This coffee cake includes a sweet whole berry cranberry sauce filling, and sprinkled on top with an oat, brown sugar, and spice mix that makes this a perfect breakfast meal or afternoon tea delight, or dessert after any main meal.

This is another recipe that we adapted from the Weight Watchers magazine “Six O’clock Solutions” cookbook, the original recipe found on page 83. The only real modification we made with this recipe is using butter in place of the reduced-calorie stick margarine. One half cup of this margarine would have a nutritional value of 400 calories, 44.8 grams fat, and compared to a half cup of butter with 800 calories and 88 grams of fat, which comes out to double the margarine amounts. Using simple recipe kitchen math, the butter adds an additional 400 calories, 44 grams of fat, 72 grams of sodium, and 26.6 grams cholesterol to the entire recipe, when we divide these whole recipe counts by the 9 servings and add this to the nutritional counts of the original recipe the per serving nutritional data comes to 308 Calories, 12.3 grams Fat, 47.3 grams Carbohydrates, 0.8 grams Fiber, 51.6 grams Cholesterol, and 202 mg Sodium. With a cup of coffee, this fits in with a good 400 calorie per meal diet plan.

Additional nutritional data and information found at: Nutrition Data, know what you eat.

Many folks are still missing their outdoor grilling with these cold winter days. But for us, we have a cast iron griddle, so grilling indoors is easy when heating it up over the gas stove top. You can click on the images for a larger view.

This recipe has chipotle peppers in adobo sauce as part of the marinade with the yogurt, giving it a southwest flavor, but the addition of yogurt also gives this chicken an Indian and middle-eastern flair as well. Each kabob served with a bed of basmati rice and a couple grilled pineapple rings.

Inspired and adapted from a Weight Watchers magazine cook book entitled “Five Ingredient 15 Minute Recipes”, this recipe found on page 7, and according to their per serving nutritional values are 4 points per serving, 206 calories, 2.3g fat, 40.7 g protein, 3.4g carbohydrates, 0.2g fiber, 99mg cholesterol, 455mg sodium, and 64mg calcium. However, the original recipe calls for serving ½ cup of cooked couscous tossed with chopped fresh tomato and fresh chopped parsley.  We served ours with basmati rice with the chopped fresh tomato and parsley, so the nutritional information may vary, based on our substitutions.

I suppose the salt and pepper are not included in the “5 ingredients”, and the 15 minutes is also a stretch for some of the recipes, including this one. However, if prepping the chicken to marinate overnight, then putting together this recipe the next day is quite fast when grilling indoors on the cast iron griddle.

The original recipe calls for marinating the chicken for 1 to 2 hours, we actually marinated ours overnight. The original recipe also includes a side of grilled fresh pineapple rings; we used canned pineapple, but followed the recipe procedures as stated in the written version. The grilled pineapple nutritional values provided in the book are 1 WW point per serving, 87 calories, 0.2g fat, 0.6g protein, 22.7g carbohydrates, 2g fiber, 0mg cholesterol, 45mg sodium, and 22mg calcium.

Chipotle Chicken Kabobs

Yield: 4 servings

Sweet and Spicy Grilled Pineapples

The adobo sauce from a can of chipotle peppers is used to bring up some heat in these tasty grilled pineapple rings.

Salmon is one of our favorite meaty fish, prepared broiled, grilled, or raw with sushi, we love it so much we have made our Dill Crusted Salmon with Dill Sauce very often, too many times to count!

This image is the salmon fillets ready to be put under the broiler, click for a larger view.

This time we found some wild caught salmon and a new recipe that is quite tasty and draws from some of the old Creole roots from New Orleans. Using a glaze of honey and Creole mustard this is brushed onto the salmon fillet and topped with chopped pecans, then broiled until done.

Monique and I have been on a “made from scratch” biscuit kick lately with the drop biscuits we did a few weeks ago, and now with these black pepper cheddar biscuits. (Click on image for a larger view.)

There is just something about biscuits that makes them so comfort food for breakfast. Now the drop biscuits are very easy too with no rolling out and cutting of the dough, however, these black pepper cheddar biscuits are kneaded and rolled out. A little more prep involved but takes only a few more minutes to fold in multiple layers for the flaky dough.

These quick to fix biscuits are rolled out and cut into squares in order to use up all the dough, leaving none for waste. In addition, by turning the dough five or six times during the kneading process, it creates a flaky biscuit with each turn, achieving a doubling of layers in the biscuit dough. Wonderfully served with fresh softened butter or honey.