Chobani Greek Yogurt: A Healthy Treat for the Whole Family
Last week we received a few new flavors of Chobani to try, and I must say that we were very excited! Particularly since there were flavors pleasing to the whole family. I knew Banana would appeal to the kids, and I thought I would like Pear, and Lee (who doesn’t usually eat yogurt) really enjoyed the Coffee with Dark Chocolate.
I will admit that I have not been able to successfully get Jenny or Brinkley to eat Greek yogurt in the past. But guess what I found with the Banana yogurt? They both liked it. The texture was very creamy and the banana really mixed well with the yogurt. Reagan’s always liked it, so I knew she would be easy, but she really enjoyed the banana flavor also.
Brinky started out a little skeptical.
But he decided to dig in. With his spoon!
I think he liked it. Though he doesn’t know exactly how to use his spoon obviously.
Jenny liked it, and she’s by far my pickiest eater. (And not a fan of being photographed these days.)
Reagan, well I knew she’d be happy about the yogurt. She requested yogurt and fresh fruit for her special birthday breakfast a couple weeks ago, so that’s just the kind of girl she is.
Jenny couldn’t eat all of hers, so she gave it to Brinkley. He wasn’t sure he could eat it all.
But look at his happy face when he dug in!
It was a little rude of his sister to point out that his face was a bit of a mess though.
Just let him have his fun.
I was very happy to find delicious Greek yogurt varieties that appeal to my whole family. What do I love about Chobani Greek yogurt?
- Chobani only has natural ingredients, so I feel better about feeding it to my family.
- Chobani has twice as much protein as regular yogurt.
- The fruit on the bottom is fresher (and tastier) than some of the fruit I’ve had in other yogurts.
- Variety – there are so many flavors!
- It is readily available at most grocery stores, including mine.
- It’s delicious!
And one last thing I learned about Chobani on Super Bowl Sunday! I can use it like sour cream in dips. I had seen recipes that substituted Chobani plain yogurt for sour cream, but I’d never tried it before. I made ranch dip (Ranch dressing packet, 1 cup plain Greek yogurt, 1/2 cup milk) using Chobani, and it was delicious! My girls didn’t realize it wasn’t the full fat version we normally make. I will definitely look at substituting Chobani in other recipes – or trying out some of the recipes on the Chobani website. Here’s a handy conversion chart:
Learn more about Chobani:
*Disclosure: I was provided with some tasty yogurt by Chobani. All opinions are my own.
10 Quick & Easy Super Bowl Recipes
While I can’t claim we’re excited about this Sunday’s Super Bowl game, we are always excited about planning out our Super Bowl food and allowing ourselves to eat everything we want that day. A little too much of everything we want, but that’s okay one day a year, right?
If you’re looking for last minutes ideas, I have several tried and true recipes we often fall back on for the Super Bowl. And they’re all quick to make, so you can decide to try one of these on Sunday morning and have them ready in time for the game!
- Pizza Dip – We’ve been making this for years. We like to pair it with tortilla chips, but it would also be tasty on breadsticks! The recipe we use is the same as this pin I found – and tasty!
Source: Pinterest
- Baked Potato Dip – Perfect with Wavy Lays potato chips, it includes all the best baked potato toppings. And takes about 3 minutes to make! I’ve linked to the original recipe I used from Allrecipes, but I will say that I normally use real bacon pieces instead of bacon bits.
Source: Allrecipes
- Spinach Dip – I love cold spinach dip, but I don’t make it very often because I eat way too much. Perfect for the Super Bowl! I like to pair it with Wheat Thins. This is my favorite recipe for it, found on Allrecipes years ago.
Source: Allrecipes
- Ranch Dip – The classic ranch dip made with the dry ranch mix and sour cream is practically healthy when you pair it with carrots! But of course it’s tasty with chips too. I may try the healthier Greek yogurt version this year.
Source: Pinterest
- Cream Cheese Salsa Dip – My favorite Mexican style dip for tortilla chips? A block of cream cheese, a jar of salsa, and a cup or so of shredded cheddar – microwave and stir. Easy. Delicious. This picture looks similar to the way mine usually looks, but the recipe linked to here just calls for cream cheese & salsa, without the added tastiness of cheddar cheese.
Source: Pinterest
- Crescent Roll Cinnamon Cheesecake – This has been one of our favorite dessert recipes for years, so usually if we don’t want to try a new dessert recipe that could be hit or miss, we pull this one out! And you can make it slightly healthier with reduced fat crescent rolls and cream cheese. I prefer to use the seamless crescent roll dough sheet which is not available in a reduced fat version though. Link to the original recipe I’ve always used is here.
Source: Pinterest
- Tang Fruit Salad – Reagan always loves it if we include some fruit, and this fruit salad my grandmother used to make is still our all time favorite fruit salad recipe. The recipe here is close to my grandmother’s. It matches the liquid part exactly, but she always used only bananas, mandarin oranges, and pineapple for the fruit, so that’s how I’ve always made it. Just writing about it is making me want some right now!
Source: Pinterest
To round out my list of 10 Super Bowl recipes, here are three we’re planning to try this year. I can’t swear they’ll be successes like my tried and true recipes, but I’m excited to try them!
- Pizza Quesadillas – How good do these look? Plus – what I always love – quick and easy! Note: we definitely wouldn’t put nasty olives on them because they’re slimy and gross.
Source: Pinterest
- Blooming Onion Bread – I’ve been wanting to try one of these bread recipes for a while, and this could be the right one.
Source: Pinterest
- Brownie Refrigerator Cake – We need a little sweetness to go with all the salty food, right?
Source: Pinterest
Now I really can’t wait until Sunday!
Monday Listicles: 10 Pinterest Recipe Successes
Food’s the topic for Monday Listicles this week, and I’m always ready to talk about food! I decided to share 10 Pinterest recipe successes. I’ve pinned so many things that I haven’t gotten around to making on Pinterest (especially crafts – I’m just not crafty), but I actually do try some of the recipes I pin. The easier ones. Here are a few from my Recipes We’ve Made board that we’ve enjoyed – most have been enjoyed more than once.
Starting with breakfast…
1. Butterscotch Rolls – I just made these this weekend. They were delicious. And easy. The base was Rhodes Dinner Rolls, which it turns out are the best base for…pretty much everything. They’re light and fluffy and the caramel was perfectly ooey and gooey. Bonus – the butterscotch topping hardened into basically toffee for later snacking.
Moving right onto dinners…
2. Crockpot Ribs – We’re having these again this week. My husband loves some ribs, and he says he prefers these to any restaurant ribs he’s ever had. Plus, like pretty much anything I try and like – easy!
3. Crockpot Shredded Beef – This is actually in my crockpot cooking as I type. It’s one of our favorite crockpot beef recipes. We don’t use it for tacos – it’s plenty good on its own.
4. Baked Spaghetti – This recipe taught us that crispy fried onions – and cream cheese – make something that was already delicious even better.
5. Spicy & Creamy Sausage Pasta – This was one of the first recipes I tried on Pinterest, and still one of our favorites. It’s the meal that caused my girls to raise their hands when asked if they love dinner a couple weeks ago! (I’m linking to my own pin because my version is slightly modified from the original recipe I tried.)
6. Sweet & Spicy Bacon Chicken – This one’s so simple and so tasty. The sweet and spicy and salty combo is just delicious. We just lay the bacon on top of the chicken – it’s not quite as pretty, but the bacon on the bottom of the chicken didn’t cook as much as the part on the top when they were wrapped around.
7. Garlic Chicken Farfalle – Can you tell we love pasta? I think it’s the Italian in us. This is another one of our favorites – we had it last week and I swear it gets better every time. Plus it’s an awesome leftover! I like that part of the cooking effort takes place in the crockpot.
8. Crockpot Mashed Potatoes – I mentioned these after Thanksgiving, and I find I’m still thinking about them and the fact that I could make mashed potatoes in the middle of the week now! Normally I wouldn’t because they take just a little too much time and effort for a weeknight. But not in the crockpot!
9. Best Rolls Eve r - As I mentioned above, Rhodes Dinner Rolls are awesome. They’re also the base for these delicious rolls.
10. Rolos Cookies – Last but not least, one recent dessert recipe. These Rolos cookies only have 4 ingredients, so they’re easy. And, in case I haven’t used this word enough in this post, delicious. You should try them.
So, to sum up…I love Pinterest. Especially for finding recipes. I’m currently searching for the perfect idea for a treat to include in our teacher gifts. Do you have any suggestions for me?
Linking up with Stasha for Monday Listicles:
Tasty Tuesday: Dinner Victory!
I often find recipes that I want to try on Pinterest, and I’m always so happy whenever I successfully find something, make it, and everyone in the family loves it. Loves it. That’s what happened on Sunday night. So I need to share the two recipes we tried.
First up, for our main course, we had Garlic Chicken Farfalle. I used the recipe on Kevin & Amanda’s site, and I’m writing it out here.
Ingredients:
16 oz. Farfalle pasta
1 c. heavy whipping cream
3-4 chicken breasts (boneless, skinless)
2 to 3 cloves garlic, crushed OR garlic salt (I do a spoonful of crushed garlic)
1 Tbsp. pepper
1/2 c. butter
1 lb. bacon, crumpled
1/2 c. shredded Parmesan cheese
1 (12 oz) Lawry’s mesquite marinade with lime juice
Directions:
Crock pot chicken and bottle of marinade on low for 6 hours. Pull marinated chicken out of the juices, allow to cool a little bit, and shred. Set this aside. About a half-hour before serving, boil the pasta. In a small saucepan, melt butter, add garlic, whipping cream, pepper, parmesan cheese, and crumpled bacon. Whisk together on low heat for 3-4 minutes. In a large bowl, pour over cooked, drained pasta, add chicken and stir through. Sprinkle a little bit more shredded parmesan cheese on top.
Here are my comments/adjustments:
- I LOVED the fact that the chicken for this recipe was made in the crockpot. It made the preparation for this meal much simpler. I didn’t read the recipe early enough in the day to realize it used the crockpot, so I ended up putting the chicken in the crockpot a little later and cooked it on high for 3 hours. It was perfectly cooked and easy to shred. I used three large chicken breasts and actually felt like there was a little too much chicken. I may add just a little more pasta if I use that much chicken next time.
- Based on comments on Kevin & Amanda’s site, I also added a bit extra cheese to the sauce. I used some shredded parmesan and some of a shredded Italian 6-cheese mix, probably closer to a cup overall.
- I used about half of the pepper listed.
- I used the pre-cooked bacon pieces that are find with the salad dressings at my store – much more convenient and easier to clean than making the bacon, and just as tasty!
My finished product:
It was delicious! Lee and I loved it, and all three kids loved it. And my dad was here and able to enjoy it. Plus, it was a great leftover the next day.
Now, I think you can tell how much we loved that pasta. But we also had something even better with it. The most amazing dinner rolls EVER! They were light and fluffy and the seasoning was so delicious. They were so good that we almost couldn’t believe it when we took the first bite. I’m serious. Everyone should make these.
They were made with Rhodes Dinner Rolls, and the recipe is straight from their website.
Ingredients:
- This isn’t a complicated recipe at all, but the recipe on the Rhodes site includes great step by step photos.
- I don’t have a small iron skillet, so I just used a glass pie pan. And actually I used two because I made two batches at once to make sure there were enough for everyone (I’m so glad I decided to double).
- Mine took about 5 hours to rise. This recipe was so easy – the only thing I’d always have to remember in the future (and we’ll definitely be making these again) is to start them plenty early so there’s enough time for the rolls to rise.
- Besides the fact that these were so incredibly delicious, I loved the fact that they’re so cheap to make. The Rhodes dinner rolls come 36 to a bag, and other than that, all that’s needed is butter and herbs that we have on hand!
Here’s how mine looked right before they went into the oven:
And here’s a photo of what they look like finished from the Rhodes site (I forgot to take one because I was so excited about how they turned out that we just started eating them!):
Overall, it was an awesome and EASY meal that I would recommend to anyone and everyone!
Tasty Tuesday: Bubble Up Pizza
Apparently I’m in the mood to talk about food here at the beginning of the week. Maybe because I’m hoping we manage to stick to our meal list for the week. I was making bubble up pizza for my family last night, and I had the thought that it’s not the most exciting recipe to share because most people have probably heard of it or seen it. But then I also thought it should be shared in case anyone hasn’t seen it because it is seriously the quickest, easiest, most kid-friendly recipe we make. So I took a few seconds to snap some pictures (with my phone, so they’re not that great) during the 5 minute preparation process so I could share the recipe.
I start with a can of buttermilk biscuits (the large ones like Grands) and quarter them and place in a bowl.
To save time (and dirty dishes), you could mix everything in the baking dish, but I prefer to throw it all into a bowl and mix it up first. After the biscuits, add your preferred pizza toppings. I added one jar of pizza sauce, some bacon pieces (the pre-cooked kind you buy in a bag where the salad dressings are), diced up pepperoni, and some mozzarella cheese. And mix it all up!
Dump the mixture into a 9×13 baking dish and spread it out so it’s all even.
Then layer on more goodness. I layer on a little cheddar cheese and then more pepperoni.
And then add a lot more cheese – cheddar and mozzarella to finish it up.
Pop it in the oven at 375 and bake. It’s as easy as that. Here’s my delicious slice:
I love so much about this recipe, mostly that it’s so quick and convenient, honestly requiring about 5 minutes of prep time, and that it’s easily customizable to your family’s tastes. It could be vegetarian friendly. It could be lighter – we’ve used the reduced fat biscuits and reduced fat cheese in the past. It’s definitely a go-to meal on our family meal list.
Bubble Up Pizza Recipe
1 can Grands size buttermilk biscuits
1 jar pizza sauce
Pizza toppings of choice: pepperoni, bacon, onions, etc.
2 cups cheddar cheese
2 cups mozzarella cheese
1. Quarter biscuits and place into bowl.
2. Add pizza toppings and about 1/2 cup of cheese and mix.
3. Spread mixture in 9×13 baking dish.
4. Top with cheese.
5. Bake at 375 for approximately 20 minutes, until cheese is brown.
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