Tortillas and Honey

Welcome to our finale of Fresh Tasty Valentines! Over this past week, over 20 bloggers have gotten together and created recipes from products provided by our generous sponsors! These sponsors are also being amazing and providing so many great prizes for our giveaway, which you can see and enter below! For the finale of a great week full of flavor, I decided to make dessert. I know it's not really a healthy recipe, but it's got a whole apple per serving. And what's that saying about an apple a day? ;-) These apples were provided to me by Envy Apples. These apples originated in New Zealand, but have eventually been planted and cultivated here in the United States up in Washington State. So, yes. Apple Dumplings. These are not your average apple dumplings. These apple dumplings are actually inspired by a version of a former co-worker's husband's secret recipe, and I've always wanted to recreate a version of it. I was going through my Grandma Betty...

Cranberry Apple Pecan Chicken Salad Sandwiches Today Aly from FudgingAhead is hosting a virtual baby shower for Joanna from Midwestern Bite ! Joanna is expecting a little girl, and Aly thoughtfully asked bloggers to take part in this baby shower for Joanna. Joanna's site represents Joanna... she writes about her life in the midwest, her family, crafts, and food. Over the holidays, Joanna posted an incredible recipe, an  Apple Cranberry Pie with Sweet Nut Topping . She was tweeting about one of her favorite recipes, which sounded amazing, and I asked her to post a blog post with the recipe. I made the pie last month, and it was truly amazing and all my family members who tried it kept going back for more. I was anticipating leftovers because my family is small, but there wasn't any more pie left to take home! This recipe quickly became a favorite of mine, which I plan on making again and again! This recipe here incorporates some of the main components of the wonderful...

Apple Cranberry and Pecan Sticky Buns It's another month of Pass the Cook Book Club and I am very excited about the cookbook chosen for this month! Three recipes were chosen from Sunny Anderson's Sunny's Kitchen: Easy Food for Real Life . I am a big fan of Sunny Anderson. I love her name, and she seems like someone you just want to hang out with! Sunny's cooking focuses on home cooked meals that are easy and non-intimidating for anyone to prepare. The recipe that I chose to make from Sunny's book exemplifies her focus on making easy meals... sticky buns! How intimidating do sticky buns sound, right?!? Sunny has an amazing idea to use puff pastry instead of making your own dough. You literally thaw out the puff pastry, roll it out a little bit, slather it with goodie, roll it, slice it, and bake it! I'm not very good at rolling cinnamon rolls so I was unsure of how these would come out because my filling was literally falling out (that's how bad I am...

BBQ Chicken Salad with Bacon and Apples You are in for a very special treat because I am sharing one of my favorite salads with you today! Now that summer is coming to a close and fall is knocking at our doors, I have a great salad recipe for you to try before BBQ season comes to an end. But we're not going to be doing any BBQ-ing with this recipe, just using BBQ sauce, haha. (Although you can use leftover BBQ chicken in this recipe if you'd like.) So if you're one that only likes BBQ in the summer, get out the last of your BBQ sauce and give this a try! This is a restaurant quality salad. It's massive and beautiful. It has all sorts of goodie and yummy flavors going on. It has BBQ chicken, bacon, apples, avocados, bleu cheese, pecans, more BBQ sauce, and ranch dressing. You can't fit much more in there! Also, you can easily double the recipe to make for your family. I've doubled and tripled this recipe and it's worked beautifully. I made some chan...

Apple Streusel Cheesecake Happy Monday! I have another wonderful fall recipe for you today and a great recipe if you have some apples waiting to be used. This recipe I've been making for years and found it on Food.com back when it was Recipezaar. Do you remember it back in those days? I've been hoarding recipes for so long! What I'm sharing with you today an Apple Streusal Cheesecake. The cheesecake is very mild and doesn't have a strong cheesecake flavor so the apples are the star. The lemon really helps to bring out the flavor of the apples, especially if you're using tart apples. This is a very simple recipe that doesn't take too much time to put together, just remember that chilling time is several hours. I hope you enjoy this recipe, it's one of my favorites! Also, the Balloon Fiesta ended yesterday so I'm going to share a photo that I snapped on the way to work last week. Being stuck in morning traffic didn't seem as frustrating w...

Traditional Apple Pie My brother has an apple tree in front of his place that already has ripe apples, and for me apples mean that fall is near! Fall is my favorite season because of the cooler weather, colorful leaves, and the many activities going on around New Mexico. Summer being my least favorite season because of the heat and lack of summer break ever since I became an adult and started working full-time. So it was a delightful shock when he brought over a bag of apples to Sunday dinner and "humbly" asked for me to make him an apple pie (or two). This year, however, is also sad because New Mexicans are very attached to the Dixon's Apple Orchard who have some of the best apples on earth (and their apple cider is amazing!). Last year, Dixon's Apples were affected by the Los Conchas fire and subsequent flooding, which damaged much of the orchard. Many of us grew up eating the apples and traveling up to Dixon on opening weekend to buy apples. My favorite is...