Happy Valentine Day
I am excited to see you today as we begin our Valentine Day celebration together. We have some great features from last weeks party that will help you have very special Valentine foods on your table. It is really cold here and we are so happy to gather round the fire and enjoy our time together. Thanks so much for coming today, and hope to see you at the party with your very special recipes, and food adventures!

Pozole is Spanish for hominy, which is a product that is made from corn. The Corn is soaked in an alkali solution then the corn is washed removing the alkali solution and most of the outside husk, then it is dried and we have hominy. We love hominy and once had it right from the farm where the corn had been raised. The traditional Pozole Soup has meat and vegetables, but the meat is usually pork. Today we are changing it up just a bit and adding beef, to give it a whole new flavor and one that our family loves. This recipe has southwest seasons that makes it a real hit here at the cottage!

When I get a call to bring something over to someones home for a luncheon, or an impromptu gathering of friends, I don't always have a lot of time to put something together. When I got a call asking me to bring my Chicken Salad, I said sure and then thought this is a job for my Instant Pot. The Waldorf Chicken Salad turned out delicious and everyone at the luncheon just loved it. It took no time to prepare the chicken and it was so much better than the Grocery Store Rotisserie Chicken. The mix of the Waldorf Salad and chicken is a great combination and made a fantastic salad!

One day this week we enjoyed a wonderful 70 degrees and we grilled out, the very next morning it is 39 degrees and the temperature is still falling, that's Texas. We can have summer one day and winter the next which makes meal planning a real challenge sometimes and we learn to be very flexible with our meal plans. If we have a chicken stew planned we can easily go to the grill with the chicken. As I begin this meal plan I am checking the weather and hoping it holds true for my meal plans. This is Valentine week so I want to plan a special dinner for my sweetheart, how about you are you planning a special Valentine meal?

Welcome February
It is time for Full Plate Thursday and its February, as we move right along with great recipes for the season. This month we will be celebrating Valentine Day and Presidents Day, both are great holidays for delicious recipes! Every week I get to select an entire menu based on your page views, and you'al share so many wonderful recipes, it is very hard to make those selections, that's why I often rely on your page views for those selections. I encourage you to visit other blogs in this community that we gather in every Thursday! I look forward to the party every week to see what you will be sharing, so enjoy the day and enjoy the party!

I told my husband that I wanted to make him a special dessert and what would he like to have, he said, ummm, I would really love to have that thing you know that is a cake and it is really a pie, and oh I want ice cream on it. Do you ever get answers like that from your family and friends, you gotta love it! After a bit of thinking I came back to him and told him I would be making him a Cherry Pecan Dump Cake and did that sound like the one he wanted, he said yes that's it, that's the one! So here it is, fresh out of the oven with a big dip of ice cream to top it off, and it is delicious! There is just something about the old classic's that bring back good memories and great comfort.

A sheet pan meal is  just perfect for a day when you don't have a lot of time to prepare a large family meal. This flavorful sheet pan meal is ready all at the same time and you don't even have to find a platter to serve it on, just garnish and serve. I love the flavor combination of lemon and rosemary and the butternut squash with the Brussels Sprouts are perfect to share this sheet pan.

If you live where the temperatures have been below 0 then I really hope that you are a meal planner and that you are your family are safe and warm with great meals during this cold weather. This is Super Bowl Weekend, and although none of our teams will be playing, we are still planning on having a fun game day here at the cottage!  This is one of those times when checking the weather and making the meal plan really helps. It is very cold here but not nearly like what some of you are having. I am going to check my inventory for the cold bins in the barn and the pantry and then see what the meal plan will look like, I sure don't want to have to go to the market in this weather. Lets just sit together and have a cup of this delicious cocoa and make the meal plan.

Welcome to Full Plate Thursday and our Top Ten Features From Last Weeks Party! We always feature our Top Ten Page Views For The Last Week of the month, taken from the last weeks party and we sure do have some good ones this week. I hope that you are staying warm and cozy no matter where you are and if you are here with us, come in by the fire, have a warm cider and lets enjoy some of the great recipes that you will be sharing today. Now lets get this party started!

The Link Party Begins At 5:00 P.M. CST Today!

It finally happened, I got a Instant Pot for Christmas, and I have been having fun! I have used a pressure cooker for years and really wasn't afraid of the pressure and love the fact that I can set the pressure and the cooking time then walk away, whereas with the pressure cooker, it requires a constant watch. It is cold weather here so I thought I would start out with a very simple Italian Stew, it was delicious and sure didn't take very long to prepare, plus it gave me a lot of freedom to take care some something else in the kitchen while it cooked. Thanks so much family, I sure am enjoying this new kitchen toy!

A slice of this vintage sour cream pound cake recipe is the most moist slice of cake that you would every want. I am topping each slice with a nice raspberry sauce making it a very special dessert. Our family vintage recipe came from my Mothers recipe notes, she loved a great pound cake and this one was one of her favorites and one of mine. The raspberry sauce can be served drizzled on top of the cake, it is just delicious!

Here we are in the last week of January already and it is mighty cold, and will get colder.  When the weather gets this cold I just want to find indoor projects to be involved in. We are still working on our DIY bathroom project and we are almost finished. I have also started going through some of my books, mercy I sure read a lot, but have been reminded that I really don't have space in this tiny cottage for all these books. I will soon  be finished with my January organization projects, in the mean time I get to sit and have a nice cup of tea with you while I make next week's meal plan, so tell me what are you hungry for?

Oh my goodness it is cold outside, and we need to gather up around the fire to stay warm and cozy. We have some hot cider and hot cocoa to enjoy while we enjoy the fellowship and new recipes that everyone will be sharing today. We really do have some of the greatest cooks on the planet and we enjoy featuring the recipes that you find outstanding every week. I really appreciate you coming to share with us today and hope you will visit some of the other awesome blogs.

The Party Opens At  5:00 p.m. CST Today!

Classic Waldorf Salad I often times receive requests for classic, vintage and old fashioned recipes. I have found that families are pretty much the same all over the world, the Grandma, a favorite Aunt, a Mom or Mother In Law made a favorite family recipe and never wrote it down, we have sure had that situation in our family. One of the most requested recipes that I am asked for is "that old fashioned fruit salad recipe that someone in that family made, and would you happen to have one that might be that recipe. I mentor a group of young homemakers and recently this is one of the recipes that they were asking for. Part of the purpose of Miz Helen's Kitchen is to preserve the integrity of our recipes that have been handed down though all of our families, as we help our younger generations become the kind of cooks they aspire to be.

This Pizza Casserole has seven layers of Italian flavor. This casserole is great to serve on a big game day or a Sunday Fun Day. I have taken this casserole to parties and served it to family, everybody loves this casserole. One of the things I love about the casserole is that it freezes well up to three months. I usually put it into serving portions and freeze for individual meals, they are a perfect size for the lunch bag gang. This casserole is a great go-to recipe for a crowd.