When my grandmother made this casserole we would run to the table. She had to beat us back from trying to grab some.

I can remember helping to peel the potatoes, carrots and onion. She always used fresh vegetables.

But this delicious recipe for chicken pot pie casserole can be made with frozen vegetables or canned.

Although you can use a store-bought crust, I love to use my easy homemade pie crust. 

However,  you will need a little more time to prepare things from scratch.

Slow roasted chicken in a creamy savory sauce, mixed with sweet carrots, chunky creamy potatoes,  delicious corn and any other garden-fresh vegetable that you love.  Your family will love this casserole! Many times I add broccoli because it is my husbands favorite in this chicken pot pie casserole.

If you need to cut the salt use low sodium soups and chicken broth.

This casserole is a perfect hearty meal to serve on those cold winter days.

It is full of nutritious vegetables so you don’t need to serve anything else with it. It is a full course meal in one dish.

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When I first made this easy homemade pie crust recipe, it came out perfect. I have even doubled the recipe to use in my recipe for homemade chicken pot pie casserole.

Oh sure you can buy a frozen pie crust from the store, but once you try this pie crust you will never want store-bought again.

This recipe changed my mind, now I make every pie crust that I need from scratch by hand.

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That meat would slowly roast for what “seemed” like hours, because it smelled sooo good!

You could smell the savory garlic, sweet onion, sweet peppers, jalapeno and the spiciness of her season mix. She would cut slits in the pork and stuff it with garlic, celery, and bell pepper.  Mm, yummy my mouth is watering just thinking about it!

Well, Although I am not going to roast my tenderloin, I am going to put my twist on this cut of meat with a marinade.

I season up my pork and let it marinate in the frig preferably overnight. It gives the entire dish a more robust flavor.

Pork stir fry is another of my families favorite dishes.  My husband is always picking up a few of these when he catches them on sale at Aldi’s. That’s when we get to create and feed our family a delicious meal!

I hope you enjoy our recipe!

For this stir-fry, we have added a lot of vegetables, like cabbage. Use as much as you want, we love cabbage so I add quite a bit. I also add broccoli, various peppers (The Creole side of me, I can’t help myself), carrots and onion.

It is sort of a deluxe pork stir fry because we are trying to make sure that we eat many vegetables these days.

You can substitute the pork for chicken, turkey or even beef,  the brown gravy goes with all of them. I have even prepared this dish without any meat at all. No matter how you decide to prepare this dish I promise that your family will enjoy this savory pork stir fry.

This recipe is also proportioned for our big family of 8, but you can easily adjust it to fit your own family!

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chocolate cake I have ever tasted!

My family craves this decadent fudgy chocolate cake every holiday.  I mean EVERY HOLIDAY and then again!

It will satisfy the most avid chocolate lover’s cravings. When I first baked this chocolate cake for my family many. many moons ago, I couldn’t believe how much they liked it! Let me tell you, I am the biggest chocolate lover in the house, and I definitely look forward to making this treat!

This chocolate cake is a cross between dark chocolate covered truffles and a decadent brownie, yet deliciously cake-like. This is why it is so loved in my family and is a must-have holiday dessert.

Fudgy Chocolate Cake

I have so many chocolate cake recipes, but none of them ever gave me the satisfying taste of chocolate that I was looking for. All of the other recipes made claims that their recipe would but, for me none of them did.

That is until I came across this recipe that I found in an old recipe book that my husband brought home to me one day way back in 2002!  You see, to me, I really believe that the old-time ways of cooking are the best.

It’s true. The recipes that my family request the most are my Grandmothers old recipes and this decadent fudgy chocolate cake, that’s my proof.

Old-time favorites

Like my Grandmothers rice dressing recipe, I prepare it every major holiday because my family looks forward to it each time. My oldest son actually said to me once. After I had suggested cooking something different for Thanksgiving he said, “Naw, stick with the old traditional favorites”.  It’s the same way with my old fashioned apple torte. You see, comfort foods are the best for family memories and tradition.

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My grandmother always put oysters in hers, but I don’t like them in my gumbo.

Some of my other family members use them and various other seafood, such as lobster, crayfish, and scallops.

This recipe is for a big pot, but you can adjust as needed.

Let your taste buds lead you! enjoy!

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My grandmother found so many ways to provide nutritious foods for us to eat.  No matter the fact that she didn’t have a lot, she still managed to cook good food.

This beef stew recipe is one of those good food dishes. Now, I know that today you can go to the store to buy a canned stew, but you don’t have to do that! You can make a more nutritious, delicious stew yourself from scratch! It is so easy and only takes about an hour to be ready!

Making beef stew from scratch

To make this stew, you will need the beef and any vegetables that your family likes. My grandmothers beef stew recipe takes a slight turn from what you might find on the internet because she never used wines or vinegar in her broth.

This fiery beef stew is tomato-based, so it is somewhat like a soup but it is thick like a stew, so my Grandmother called it a stew, and that’s what I call it, too!

The other reason she labeled it as a stew was that she browned the meat, which helped to thicken the broth which made it more of a stew. Then she would let the meat simmer on low for about an hour, it made the beef meltingly tender.

I love to put lots of thyme, rosemary and parsley in my beef stew. I also like to use the canned fiery tomatoes in my stew. All of these delicious ingredients adds so much flavor to the thick broth.

So, if you want to give your family a delicious hearty stew, that will fill them with good nutrients and that will satisfy their hunger, make this Fiery beef stew!

Of course, if you don’t like the fiery idea just substitute with regular canned tomatoes you will still get that awesomeness in this meal!

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Instead, I saute my vegetables with olive oil cooking spray or olive oil.

At least I know that this oil is a healthy one and is good for the heart. As you can see I love lots of veggies and I am always trying to find easy ways to get them into my kid’s system. These sweet red onions are so much better if you saute them first, combined with the garlic, and peppers.

Get the freshest parsley, tomatoes, orange, red and green peppers you can find. You know, don’t pick up wilted parsley, it just doesn’t flavor as well.  Since I have never used a lot of butter in this recipe my family never missed it, yet they do miss when I don’t cook this dish for a while. This is the kind of meal that people will actually request over and over again.

So here is my grandmother’s recipe without all of the butter.

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dishes.

Thinking back on the things my grandmother use to say to me, it brings back memories of warmness, Joy, and sometimes sadness. Simply, because of the reasons, she said certain things to my siblings and me.

Like “You will understand when you have children” or “Be grateful for what you got on your

plate” she said this whenever we complained about eating the same thing more than once, during the week.

One of those dishes was kidney beans and rice!

These delicious little pellets of energizing protein, packs a lot of flavor and goodness rolled into them. They are perfectly fine when eaten all alone, but extra scrumptious when served over white or brown rice! Yum!

I can’t believe that now as an adult I love to cook them, eat them, and serve them to my kids. I love to reminisce about those good days when I was a young girl,  racing my brother home, to get to the dinner table first.

Kidney Beans

Now when shopping, don’t get these kidney beans mixed up with red beans. I say this because my husband brought back the wrong beans one time. Just because they looked similar, but they are different.

Kidney beans are bigger than red beans and are not as strong tasting. Kidney beans do not take as long as red beans to cook. But if your local grocer does not have them, you can substitute this recipe with red beans.

This recipe kindles memories like the one I talked about up top, because, it was one of those dinners that I remember the most as a young child.

Particularly, because my grandmother seemed to always have this dish ready when my brother and I  got home from school.

We would race back home to eat, after a long day at school. The long public bus ride to and from school was extra tasking on our starving bodies.

It was as if we were starving when we stepped foot off that bus. Even though we had eaten lunch at school, it seems that we were always hungry when we got home.

My grandmother never failed use, she knew that we would be hungry, so she had our beans ready. As a mom, I now know that it took her a long time to prepare this dish.

Her Creole heritage definitely influenced her cooking and made it so delicious, and she cooked for us with a healthy dose of love in each meal.

Back then I thought that we were unfortunate and poor because we had to eat beans, which seemed like every day. Now I know it was really one of the best and one of the healthiest meals we could have eaten.

What to cook with kidney beans

This delicious dish pairs well with many things and, I eat them any time of the day. Get you some smoked turkey or smoked ham or even smoked sausage is good. The tender ham flavored meat makes it even more mouth-watering. Drizzle the thickened savory sauce over fluffy white rice, spiced with some screaming Texas Pete hot sauce, oh baby you’re talking good!

Although it seemed as if my grandmother prepared this dish for us every day, at the time, I now understand that she had actually cooked the pot of kidney beans & rice on that Monday.

It seems as if it was a kind of unspoken tradition to put a big pot of beans on the stove that would simmer all day long. Just like the tradition of frying fish on Fridays was a family ritual with my kinfolks.

My family was not catholic, but they did come from Louisiana and many of these traditions were lived out in their homes, even after migrating to San Francisco.

Sometimes we got to eat these beans with some good fried chicken, pickled peppers and freshly diced tomatoes. Which are all duplicated at my table today, when I cook  red beans & rice for my family

So, this is a meal that I have placed in front of my family quite often. Today, as a mother, that has the choice to prepare any dish for my family that I want, I often prepare red beans & rice. Yes, I could skip beans, a little more often then I choose too.  But, the fact is, my family, enjoy eating this dish, especially with a nice thick piece of cornbread, chicken or with a nice crisp green tossed salad!  Plus it is so healthy and nutritious! Yum, delicious!

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so good for you!

Wondering what to serve with them?

Herb oven grilled chicken will complement these black beans and rice well. Just get some jerk chicken seasoning, sprinkle your clean chicken with olive oil and the seasoning. Grill uncovered in the oven until done and crisp.

Don’t forget a nice cilantro based salad! Yum. Black beans and rice is a dish that we could eat every day, since we cook them with no meat, a very little salt and many fresh herbs and tomatoes. You will love the different flavors mixing in your mouth.

I grew up on beans and rice!

Black beans and rice are true comfort food and because they are so filling you don’t need a lot. You are getting a lot of fiber from these black beans and rice, which is excellent for the waistline! Because we were not rich, my grandmother served us some kind of bean almost every day, yet we were lean, healthy and strong.

Although these amazing vegetarian black beans were not a staple on my grandmother’s table, I discovered them while trying to provide nutritional food for the army of men that I cook for every day. Some nights I would include a pan of sweet cornbread or freshly cooked pita bread, my family loves it.  Try cooking these and see that you won’t add them to your regular menu!

Please let me know if you make these delicious beans, and I would love it if you leave me a star rating!

Thank you!

Adrienne

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Every Thanksgiving  I use this easy sweet potato pie recipe to make at least 3 varieties of sweet potato pies. I make that many varieties because some of my family members do not like coconut, and some do not like lemon. So, every Thanksgiving I make at least 8 pies.

I know, My family members are so picky.

But it’s ok, over the holidays I love cooking large meals to share with them, it makes me happy to see them enjoy the food!

My attitude comes from my Creole grandmother, she was just the same. I can remember her cooking delicious meals, and when they were done, she wouldn’t even eat sometimes. Many times she just cooked so that we could eat.

So, laboring over the food during the holidays truly brings me joy! I usually bake 3 sweet potato pies with vanilla, 2 with coconut and 3 with lemon.

My husband helps me prepare the coconut one, it’s his favorite, because his mom made hers with coconut and he wants that taste. The basic recipe is the same, yet each variation of this southern sweet potato pie has its unique delicious taste.

I hope that you will try my recipe and if you do please come back to let me know how you liked it!

Please give me a star rating, it really does help my recipes to be shared with others!

Thank you!

Adrienne

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