Welcome to Chef Ginny's kitchen. It's no secret, I love to cook. Here you will find recipes, reviews and products that I love so you too can be successful in the kitchen. Enjoy!
Good morning & Happy Mothers Day! Hope today is everything you wished for and more. I spent the last couple days cooking and baking a bunch of Mother's Day treats in order to raise some money for Food With Love. It was a success and I was able to sell enough boxes to fund one whole cooking session. Yay! Thank you to my friends and family for being so supportive. Now, my brain is working hard to think of what else I could possibly dip in chocolate or whip up for Father's Day. Hmm. The possibilities...
Next weekend will be our first cooking session for our new 'adopted' family. I look forward to spending quality time in the kitchen with my good girlfriends.
I am still working on getting my new personal chef business up and running, trying to get all my ducks in a row and waiting patiently for that first real cooking gig. I have also had a couple really great cooking & learning opportunities recently. I was able to tag along with Dani of Catering by Dani and helped her out with a wedding & festival she catered one day. It was so great to watch her work and see how the whole process goes. I am also part of a Moms of Multiples group who is hosting the Ronald McDonald House dinner for Mother's Day this evening. I can not attend today so I had 4 incredible ladies from the group over last night and we prepped all of the food. 11 1/2 hours in the kitchen. Whew! So, as of last night, I can officially say that I have cooked for 100 people. I am so happy about this. My feet...not so much. But my heart...oh yes. I hope the dinner goes smoothly this evening and I can't wait to hear from the amazing MoMs going out to serve dinner tonight. You are all amazing!
If you would like any of the recipes from the box of treats I made, you can find my Mother's Day Pinterest board by clicking HERE. All of the recipes I found worked out wonderfully!
Yum! So, I sit down to write this review and begin uploading the photos to this post and my stomach starts growling quite loudly. Yup. This stuff is good. Real good.
Butter Flavored Coconut Oil made by Golden Barrel in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. They offer a variety of products like molasses, syrups, oils, sugars, mixes and more. I had the chance to receive a free jar from the company directly in order to try it out and write up a review. I was glad too. I had already been eyeballing their products via the interwebs since I had recently discovered their Instagram feed @goldenbarrelbp. I really want to try their Shoofly Pie Mix. It sounds perfectly delicious.
They asked if I would just give it a try in place of butter for some of my recipes. Why not, right? I thought about the possibilities, deciding that popping popcorn and baking cookies would be an obvious choice. So, I put those two ideas on the back burner for a bit. A couple nights after I received my jar in the mail was a gorgeous Spring night. Here in Minnesota, after a long cold winter, the second it's finally nice enough to grill...we do! Homemade burgers on our Weber charcoal grill is one of my all times faves! That is what I make first nearly every year.
When I have a big juicy burger I love sauteed mushrooms and onions with mine. I cook 'em up in a little butter, minced garlic, salt and cracked pepper. The perfect burger topping in my book. Why not give the coconut oil a try instead?
The butter flavored coconut oil melted perfectly as butter. Smelled pretty good to me, too (...and nothing like coconuts, which my husband was a little worried about...'cuz he and coconuts aren't really friends, you see.)
Anyway, they sauteed up nice and golden. Crisp and tender at the same time. Mmm!
Piled up nice on my super duper burger. They were wonderfully delicious and lightly butter flavored.
The next night I decided to try it out again since it went so very well. I like to add a layer of vegetables into my pasta dishes sometimes. I love to hide veggies in my childrens' food. Some days more obviously than others. Ha!
Again, they vegetables cooked nicely and tasted very good. I also like the hint of color that the coconut oil gives to the food. The butter flavoring I'm sure.
Within the following week I had an opportunity to use the coconut oil in place of butter when popping kernels for family movie night and in chocolate chip cookie dough for Easter treats. The popcorn turned out perfectly. I didn't even use extra butter afterwards. just some salt and a little white cheddar powder. The cookies were soft and chewy. No one would have guessed I didn't use real butter. All in all a good product and something I would use again. Thank you Golden Barrel for the opportunity.
Where can you get your own Golden Barrel products?
I received an awesome product to review for this time of year. I bake so many cookies for the holidays and a BakeItFun Non-Stick Silicone Baking Mat was exactly what I needed. Today I tried it out for the very first time and I am more than happy to report that it worked flawlessly!
This handy mat is top rack dishwasher safe, microwave safe and so easy to clean. When they said non-stick they weren't kidding. The cookies slid right off with ease and no crumb residue was left behind. I baked six dozen sugar cookies and only needed to wipe the mat down with a warm wet rag afterwards. So nice! With five kids I go through so many dishes each day. One less difficult dish to wash and I am one happy Momma!
I decided to use a very simple sugar cookie dough for my test run. I rolled the dough into balls and dipped them each in a mix of cinnamon and sugar.
The mat comes with twelve circles printed on it. I baked the first batch with my two year old twin sons and it was so easy for them to place the dough balls. All I had to tell them was to put the dough in the circles and they did it. So adorable! There are also measurements on the edges of the mat for other baking needs, as you can use this versatile mat for so many other kinds of food, too.
The cookies slide right off the mat after cooling for just a couple minutes. As you can see there really is no mess left behind.
The cookies baked so evenly. This is a picture of the top of the cookie and following is a picture of the bottom of the cookie. No burnt edges or bottoms. just beautiful perfect cookies.
I had to decorate some for the holidays, of course. Here is my cute little sugar cookie snowman. My daughter was happy to see him when she got home from preschool.
I also posted a video review on my YouTube channel, in case you would like to swing by and check out the baking mat (or me, hee hee) in action.
Thank you so much for stopping by. This truly is a great product. Works above and beyond all of the other silicone baking mats I have tried in the past. If you try it out, please feel free to come back here and tell me how it works for you. Happy Holidays to you and yours! Bake away!
If you would like to order one for yourself, just click HERE for Amazon.com.
And don't forget to follow BakeItFun. Just click on the following links:
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