Pesto Grilled Cheese

OMG, these were amazing! There isn't really any special recipe to follow (I did get the idea, though, from closetcooking.blogspot.com--one of my very favorite cooking blogs) since it's basically just a grilled cheese with some pesto added in. But seriously, if you love grilled cheese and if you love pesto (which really, why wouldn't you??) you must make this immediately!

It's just these four little ingredients:
Good bread
Butter
Pesto (I just used store bought)
Provolone

I served this with my easy cream of tomato soup and it made for quite the delicious dinner!

Very Easy Chocolate Chip Cookies

My mom had us over for dinner recently and served some delicious homemade ice cream sandwiches for dessert. Colin talked about those ice cream sandwiches for days! After many mentions of how awesome those ice cream sandwiches were, he moved passed the hinting phase and asked (possibly even begged) me to make some. We already had Blue Bell vanilla ice cream, so I just googled for an easy chocolate chip cookie recipe that would work with the ingredients I had on hand. This was the one I came across and the cookies were both very easy and very delicious. They also made perfect little ice cream sandwiches!

1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup walnuts, chopped (these were optional but I included them)
12 oz. chocolate chips

Mix wet ingredients and sugars. Sift in dry ingredients, add walnuts and chocolate chips. Drop by teaspoons onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

Source: Cooks.com

Halloween "Trash"

I know Halloween has come and gone (seriously, what has happened to 2010?!!), but this is too easy and tasty not to share! It's not a super new and creative recipe or anything, but it was quite popular at my work Halloween party. If you want to really go with the "trash" idea, this could be served in a brown paper bag, as suggested by Southern Living. Here's what the trash consists of:

Carmel popcorn
Pretzels
Carmel peanuts
M & Ms
Candy corn
Gummy worms
Dried tropical fruit mix (included bananas, coconut, mango, and pineapple pieces)
Craisins


We took a little roadtrip to attend the wedding of a college girlfriend of mine this weekend and made a non-Halloween version (subtracted the candy corn and gummy worms, added almonds, cashews and goldfish). For this occasion, Colin renamed it "snack zone" and I have a feeling snack zone will now be requested for all future Sanburg family road trips!