Jolene's Recipe Journal

I absolutely love where I live.  Sure, spring is a bit elusive here, and weeks of soggy weather can force you to grill while holding an umbrella, but there are so many wonderful things about New England too.   We have beaches, forests, mountains, plus there's maple season, wild blackberries, apple orchards, and bread baked in a can. *This is a sponsored post.  I received products for use in the creation of my #BurgerMonth recipe.  All opinions are my own.*   When I decided to participate in Girl Carnivore's Burger Month again this year, I decided to take those flavors of my little corner of the world and incorporate them into my recipe.  The maple glazed bacon was the first element I tested.  I tried it with both raw bacon and ready to eat bacon, and was happy with the results with both.  It's absolutely delicious. The barbecue sauce is something we usually like to use on steak, so of course it will go with burgers too.   I make the sauce ahead and store it in the fridg

I'm wrapping up BBQ Week with an festive and delicious dessert, Sugar Cone Chocolate Chip Cookies.  My guys love cookies in all forms, but ones with chocolate chips always go over especially well.  These are even more fun because they have little bits of ice cream cone and sprinkles!  I tweaked the recipe a bit due to my family's taste and also due to a slight reading comprehension problem.  I switched out the milk chocolate chips for semi sweet.  I scanned the recipe quickly and used baking powder instead of baking soda, so then I covered my bases and ended up using both.   I'm a big fan of using a scoop for nice uniformly shaped and well-baked cookies.  Using a 1 tablespoon scoop with some slightly overfill, I got 4 dozen cookies.  Mine baked in about 11 minutes because they were slightly larger. I left them on the sheets for about a minute or so more, then moved them to racks to cool completely. Thank you again to Ellen and Christie for hosting #

When you're having a barbecue, the last thing you need is to be stressed out, it's supposed to be fun! For me, one of the best ways to avoid that is to choose a few simple make ahead recipes, like this Balsamic Three Bean Salad. You start out with some fresh green beans, trimmed and steamed until crisp tender.  Or maybe you don't.  Maybe you pick up a bag of frozen "steam in bag" green beans and no one is the wiser! I'll never tell.  That being said, the one step you do not want to skimp or skip is draining and rinsing the canned beans, trust me on that one! Using the bottled vinaigrette definitely makes things easy, but you can quickly throw together your own if you aren't a fan of store bought.  The longer this sits the better, I liked it the same day, but I really loved it the next day. Another day of #BBQWeek is in the books!  Scroll down below the recipe to see what the other bloggers are sharing today! Balsamic Three Bean Salad Print Wi

  So happy that the weather is finally starting to turn and I can start grilling more of our meals!  We eat chicken at least a couple of times a week and it can be a challenge to change it up so we don't get bored with it.  One of the best ways I've found to do that is with marinades.    I saved this recipe for Honey Citrus Grilled Chicken Sandwiches a while back from Taste of Home.  I like that it uses ingredients I always keep on hand.  I will say, I'm not a big fan of bottled citrus juices, instead I buy fresh and juice them myself.  Then I pour the juice into ice cube trays and freeze them solid. It's great because I can just pop them out and thaw them as needed.    For marinades with citrus, you want to be cautious that you don't leave the chicken there for too long, it can start to change its texture.  I let these go about 4 hours.  I prepped all my toppings ahead because the chicken doesn't take long to grill at all.  To add cheese or to not a