Brownies, Peanut Butter, and Cheesecake- How Can You Go Wrong

This is from the Betty Crocker website. My hubby is a HUGE cheesecake fan and loves anything peanut butter so I'm expecting this to be a big hit. I copied and pasted the nutritional info at the bottom and for that reason this will be a rare treat in our house. :)

1	pouch (1 lb 1.5 oz) Betty Crocker® peanut butter cookie mix
	Water, oil and egg as called for on cookie mix pouch
1	box Betty Crocker® Ultimate fudge brownie mix (with chocolate syrup pouch)
	Water oil, eggs as called for on Brownie mix box
3	packages (8 oz each) cream cheese, softened
1	can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk (not evaporated)
4	eggs
1	teaspoon vanilla
1	cup caramel ice cream topping

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1.	Heat oven to 325°F. Make dough as directed on cookie pouch. Cover and refrigerate about 1 hour or until firm.
2.	Meanwhile, make brownie mix as directed on box for 13x9-inch pan. Cool completely, about 1 hour.
3.	Wrap outside bottom and side of 9-inch springform pan with foil to prevent leaking. Spray inside bottom and side of pan with cooking spray. Press cookie dough on bottom and 1/2 inch up sides of pan. Bake crust 13 to 15 minutes or until set.
4.	Meanwhile, in large bowl, beat cream cheese with electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy. Gradually beat in condensed milk until smooth. Beat in eggs one at a time, just until blended. Stir in vanilla.
5.	Crumble 2 cups of cooled brownies into coarse crumbs. Fold into cream cheese mixture. Pour over cookie dough crust.
6.	Bake 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes or until edge of cheesecake is set at least 2 inches from edge of pan but center of cheesecake still jiggles slightly when moved. Run small metal spatula around edge of pan to loosen cheesecake. Turn oven off; open oven door at least 4 inches. Let cheesecake remain in oven 30 minutes. Cool in pan on cooling rack 30 minutes. Refrigerate at least 8 hours or overnight before serving. Cool completely in pan on cooling rack 1 hour.
7.	To serve, carefully run small metal spatula along side of cheesecake to loosen. Remove foil and side of pan. In small microwaveable bowl, microwave caramel topping uncovered on High 10 to 15 seconds until thoroughly heated. Top individual servings with caramel topping. Store cheesecake covered in refrigerator.

Nutrition Information:

1 Serving: Calories 580 (Calories from Fat 270); Total Fat 30g (Saturated Fat 14g, Trans Fat 1/2g); Cholesterol 135mg; Sodium 470mg; Total Carbohydrate 65g (Dietary Fiber 0g, Sugars 47g); Protein 10g Percent Daily Value*: Vitamin A 15%; Vitamin C 0%; Calcium 10%; Iron 10% Exchanges: 1 1/2 Starch; 3 Other Carbohydrate; 0 Vegetable; 1 High-Fat Meat; 4 Fat Carbohydrate Choices: 4
*Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet.

Esther

My sweet friend and neighbor started a summer Bible Study in June. We are doing Beth Moore's Esther. Because of the nature of summer, attendance has been hit or miss and sadly I have missed more than I've attended. Things are settling down now as school is starting back in a week so I am hoping to attend more regularly.

Even though I haven't attended each session, I have been able to keep up with the weekly homework. I think the thing I love most about Beth Moore is her ability to write as if she is speaking directly to you. There is an ease about her style that flows. Another thing I love about her is how she can make a one or two sentence statement and it just shoots straight to the heart of the matter. There have been so many in this Esther study and rather than write a narrative, I'd like to just share some of the things that have really spoken to me.

• When we trust our lives to the unseen but ever present God, He will write our lives into His story and every last one of them will turn out to be a great read with a grand ending.

• You cannot amputate your history from your destiny.

• God is so wholly secure in His own spotless integrity that He feels perfectly comfortable giving us an account of something without making himself accountable to us.

• We too can become so steeped in our culture that we are almost indistinguishable from the world. We too can lose our sense of identity and forget who we are. Indeed the fact that we can hide our Christianity assumes a certain amount of assimilation. I believe one of God's purposes in this journey is to help us recapture both our identity and identification as His children-- not so we can be obnoxious but so we can be influential.

• Only a person strong in character and steadfast in spirit can follow someone else's instructions for long.

• Information served with a heaping side of personal agenda almost never turns in to the meal we had planned.

• Some crises are too important for saving face.

• Guilt is a relentless mocker even if it's misplaced.

• That which shatters our superficiality also shatters the fetters of our fragility and frees us to walk with dignity and might to our destinies.

• Sometimes we fear that fighting for what is right will kill us. Then again, it occurs to us that to stand by and do nothing out of self-preservation is to be dead already.
  

Easy BBQ

My friend Melissa passed this recipe on to me and I made it for my family last week. It made such a large amount that I was able to share it with my neighbor and her sweet family. I have never made BBQ before because honestly I thought it would require a lot of work. This recipe was so simple!!! And delicious!

Ingredients
4-5 lb Boston Butt Pork Roast (I couldn't find anything smaller than 7 pounds but that worked fine)
1 bottle Allegro Hickory Smoke flavor
water

Place Boston Butt roast in crockpot fat side up. Pour entire bottle of Allegro over it. Fill Allegro bottle 1/4th of the way with water. Shake and pour over roast. Cook on high for 1 hour then set to low and cook for 8 hours.

What ever happened to....

Mercurochrome.... Merthiolate...




If you read the words above and have no clue what I am talking about chances are you are much younger than me or at least younger than your early thirties. If you read the words above and cringed then you know exactly what I'm talking about!

It came in a little bottle with a cap that served as a dropper or just had a stick on it. It was this reddish orange color that stained everything it touched including your skin for days. And it was what my momma used on every cut, scrape, or injury involving blood throughout my childhood. Just the mention of it brought tears to my eyes. Sometimes I wouldn't even tell my momma if I cut myself or had a bike wreck for fear she'd break out the mercurochrome.

What made me remember the good ole days where all cuts and injuries were treated with this reddish orange antiseptic from the devil? My little one was running the other night and fell on the concrete driveway- scraping the crud out of his knee. He came running up to me, big tears streaming down his face and a small stream of blood running down his leg. "Don't touch it momma! No I don't want you to wash it off!" I ran in the house scrambling for something to clean it with. I pushed the peroxide aside and grabbed this Instant Antibiotic spray foam - the creators of Band-Aid produce it and in big letters on the front of the bottle it reads... HURT-FREE.

So as I sat there coaxing my little one in to letting me spray this on his leg, promising it wouldn't hurt I had flashbacks of the cleansing antiseptic my momma dabbed on my cuts and scrapes. It was most definitely NOT hurt free. It stung like the dickens and she never promised it wouldn't hurt. In most cases the application of mercurochrome to my injury was more painful than the injury itself. I think peroxide would have been a welcome alternative. But before you start thinking of my momma as some demented woman who took pleasure in dishing out more pain and if you are younger, just know that it was what the doctor recommended. And did you know that whatever properties it possessed, it also apparently aided in minimizing scarring?

So if you grew up with mercurochrome then you are probably as thankful as I am for all of the research and progress and for companies like Johnson and Johnson that produce hurt free antiseptics.

And I guess what doesn't kill you makes you stronger... In 1998 the US Food and Drug Administration said that mercurochrome was not generally recognized as safe and effective as an over the counter antiseptic. Oh yeah and it contains mercury. Ok FDA- coming out with that observation 20 years earlier would have saved me a lot of pain!