A Monday Night Treat

Let's start off with an easy one. This was a favorite recipe for our whole family and continues to be a never-fail (and never fail to impress) treat. Hard Shell. Yes, you can go to the grocery store and buy that waxy, filled with chemicals concotion called Magic Shell. But why cramp your fridge with another bottle of something while skimping on taste? You can get the real thing, with far better taste, right at home - with just 2 ingredients! Chocolate chips and butter. That's it. Mix two parts chocolate chips with 1 part butter. For us, a nice batch is 1 cup of chocolate chips, 1/2 cup of butter. Melt in a saucepan over relatively low heat. When totally melted and combined, let cool just slightly so it doesn't melt the ice cream on contact. Serve over ice cream and watch as everyone is amazed by the quickly hardening shell. And it's delicious to boot. Hard shell can be made with whatever type of chocolate chips you'd prefer - milk chocolate, dark chocolate, or semi-sweet. Semi-sweet happens to be our favorite. The leftovers can also be refrigerated and then remelted in the microwave whenever the urge strikes you. Make it a family tradition tonight!

The Never Fail Recipe

This blog is born out of a recent class my mom and I gave for some friends at church. We have both absorbed and used numerous kitchen tips and techniques over the years that have considerably improved our success rates. Not to say that we're experts, by any means, or even gourmet chefs for that matter, but we thought our knowledge might be interesting to some of the women. Wow! What a response! After teaching some knife skills, talking about our favorite kitchen tools, and demonstrating a few delicious never-fail treats, we apparently opened up a whole new world. We've gotten so many comments since that class, we thought it might be helpful and fun to share some of our tricks with the rest of our friends and the blogging world.

For some reason, the kitchen seems to be an intimidating place for people these days. It certainly doesn't have to be. Tried and true techniques, great recipes, and a few modern gadgets really make ALL the difference. So play along and check back often for our most recent learnings and testings. Our goal is to make life in the kitchen a little easier, a little more fun, and hopefully make everyone a never-fail cook.