Dallas ISD Chess Pie
Dallas ISD had the best cafeteria food in the 80’s. Almost everything was made from scratch. Even with the good food, I used to get a chocolate bar from Mr. Lancaster’s class and get two $.10 rolls with butter for lunch. Some of my favorite school cafeteria food, (when I ventured off from my lunch of champions), were Fiesta Salad, Rectangular Pizza, and Chicken Fried Steak!!! I even liked those fried fish squares with tartar sauce.
I think DISD was most famous for Chess Pie, but when everyone started to worry about childhood obesity, pies were off the menu. My friend, Flo, has been trying to recreate the recipe, and he thinks he has it!! Since this is a little more than my skills will allow, someone has to try to make this and let me know how it turns out!!!
Photo by The Merry Gourmet!
DISD Chess Pie
1 1/2 Cups Sugar
1 1/2 Tablespoons Cornmeal
1/2 Cup Melted Margarine
3 Whole Eggs
1 Teaspoon Vinegar
1 Teaspoon Vanilla
1/4 Cup of Milk
Mix sugar and cornmeal. Add melted margarine and mix thoroughly. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing after each. Add liquids and mix well. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until done.
Sour Cream Chicken Enchilada Casserole
I haven’t posted a blog in a while! I have been so busy that I have gotten a little behind on things. I haven’t even been walking, which is really starting to affect my mood. I’ll get back going with that next week and maybe catch up on my blog. I actually have two more recipes to blog about, but since I made this one tonight and had my phone camera there, I thought I’d post a picture of this first!
This was supposed to be enchiladas, but I didn’t feel like making little rolls of chicken.
Ingredients:
Chicken (I bought a pre cooked chicken from Krogers)
Corn Tortillas
Chopped Onion
Green Chiles
Sour Cream (I used sour cream light)
Mozzarella Cheese
Colby Jack Cheese (only because I didn’t have enough Mozzarella Cheese to cover the Casserole)
Spray Pam on the casserole dish. Put corn tortillas all over the bottom of the dish. Put ripped up chicken on the tortillas. Spread chopped onions on top of the chicken. Cover with tortillas.
In a bowl mix sour cream and chiles. Cover tortillas with mixture. Top with cheeses. Place in the oven for 30 minutes at 350.
Rolo bites
My mom’s idea of cooking for the holidays is ordering all the food, picking it up, then bringing it to the party. That can get really expensive, so my sister and I said we would make the food ourselves this year and she could pay us. We were only (half) joking about the pay us part… We did manage to make my corn casserole, green bean casserole, stove top stuffing, and these rolo bites on our own and everyone seemed to love it all! My sister also made a turkey and a ham, but I can’t claim that I helped with that at all.
It was extra exciting this year because it SNOWED on Christmas in Dallas. The weatherman said that it hadn’t snowed in Dallas on Christmas for 83 years. I’m so glad my niece and nephew got to have that experience, even though they probably won’t remember it since they are so young.
Ingredients:
Pretzels (the waffle looking ones work best)
rolos
pecans
m&m’s
Put the pretzels on a cookie sheet, put a rolo in the center of the pretzel and put in the oven at 250 degrees for 4 – 5 minutes. 
Add an m&m or a pecan on the top of the semi melted pretzel/rolo.
Put in the fridge for about twenty minutes or so to cool them off. Put on a plate and enjoy!!
Mexican Chicken Casserole
I’m still trying to make a dish that I can eat when I get home from work, but the biggest problem I have is that I make all this food and then life gets in the way of me eating my creations. I made this casserole on Monday and here it is Thursday and I’ve only eaten it once. I think tomorrow I will bring some of it to lunch or maybe I will even eat it for breakfast. The one time I got to eat this, I really enjoyed it. I recommend it as a keeper recipe since it’s good and REALLY easy to make! I found this recipe on the Paula Deen website and made a few adjustments to meet my tastes.
Ingredients:
1 can of cream of mushroom soup
1 can of cream of chicken soup
1 can of cheddar cheese soup
2 cans of rotel (I drained the second can)
1 whole cooked chicken cut up in pieces, I bought a pre-made chicken at Target
6 flour tortillas
Enough cheddar cheese to cover the top of the casserole
Mix the three soups, rotel and chicken in a bowl.
Spray the pan with pam, then put tortillas down for the bottom layer
Put a layer of the soup/chicken mixture on the tortillas, then repeat tortilla then mixture ending with the tortillas on top
Put a layer of cheese on the tortillas
Cook in the oven on 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until cheese starts to brown
Enjoy a great meal!!
Is There Ever TOO Much Chocolate?
I finished making my strawberries and I had WAY too much chocolate left over. I started grabbing anything I could think of to coat with white chocolate. I even added some sprinkles on the Lay’s Potato Chips. The pretzels were good too. I could have added sprinkles on them, but I was really ready to be done with this whole project. I still want to try chocolate covered bacon, but that will have to hold for another day!
Cheese quesadillas
OMG!! I am out of chips, so I can’t make nachos! I almost had to go without dinner tonight until I found tortillas in my fridge. I decided I could make some cheese quesadillas. They are almost as easy to make as nachos and they have CHEESE!! I only had wheat tortillas, so I had to make due, but flour tortillas are better because they get pretty crunchy if you cook them long enough!
Melt butter in a pan
Put a tortilla on top of the butter and add cheese to the top of the tortilla. (You could put meats or veggies on here too, but I just like cheese.)
Put another tortilla on top of the cheese. Cook until brown on one side and then flip it over and get the other side browned.
Cut in to quarters and eat! Obviously I made 2 quesadillas. I was hungry, ok!?
Saltine cracker toffee
Ever since I made firecrackers, I’ve been looking for another recipe that I can make with saltine crackers. I found this recipe on Pinterest that looked really good. Anything with toffee and chocolate has to be good, right!? Tomorrow is our pot luck end of the school year party, so I figured this is a good a time as any to try and make this recipe that was pinned from The Girl Who Ate Everything blog.
Ingredients:
40 salted saltine crackers…or as many that cover your pan
1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 cups milk chocolate or semisweet chocolate chips (I used the semi sweet)
(optional) 3/4 cup chopped pecans…since I’m making this for potluck, I didn’t use the pecans. You never know who is allergic.
Line up the crackers on a pan covered in foil or parchment paper
Mix the butter and brown sugar and bring to a boil.
After comes to a boil, let it boil for 3 more minutes.
Pour the mixture over the crackers and spread it as evenly as possible.
Bake at 400 degrees for 5 – 6 minutes. It will get bubbly.
Right when you take it out of the oven, put the chocolate chips on the mixture and let it begin to melt.
Spread the melted chocolate as evenly as you can over the saltine cracker/toffee mixture.
Let it all cool down completely and then break in to pieces.
These are really good. The chocolate kind of overpowers the toffee though. I think I used more than 2 cups of chips, so you may not want to use as much as I did. I also put them in the fridge to cool them down. I was in a hurry to try them!!
Southwestern Chicken Cornbread Salad
This weekend I signed up to climb to the top of the Frost Building to raise money for the American Lung Association. You would think that knowing I’d be climbing about 33 flights of stairs that I would train a little bit for it. Nope. Not me. I have let it go until the last minute and now I am going to just have to do it. I’m really nervous, but I’m going to make it no matter what!! I’m not sure why I thought I would be better off making something to eat rather than training this week, but I found this and it seemed easy enough.
I got this recipe off Pinterest. I copied it exactly from the recipe on Martha Stewart’s website. The only major prep to this was making the cornbread, grilling the chicken and dicing some of the vegetables. Other than that, it was an easy recipe to make!!
- 6 cornbread muffins, very dry, coarsely crumbled, divided… I used a box of jiffy cornbread muffins and just made it in a small dish
- 1 (2.25 ounce) can sliced ripe olives drained
- 1 (16 ounce) can pinto beans, rinsed and drained
- 1 (11 ounce) can whole kernel sweet corn, drained
- 1 cup Hidden Valley® Spicy Ranch Dressing, divided
- 1 cup bell pepper, diced, assorted colors
- 2 chicken breasts, grilled*
- 1/2 cup red onion, diced
- 1 cup tomatoes, seeded and diced
- 1/2 cup Cheddar cheese, shredded
- In large clear salad bowl or trifle dish, layer half of the cornbread followed by olives, pinto beans and corn. Top with 1/2 cup of the dressing. Layer with bell pepper, chicken, onion, tomatoes, remaining cornbread and remaining dressing. Sprinkle with cheese.
- Cover and refrigerate several hours or overnight.
Taco Salad
A bunch of the teachers at my school decided to participate in the National Screen Free Week this year along with about 120 of the students. We wrote down some of the things that we wanted to do instead of playing on computers/games and watching TV. Several of us wrote that we would cook more. I got the bright idea that maybe we should have a potluck with some of the new recipes that we were going to try. The first person that responded said she was going to make enchiladas, so I had to find something that would somewhat go with that. It also happened to be May 4th, so the potluck kind of turned in to a Cinco de Mayo theme. I’ve always liked taco salad, so that is what I decided to make. I found this recipe on Pinterest. It was pretty good, but I think it would have been easier if I just would have used a packet of taco seasoning. If you don’t like to use pre-made mixes though, this is a great recipe to try! I got this recipe from Taste of Home website.
- 1 pound ground beef
- 1/2 cup ketchup
- 1 teaspoon dried oregano
- 1 teaspoon chili powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon pepper
- 1 medium head iceberg lettuce, torn
- 2 medium tomatoes, diced
- 1 cup (4 ounces) shredded Mexican cheese blend
- 1 can (2-1/4 ounces) sliced ripe olives, drained
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1/4 cup taco sauce
- 1 package (10-1/2 ounces) corn chips
Nutritional Facts1 serving (1 cup) equals 245 calories, 17 g fat (4 g saturated fat), 22 mg cholesterol, 398 mg sodium, 14 g carbohydrate, 2 g fiber, 8 g protein.
Cook the meat over medium heat until it is no longer pink, then drain.
Stir in the ketchup, oregano, chili powder, salt and pepper. After it boils, reduce the heat and let it simmer with a lid on it for 10 minutes.
To make the dressing, Mix the taco sauce and the mayonnaise. I had to use my hand blender to get the lumps out.
Since it was for a potluck, I served everything separate and let people add all the ingredients the way they wanted for their plate. It can be pre-made for a family if you wanted, but you would need to serve it immediately.
Kahlua Cake/Trifle
Fabulous after FIFTY 