Fourth and Ten: Fourth and Ten in the Kitchen

One of my favorite things to do outside of teaching/blogging is spending time in the kitchen. I love to cook and I especially love having more time to do it in the summer. So I was overjoyed to find the Eating, Drinking, and Linking weekly link up hosted by Christy at Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road. What a great idea! :)

We eat most of our meals at home, which saves us a lot of money each month. That's not to say that we don't enjoy a nice dinner out, we do. We just limit them to once or twice a month. Since we eat a lot at home, I have lots of recipes to share. :)

We always seem to have extra bananas left over each week, so I've been making lots of banana breads and muffins this summer. I often freeze the leftovers, so we can have them for breakfast throughout the week.

These two recipes have been our favorites, this whole wheat / reduced sugar banana bread and these sour cream banana muffins. I usually use whole wheat pastry flour or a mix of half white flour and half whole flour in all my baked goods. I also replace the oil with unsweetened apple sauce and sugar with organic honey when I can. I do this on a recipe by recipe basis because for some recipes this switch seems like a good fit and then for others it is not.

I always love a quick, but yet delicious, dinner.
One of our favorite quick and delicious meals is Maid-Rites. Maid-Rites aren't quite burgers and they aren't quite sloppy joes. However, they are delicious. This recipe is from one of my favorite bloggers, Iowa Girl Eats. Everything we make from her site is delicious and usually pretty healthy too.

Maid-Rite Recipe

We also love pizza. I pinned this fun deep dish pizza in a casserole dish and knew I had to try it right away. We had it for dinner this week and loved it!

Since it uses refrigerated pizza dough, this recipe couldn't have been easier. It came together and minutes and it's perfect for a week night dinner during the school year.

My husband and I also do our fair share of grilling and we had beer can chicken the other night, which is my FAVORITE way to prepare chicken these days.

There are lots of recipes and tutorials out there for beer can chicken. We watched this video the first time we made it. You can use root beer or coke as well. I do recommend using a beer can chicken stand for your grill. We got ours here. Sometimes the beer/soda cans don't hold up the chicken very well on their own. We also made my favorite green bean recipe to go with it.

I also use our Crockpot a lot, especially in the

summer. We love this easy chicken and black bean taco salad from Skinnytaste. We buy Bolthouse Farm's Cilantro and Avocado Greek Yogurt to go with it.