I’m going to be making desserts for my family dinners this year, and because there are going to be a pretty even mixture of adults and children, I thought it would be fun to make one “fun” recipe and another more “serious” dish. So I’m making my apple pie and I’m also making cake batter cookies and rice krispies treats!

Now with the amount of sugar and marshmallows in the two recipes, they may not be considered the healthiest treats around. However, I think we should all do what we can to make little changes, so in the following two recipes I am going to substitute I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (< MY FAVORITE) for regular ol’ butter. I also use Country Crock when I cook at home, but I just happened to use I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter for these two desserts.

The apple pie is my favorite. I cooked my first apple pie by using this recipe in 2006. Since then, I’d say I’ve made probably about 5 pies, and every single time I change the recipe as I’m too lazy to look it up again. Here is what I used this time:

All Purpose Flour: 2 Tablespoons

8 or 9 Granny Smith Apples (this time I added about 4 or 5 red apples too!

Pie Crust (from the store!)

1 cup of sugar

Cinnamon: 1 Tablespoon

Nutmeg: 1 Teaspoon

Egg: 1

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter: 2-4 Tablespoons.

One lemon (both the juice and zest)

So basically, you will peel and cut your apples. Next you can grate your lemon peel and juice it over the apples. Mix together the flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and about 1 tablespoon of butter. After you’ve got that all mixed up, you can literally toss it in your crust and cover with the second layer of dough.

Next, you’ll beat the egg and brush it completely over the dough. After that, I sprinkled some brown sugar and sugar on the top. Then I cut a little design in the top before I baked the pie. The MOST important part is that you stick some I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter under the cuts you just made. I honestly don’t remember why, but my mom told me this years ago, so I’ll listen to her. Tada! All done. (Well, that technically isn’t true, before you stick it in the oven, you’re going to want to heat it to 400 degrees. Then cook for about 45 minute. You’ll tell its done when the crust is golden brown and the juices are bubbly.

Now, if you’re interested in the cake batter rice krispies, here is what you will need:

One Box of Rice Krispies

Funfetti Cake Mix: 3/4 cup

marshmallows: one bag

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter: 3 Tablespoons

Sprinkles (A handful or two)

This one is easy. First, melt the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and the marshmallows in a huge pan. Once they are lumpy and mostly melted pour in the rice krispies cereal, but you must do this part slowly. It’s tough to mix this around, so if you put too much cereal in at once, it’s going to be even harder to mix. When you’re getting pretty well mixed, I’d toss in a handful of sprinkles. Then you spread the coated rice krispies into a pan and you’ll want to put a bit more sprinkles on the top. THAT IS IT, FOLKS! Simple! I haven’t decided if I am going to frost these or not. Maybe I’ll just glaze them with white chocolate. Yum.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but I honestly love Country Crock and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. One of those two brands are always in my fridge, and I use them to cook all the time. Whether its simple as toast or mashed potatoes, or I’m cooking desserts for Thanksgiving…I’m a I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter FAN!

Thank you to Good to Know & Unilever Spreads for being a sponsor. I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Note: This was originally drafted the week of my birthday, although I never finished it. I just read it in my drafts folder, and thought it was a good post to share, even if it isn’t fully complete. So here is something written last month, in my last few days of being 27.

A few years ago, I would make some pretty stellar birthday lists. No, not as wish lists, but more like “lessons I’ve learned” or “goals for the coming year” kind of lists. Somewhere in the past few years (I blame grad school), I stopped making these lists. After reading Jenn’s most recent post about her 25th birthday (Happy Birthday, Jenn!), I decided to not let another year go by without writing something. Now, I have enough goals to last me, you, and your extended family a few years so there is no need to come up with any more. (I’ll just finally put some effort into my 101 in 1001 list!)  So here is a portrait of who I am (inspired by Nora from last year if you can believe it*) at the age of 28.

If you look at my hair, you will see that for the first birthday of my life, I am a brunette. There were days in the past 11 months that I missed being a blonde, but now I’m comfortably settled into the simplicity of brown hair. If you look at my face, you may notice the lack of glasses. I’m entering the first birthday of my life with perfect vision, and I see a great future in the distance. If you looked at my skin you’d notice many imperfections and scars. I’ve been cut into and biopsied and am eternally grateful to every imperfection because they prove that I am healthy and alive.

If you looked at my wrist you’d notice the only jewelry I wear: a Pandora bracelet from Mr. O with beads chosen carefully and purposely, beads that symbolize important moments for our little family. If you looked at my clothing, I’ll probably be either in work clothes or extremely comfortable clothing like pajamas or jeans and a tee-shirt. If you looked at my feet you’d see flip flops as I’m trying to get in every possible last day with them before it becomes boot weather. My accoutrements are various. If I am out of the house, I pretty much need sunglasses, my iPhone and keys; however, I will have much more on my person. I carry a huge black pocketbook, and if you dump it out, you will find: an agenda, a small notebook, at least 5 pens/markers, a wallet, a camera, many receipts, cough drop wrappers and a full bag of cough drops, a pill-box full of vitamins, eyeshadow, band-aids, tissues, finger puppets, paper clips, chap stick and lip gloss, and random other goodies.

If you watched me as I went about my day you’d notice I usually do multiple things at once. At work I seem to do four different projects at once. I’m not advocating this is a good idea (because it isn’t), but I can’t seem to get things done if I don’t multitask.

If you could peek into my brain you’d see that I most often think about my relationship with Mr. O, Wolverine, what I’m going to eat, my friends and family, Spry, work stuff and mundane tasks like getting gas or food shopping.

If you wondered what my life would look like in the near future, I’d tell you that I will be content. That I make the choice to be happy, and while I struggle from time to time, I still choose happiness over the alternative. I will tell you about Spry, the literary journal my colleague Linsey and I just founded. By this time next year we will have published two issues and be working on our third. I will tell you about Mr. O and Wolverine and how happy I still am with my two guys. I will tell you that this year of my life I plan on thriving and creating and relaxing.

Thank you, twenty-eight for the endless possibilities. I have faith that this will be an exciting year.

I let Pinterest dictate much of my cooking. Since there are a billion recipes I’ve never made before, this works really well for my 101 in 1001 goals challenge of cooking weekly for 52 weeks*. Mr. O and I make our own pork dumplings and eat them way too often, so when I saw a recipe for Asian meatballs, I thought, “Perfect idea! It’s just like the dumpling, but without the wrapper. And in a meatball form!”

There is a good chance I tweeked the recipe a bit. I started off using this recipe, but the meatballs ended up being a mixture of these recipes as well. They all seem very good. Maybe for the first time I should have just chosen one recipe and stuck with it.

Did you know that Mr. O bought me a bib for our first date?

 I mentioned that I was going to make a big hot mess when I ate (I was planning on getting lettuce wraps, which is how this whole side story actually relates to this post), so he bought me a bib and presented it to me (along with a few other gifts, because he is über charming) when he picked me up. Yes, I did mention how messy of an eater I was. Sexy, huh? I’m one classy first date.

Anyway, I love lettuce wraps. Some of my favorite are at Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Changs. I was lucky to find this recipe from Iowa Girl Eats, and both Mr. O and I were huge fans. It tasted great. By the way, her website is awesome. You’ve got to check her out.

However, something huge felt missing from the recipe. I was bummed, because the recipe really tasted great, and I couldn’t figure out what was missing…until last week! Mr. O and I went to the Cheesecake Factory, and of course, I ordered the wraps. The additional fillings were missing! Bean Sprouts! Shredded Carrots! Rice Noodles! Cucumbers! Oh, and cabbage shells. The Cheesecake Factory uses cabbage leafs as decoration to hold the fillings I just mentioned, but I use the cabbage leafs just like I use the lettuce leafs: as shells for my yummy food. Now that I’ve figured that out, I’m sure to use the same recipe as before, but prepare some of those fillings as well.

So one day Mr. O decided he wanted oatmeal cookies. We went online and found a recipe*, bought the ingredients and made the cookies together. The pictures that follow are from that cooking experience. These cookies were alright, but we didn’t plan on making them again. Since then, we have found an amazing cookie recipe that Mr. O tweaked a bit, and if he’ll let me share, I’ll write a post about it later on.

*Since we didn’t really like round one of oatmeal cookies, I thought it was best to not link back to the recipe. They weren’t bad cookies, and I didn’t want a negative review to link to a blog post that someone carefully crafted.

So, I showed you how to make Shrimp Mozambique, so now let’s move on to Chicken Mozambique. I’ll be honest. There really is very little difference between the recipes, besides the obvious: one has shrimp and the other has chicken. So the first thing I did was to cut my chicken into small little sections. Its going to fall apart a bit, so don’t cut your chicken too small. I’m going to approximate that mine were about an inch or two long, and maybe a little less than an inch thick… Who knows. You don’t have to worry about this too much, because I just cut them however I could to keep them small and get the fat off. If you want tiny itty bitty little pieces of chicken then go nuts and chop it up!

Now, I made this dish for the holidays, so I made a LOT of food. You don’t need to make as much, unless you have a small army to feed. I basically tripled my recipe from last time, but I also increased a few things. I’ve made a whole bunch of Chicken Mozambique since this first recipe, and Mr. O seems to think I’ve perfected the recipe, so I’m going to do a post in the very near future with my own fancy recipe for y’all.

Wolverine loves to help out cleaning and cooking, so he helped me mix the ingredients. While your butter and onions are cooking, you’re going to want to mix the garlic, wet crushed red pepper, Goya, tabasco sauce, parsley. He did a fantastic job of trying to keep them all a little separate so that I could take a picture.

Basically, after you get the ingredients together and the onions are a bit softer, you can throw them all into the pot and mix them around. Oh, and don’t forget to pour all the beer in at this point as well. (This is an easy step!)

Alright, so now that you’ve mixed up everything, you can toss your chicken into the sauce. At this point, you’ve got nothing to do but cover the pot and let the chicken cook!

I took this picture to show you what everything looked like when my chicken was done cooking. You’ll know your chicken is ready when it turns “white.” You don’t want to see any pink inside the meat. However, it’s actually going to take the color of the sauce, so it will be a tad orange-colored. The meat doesn’t take too long to cook, so technically you would be free to serve this right away, but I prefer letting it sit a while to really absorb the flavors. That is up to you. If you let it sit, you’re obviously going to need to reheat it before eating.

You can serve this anyway you please. For this meal I made a whole lot of white rice, and we just scooped the chicken and sauce over the rice. You can also serve it over pasta. You can serve it as is too, especially if you’re got some nice bread to dunk in the sauce. Enjoy!