat loaf with "ketchup in and ketchup on" for maximum flavor and moistness. The bacon certainly doesn't hurt either!

Ingredients:
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 2 cups finely chopped onion
- 1 medium green bell pepper, finely chopped (about 3/4 cup)
- 1 large celery rib, finely chopped
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
- 2 pounds ground beef
- ¼ cup rolled oats
- 2/3 cup ketchup
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 2 teaspons salt
- 1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
- 4 slices of bacon, halved crosswise

Instructions:

1. In a medium skillet, melt the unsalted butter over medium heat.


2. When it foams, add the onion, bell pepper, celery and thyme. Cover and cook, stirring once or twice, for 10 minutes, Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature.


3. Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, combine the ground beef, the onion mixture, oats, 1/3 cup of the ketchup, the eggs, salt and pepper; mix thoroughly.


4. Spoon the meat mixture into a large, shallow baking dish and shape into a flat loaf about 2 inches high. Smooth the top with the back of a spoon. Spread the remaining 1/3 cup ketchup over the top of the meatloaf. Arrange the bacon strips, overlapping them slightly, if necessary, on top of the ketchup.


5. Bake the meat loaf for about 1¼ hours, or until an instant-reading thermometer inserted into the center registers 145 degrees. Let the meat loaf rest on a rack for 10 minutes before slicing. Serve hot!

Note: This recipe tastes very similar to the meatloaf that Mom used to make, minus the bacon of course! I loved Mom's recipe, and it was always very good, with the tangy baked-in ketchup on top. Mom also baked it with dill pickle spears from time to time, although pickled meatloaf was not my favorite.

Also, be aware that when I used the pan in the photo at the top of this recipe, it filled to the very brim. As a result, the bacon grease sizzled and boiled over the top, coating the bottom of our oven and leaving it a nasty mess to clean up. :-( Although the smoke from the smoldering bacon grease did give the meatloaf a rather nice hickory-smoked flavour! So make sure to place a cookie sheet BELOW the meatloaf if the ingredients nears the top of the pan! On a serious note, I did have to lower the oven temperature for the last 25 minutes because the bacon grease really would have started a fire. So be careful...

Finally, the recipe makes no indication as to whether the bacon should be cooked first. So I placed the bacon in raw! I used thick cuts of quality maple-flavoured bacon. The generous amounts of bacon juices deeply penetrated the loaf. It sure tasted fantastic! *yummy* But if you want to cut fat calories, I would advise you to cook the bacon slightly and then drain the grease before adding it to the top of the loaf. Doing so will also cut down on how much the bacon spits while the meatloaf cooks.