Buttery Cheese Bread Sticks

We like to make pizza at home and we found a great recipe for dough from Tyler Florence.  This is a very straightforward and reliable dough to make although we do reduce the salt by half (for our tastes) and use one cup of whole wheat flour for part of the dried ingredients.  Typically, we have some dough left over after making two pizzas so we put it in the fridge and do something with it a couple of days later.  One thing we like to do is make cheese bread sticks.

We start out by rolling out the dough.

After that, I melt some of that wonderful Kerrygold butter from Costco and brush that on top.  Next comes some garlic powder and I finish it with Kirkland Signature Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese.

I slice it and then move it to a cookie sheet for baking.

I bake it at 425 degrees until golden brown and delicious.  You can have them as a snack by themselves although we made a meal out them with some homemade marinara sauce and a salad on the side.

Easy, quick, delicious and fun these are a tasty snack or a satisfying part of a meal.  They are also very affordable.  Add it all up and you definitely have a winning combination.

Enjoy!

The Best Ham Glaze Ever and Calphalon Cookware from Costco

A couple of years ago I discovered this fabulous ham glaze recipe with apple cider and bourbon from Sunny at the Food Network. It combines some great fruit and sweet flavors with a bit of bourbon to give it some flare. (Don't worry, the alcohol all cooks out.)   I make a triple size batch of it using Kerrygold butter from Costco.

Another great ingredient in this glaze is a good bourbon.  Per my brother John's recommendation, I use Maker's Mark.  Costco definitely has a great price on this fine bourbon.

As I said I make a triple batch of it.  We serve some on top of the ham but it has other uses. For example it is great on vanilla ice cream, apple pie or apple pie with vanilla ice cream!  There are probably other great ways to serve this wonderful glaze but there are certainly already plenty of good reasons for us to make a big batch of it.

There has been one problem with making a big batch and that is that our saucepan was only 2 1/2 quarts and that was a bit on the small size for making a triple sized batch.  Given that situation,  I started looking for a 3 1/2 quart saucepan.

I found some nice Calphalon pans in the $60-80 range online and then I thought to check out Costco since they sometimes carry some individual pans.  They didn't have any single pans like that but the following 12 piece set caught my eye:

The set includes the following:

• 8” Fry Pan
• 10” Fry Pan
• 2.5 Qt. Sauce Pan with Lid
• 3.5 Qt. Sauce Pan with Lid
• 4.5 Qt. Sauce Pan
• 3 Qt. Saute Pan with Lid
• 5 Qt. Dutch Oven with Lid
• 6 Qt. Stock Pot

While we have some nice cookware, this immediately caught our eye since we do have a few random pieces and not a complete set. Also, we noticed how incredibly compact the set is for this much cookware.  And the stacking is very secure due to a thoughtful design of the handles and the pans themselves as seen below.

And finally, the set was on sale for only $300!  Needless to say most of our old cookware is history and we now have this wonderful set that should last us the rest of our lives.

Costco is bigger than ever in our kitchen.  Not only do they give us top quality ingredients at a great prices but we have some outstanding cookware that will be with us for decades.