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I am a person who loves to cook and I like to try to recreate some of my favorite restaurant dishes. We used to have a great Italian place in town that had these delicious Italian Nachos. Lucky for me my husband was a kitchen manager at this restaurant and knew the recipes. Now this recipe is not exactly the recipe they used but we have tweaked it to our liking.

You start by frying the Wonton chips. I like to cut the wrappers diagonally to make them a little easier to eat. I am fortunate enough to work at a restaurant where I can fry the chips but it’s just as easy to do at home. You will want to get a small fryer or cast iron skillet filled with canola oil and heat it to 350 degrees. You only want them to get very light brown on the edges otherwise they will be burnt when you take them out. This usually takes less than a minute.

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Next you will want to cook your Italian sausage and place on a paper towel to drain any excess grease. Then you will make your Asiago cream sauce. Place butter and onion in a small sauce pan and cook onions down. Then add your garlic. Next add your cream and heat through. Finally, add the Asiago cheese and stir in until melted and thickened. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place your chips on a cookie sheet. Pile on your sausage, sauce, mozzarella cheese and red onion. Place in a 350 degree oven for 5-8 minutes or until the mozzarella has melted. Plate the nachos and enjoy!

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Italian Nachos

Ingredients:

• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 4 Tbs butter
• 3 Tbs diced onion
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup finely shredded Asiago cheese
• 1/3 lb Italian sausage
• 1/4 cup diced red onion
• Fried Won Ton chips
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees
• Cook Italian sausage, place on paper towel
• Place butter and onions in a small sauce pan and simmer until onions are softened. Add in garlic.
• Slowly add cream. Reduce heat to keep from scorching. Continuously stir then add Asiago cheese. Remove from heat
• Place chips on a cookie sheet and top with sausage, rest of red onion, cream sauce and then mozzarella.
• Place in oven for 5-8 minutes.

These nachos are great for tons of occasions. I hope you enjoy them!

-Cristie

Happy Monday all! I hope you have all been enjoying the fantastic weather we’ve been having recently! We decided to take full advantage of it and start our flowerbeds for the spring. If you remember we did our terrace project this fall. My husband got an itch to start tilling up those terraces this weekend on his break from work. I was also off Sunday and Monday so we decided let’s just go for it.

Once the dirt was tilled up we put down a layer of landscape fabric weed barrier. On top of that we put a layer of Preen mulch with weed preventer. As you can tell we don’t enjoy picking weeds! Next we headed to Lowe’s to buy our perennials. We mostly wanted to do flowers and plants that would grow back each year and just a few annuals every season.

We bought the following perennials: Color Guard Yucca, Snow Cone Candytuft, Halo Lilac Viola, Morning Star Deep Rose Sea Thrift, Butterfly Blue Pincushion Flower, Orange Glow Wallflower and we will be getting five May Night Salvia to go in front of each pillar. We are waiting for the salvia to come in and they will be fairly large and lavender in color. We also bought a couple of raspberry bushes and will later plant eight peppers on the south side of the beds. Once we had all of our plants and flowers we measured and laid out where we wanted to put each thing.

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Next we hooked up and laid out the soaker hose. We weaved it in and out among the plants then covered it with mulch. We wanted to be able to just turn on the hose and let it evenly water the plants. Last thing was putting in the solar landscape flood lights. We wanted to be able to light up the house and the flowers at night while having the porch lights off.

That’s it! We have a few other things we will be doing throughout the spring and summer and will update as we go. I hope you all enjoy getting outside and planting your own plants and flowers!

I hope everyone is starting to thaw out after all of the snow last week. After a good long life of over thirteen years our goldfish Serial passed last week. We knew it was coming soon but it was still very sad. We had never been able to have any other fish because Serial would kill them within a day. This is how he got the name Serial. We were now able to fill the 75 gallon tank with the plethora of fish it was made for.

We did our research to find out which fish would make good tank mates. Then we headed to Petco. We really liked the Tiger Barbs that they had. Since these fish were mildly aggressive we had to purchase other fish that were mildly aggressive. We saw some Rosy Barbs near them that we wanted as well and they would make good tank mates. We got six of each Barb and also got a Red Tail Shark. We only got one shark because they are a very territorial fish and needed to be the only one of its kind. We were now ready to take them home.

Before we left we picked up some tropical fish flakes and some pellets made for bottom feeders (for the shark). We also bought another little hidey-hole for the shark so he could have his alone time. We got the fish home and placed their bags in the tank for about thirty minutes to acclimate to our tank. After the thirty minutes was up we scooped them up with a net and placed them in the tank.

Once released they grouped up into their different schools and checked out the tank. The shark immediately hid behind an object and waited until the others swam away. Once they were gone it explored inside the new hidey-hole and other rock structures we had. They seem to be settling in and we hope to enjoy them for many years to come!

When we decided we were going to build a house the kitchen layout was my first priority. Our house at the time was perfect for us except the kitchen was extremely small and had very little cabinet or counter space. For two people who love to cook and host it was very frustrating to say the least. I took my time and put in a ton of effort to create the kitchen of our dreams

First thing was getting a ton of counter space. The architect helped put a plan in place that included two islands in addition to two of our walls lined with granite countertops. I knew I wanted a white kitchen (my husband was reluctant at first) so we chose a dark granite to off set the bright white features. My husband picked out the tile backsplash with the dark grout. Now we had the bones of the kitchen in place.

Next, the details. I wanted a gas stove, farmhouse sink and a pantry. Now we needed to be a little frugal because we had just taken on this huge project of building a house from scratch. We have a plumbing store in our town that has a “garage sale” every year and we were fortunate enough to find two farmhouse sinks for $25 each. We also found two sinks for one of our bathrooms for $5 each. I went to an outdoor flea market later that summer and found these doors that came out of a school cafeteria in a small Oklahoma town. These would become the doors to our pantry. The last detail came from an idea from my mom which was to put in a pot filler. I honestly don’t know what I ever did without it!

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This kitchen has given way to so many family gatherings, romantic meals for two and of course canning the harvest from our summer garden. I feel so fortunate every time I get to create a meal in the kitchen of my dreams. In future posts I’ll extend the tour to other parts of our country home!