Filming Days! Season 2 of Cooking With Chef Tess!

 

This has been a very productive week! We filmed six episodes of Season Two of Cooking With Chef Tess for Heartland TV Network in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was amazing once again working with my producer and friend Theresa Goss.  My best friend Gena let me use her gorgeous kitchen to film. 

 It is the prefect space for what we wanted to capture. 

The premise of the show has been well defined. We're focusing on whole foods on a budget and making 3-4 different meals from one base in a 30 minutes show! 

Here's a sneak peek at a few of the episodes:

The Best Homemade Freezer Lasagna! 4 casseroles the easy way...

Convenient  Meatloaf Cups 3 ways...

Summer Quinoa Salad, 3 flavor profiles (recipe courtesy of OrganicGrains.com) 

Plus 3 more episodes!

There will be tips on:

• Cooking from scratch
• Secrets for saving money on healthy meals
• whole grain nutrition hacks
• freezer meal safety
• slow cooker variations
• lowering the impact carbohydrates of food

It will all be whole food healthy meals.

Special thanks too my assistant Sonya for coming to the set and helping with setting things up and helping clean up after the mayhem!  

It takes about 4 hours behind the scenes to get the ingredients together, and cook for each show. Keeping in mind that it will be much less time for you to cook this way, we just have to make things several times. 

The new season will start to air in a few days! I'll keep you posted with new episodes and full recipes here on the website. 


There you go!

Always My Very Best,
Your Friend Chef Tess

Hershey's Kisses Cookie Party

Two things...first, I have been asked back to visit Fox 10 Phoenix Arizona Morning coming up on December 21st. I won't be making these. I will be covering how to Make a Mix from ingredients you probably have on hand already and save a lot of money this holiday season. Second, my Wendy darling is bringing her kids to join in the fun. It should be amazing! Don't miss it. If you click on the embedded video in the right hand upper corner of my blog, you can see my last segment. We've had 6 so far. Hopefully they keep me around for a while. I do love being part of the Fox family. The big chocolate news is this...

My friend Gena won a cookie party from Hershey. I think it was rigged. As a consolation prize, Gena said I could come and help demonstrate how to make these evil but good

Double KISSES Truffles. I know...it even sounds wicked.

We melted 28 kisses with 2 T heavy cream plus 2tsp. I also added a little orange brandy flavored chocolate oil, some of my Wise Woman of The East Spice Blend which was the only shameless personal plug I did (My Chef Tess Spice Sale! ). At this point we whisked it up really well...and then I lost all forms of sanity.

I had to have an intervention. Part of the 12 steps is putting the truffle chocolate in the fridge...and not opening the door for 4 hours. Through the magic of blogger...it doesn't take long at all. For the class, I had some I made ahead of time. Even then it still gets a little gooey wrapping truffle around cherry cordial kisses.

Does melted chocolate make your skin softer? Prevent wrinkles? Turn you into a raving chocolate football player?!

Yup. Football. Sorry folks. I cannot be held responsible for my actions when I have too many little truffles.

Rolled into balls then coated with pecans or almonds.

As always, it is what's inside that really will make you fat.

Quick and Easy Peanut Butter Blossoms made by Gena. Don't they look like they belong on a Christmas card.

We had a rousing supply of whoopie pies! (recipe coming later). Yes. I was in sugar overload by this point. That and some fudge...cookies...buzz-buzz-buzz oh my oh me.

We where graciously given a fabulous amount of take home boxes by Hershey's...for all the extra sugar to come home with us. How thoughtful...and evil.

Everything was really amazing but here are some of my favorites...
Oh Henry! Then kiss her dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry...la la la la la la...

Dear oh dear. It isn't fair that something this good could be so easy to make.

All time favorite however...the Barefoot Contessa Outrageous Brownies brought by Lisa.
I will love Lisa forever...and not just because she brought these nuggets of joy.

Smile for the camera, we got free cookbooks from Hershey too.

The sweetest ending to the night...finding these surprise pictures on my camera of baby Cake just finger first in a gooey warm melty kiss drop thing. That look says it all. Girls, we will always love chocolate.
It looks like she's saying a prayer of thanks. Amen girl. Amen.

There you go. Make some cookies and invite me over...or something like that.