Meat and Potatoes oh my!

Meat and potatoes sounds like every man's dream meal or at least where I'm from. Down south we love us some meat and potatoes. Yes, I did just go all country in the blog. This month our lovely sponsors were Johnsonville® again and Ore-Ida. Johnsonville® may seriously be the greatest sponsors ever. If we look back, we'll see this is the same company that sent us $60 worth of nesting casserole dishes, FREE! This time around we all got free Crock Pots! No lie! Greatest sponsors ever! See! Now I already had a crock pot that I love, however, I'm a firm believer that you can never have too many kitchen appliances! Crock pots are amazing too because you can have several things cooking at once that you DON'T HAVE TO WATCH! Busy moms say heyyyy!

Now, down to the even better stuff: FOOD! March was the first month that we worked with Johnsonville® and one of my recipes that month to makeover was spaghetti. Instead of using ground beef, we used sausage. It became a favorite in our household and from time to time we have spaghetti with sausage instead of ground beef. This month I used sausage to make spaghetti, however, instead of cooking in separate pans, this recipe calls for cooking it all in one pan which was a lot easier and the whole dish had more flavor. Perhaps it was because the noodles actually cooked in sauce instead of just water which allowed them to absorb more flavor. Either way it was much better this time around! Check it out for yourself at: Johnsonville® One-Pan Italian

Second up was a meatloaf recipe that my family was not a huge fan of. It was ok. It had a lot of flavor but it wasn't exactly a flavor my family liked. We've become huge fans of a cheeseburger meatloaf I make so it took some bribing to get them to try this. Our firm feelings are, there were too many elements in this. Corn, peppers, spinach, cheese.... it was all just too much in a meatloaf for us. We also don't care for ketchup in our meatloaf and the chili sauce tasted a lot like ketchup. Feel free to try it yourself though. The recipe can be found here: Italian Sausage Market Meatloaf

Last but not least was another not so favorite but still tasty. This particular recipe was called: Johnsonville® Italian Sausage and Pepper Skillet. Now my reasons for disliking this one had NOTHING to do with the sausage. Let me reiterate. I LOVE Johnsonville® sausage. I really do, but I think my problem with this one was that it came out more like a soup or stew than a saute' or skillet meal. Perhaps the tomatoes were supposed to be drained. Perhaps there was too much oil added. I'm not positive but I know it came out like a stew. This made it great to eat with something like rice but not so much on it's own or with a side dish other than rice.

Our other sponsor as previously mentioned was Ore-Ida®, the famous potato people! I love their fries. Essentially, you would think that all frozen potatoes would be the same and taste the same but honestly, they don't. Ore-Ida® really does have the best frozen potatoes. Our tasks for them this month was help pair these products with family meals or create our own dish with them. I created two hash brown casseroles, one using the julienne hash browns and one using the diced version. The first casserole was more like a macaroni and cheese with hash browns instead of noodles. The second version had soup, sour cream, cheese, butter and some other yummy ingredients. These could both be eaten alone but are great side dishes for something meaty and heart!

The final dish I made with the products were chili cheese fries. These are a staple in our home and we often eat them as a dish or we have them with chili dogs. That way we can use the chili for two different items at once!

Disclaimer:

I am an AllRecipes AllStar Brand Ambassador. This is a voluntary position which I am not compensated for.