Galopillo's blog

Hamburger Corn Casserole

Hamburger Corn Casserole recipe

Ingredients (10 servings):

12   oz      drained corn, whole kernel
1.5  lb       lean ground beef
3    cups   cooked and drained noodles
1    cup     soft breadcrumbs 
1    cup    chopped onion
1    cup    sour cream
1    can    soup, cream of mushroom
1    can    soup, cream of chicken
0.25 cup  chopped pimiento,
3    tablespoon    melted butter
0.75 teaspoon    salt
0.25 teaspoon    pepper

Directions:

Lightly brown the beef; add onion and cook until tender, but not brown. Add drained corn, soup, sour cream, pimient, salt, and pepper. Mix well; then stir in noodles. Taste and add more seasoning if needed. Pour into 2.5 quart casserole, seal, and freeze. To serve, thaw and add melted butter to breadcrumbs and sprinkle over top of casserole. Bake at 350^ for 30 min. or until hot.

Cilantro Cream Sauce

Cilantro Cream Sauce recipe

Ingredients (4 servings):

8     ounce              softened cream cheese
7     ounce              tomatillo salsa
1     bunch              chopped fresh cilantro
1     tablespoon       fresh lime juice
1     tablespoon      sour cream
2     teaspoons       garlic powder
1     teaspoon         celery salt
1     teaspoon         freshly ground black pepper
0.5  teaspoons       ground cumin
 
Directions:

Combine cream cheese, salsa, sour cream, cilantro, pepper, celery salt, cumin, garlic powder and lime juice in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth and creamy. Place in a serving bowl.

Spinach and Cheese Cannelloni

Spinach and Cheese Cannelloni recipe

Ingredients:
Cannelloni

3	tablespoons	olive oil
8		fresh pasta rectangles
1		onion
2		garlic clove, finely chopped
10	oz	baby spinach
1.75	cups	ricotta
1		large egg, lightly beaten
0.5	cups	fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
3	oz	sliced prosciutto
0.25	teaspoons	pepper and salt
0.5	cups	Pecorino Roman, finely grated

Sauce

1.5	tablespoons	butter
1.5	tablespoons	flour
2	cups	milk
0.25	teaspoons	salt
1	pinch	freshly grated nutmeg
0.33	cups	Parmigiano-Reggiano,  finely grated

Directions:
Cannelloni
Heat oil in a 5- to 6-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then saute onion and garlic, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned, about 5 min. Add spinach and sauté, stirring, until just wilted, about 3 min. Remove from heat and cool completely.

Stir together egg, ricotta, prosciutto, parsley, salt, pepper, and 0.33 cup cheese in a bowl, then stir in spinach mixture.

Boil pasta 2 pieces at a time in a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water , stirring to separate, until just tender, about 2 min. for fresh pasta or about 6 min. for oven-ready noodles. Gently transfer with a slotted spoon to a large bowl of cold water to stop cooking, then remove from bowl, shaking off water, and lay flat on kitchen towels. Pat dry with paper towels. Trim oven-ready noodles as closely as possible to 6.25- by 5.25-inch rectangles.

Sauce
Melt butter in a 1.5- to 2-quart heavy saucepan over moderately low heat. Whisk in flour and cook roux, whisking, 2 minutes. Add milk in a stream, whisking, and bring to a boil over high heat, whisking constantly. Reduce heat and simmer, whisking occasionally, 2 min, then whisk in salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Remove from heat and whisk in cheese, then cover pan.

Preheat oven to 425°F.

Spread 0.67 cup sauce in buttered baking dish. Spread about 0.33 cup ricotta filling in a line along 1 short side of 1 pasta rectangle, then roll up to enclose filling. Transfer, seam side down, to baking dish. Make 7 more cannelloni in same manner, arranging snugly in 1 layer. Spread 0.5 cup more sauce over cannelloni and sprinkle with remaining cheese. Bake, covered with foil, in middle of oven until sauce is bubbling, about 20 min.

Turn on broiler.

Remove foil and broil cannelloni about 5 inches from heat until lightly browned, 2 to 4 min. Let stand 5 min. before serving. Reheat remaining sauce and serve on the side.

Christmas Potatis Korv

A Swedish Christmas recipe: Christmas Potatis Korv (sausage).

Ingredients:
2 lb of ground lean beef
2 lb of ground lean pork
6 medium raw potatoes (shredded)
1 medium onion (chopped)
2 teaspoons of ground allspice
0.5 teaspoons of pepper
3 teaspoons of salt

Directions:

Bring a stockpot of salted water to a simmer.
In a mixing bowl, mix all ingredients well together. Form into rolls about 4 inches long and 2 inches in diameter. Cut parchment paper into 6-inch lengths and wrap sausage well, tying both ends tightly with string. Place rolls into the simmering water.
Cook slowly for about 45 minutes. Remove sausages from water and let cool before unwrapping.
Serve piping hot on the Christmas table with Swedish mustard (senap).

Thanksgiving Turkey

 Thanksgiving Turkey recipe

Ingredients (for 6 servings):

12 lb     whole turkey
1 teaspoon    Italian seasoning
1 tablespoon    vegetable oil
   salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Prepare an outdoor grill for indirect medium-high heat.

Rinse turkey and pat dry. Turn wings back to hold neck skin in place. Return legs to tucked position. Brush turkey with oil. Season inside and out with Italian seasonings, salt, and pepper.

Place turkey, breast side up, on a metal grate inside a large roasting pan. Arrange pan on the prepared grill. Grill 2 to 3 hours, to an internal thigh temperature of 180 degrees F (85 degrees C). Remove turkey from grill and let stand 15 minutes before carving.

Your Thanksgiving dish is ready.

Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios

In Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios Gilda, Flo's college roommate, invites her, Cookie and Grandma Florence to the set of her new show. Not surprisingly (at least if you're familiar with any of PlayFirst's Dash games), as soon as the women arrive they'll be required to make use of their top notch cooking skills. Will the second installment by Playfirst and Aliasworlds be an as entertaining and witty challenge as every dash fan expects it to be, or will players have to face a letdown?

Like its predecessor, Cooking Dash, Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios features 50 levels in the story mode across five different locations, and an endless mode, where the player can replay each stage with three varying levels of difficulty: easy, medium and hard. At the different films sets, including science-fiction, western and royal court themes, you will meet a lot of familiar characters, but also some new ones.

In addition to the usual cast of Bookworms, Cellphone Addicts, Kindly Seniors or Students, you'll meet new characters like the Director, the Celebrity and the Starlet. Like all Dash titles, knowing the personality traits of the different customers is highly important to play the game successfully. Some of the guests cause noise with their cellphones, thereby bothering all the other guests who prefer to eat in a calm atmosphere. I am still waiting for an option to throw out guests, although I doubt that will ever happen.

This is only one aspect you have to consider while seating customers. Apart from this you also have to take into account the colors of a customer's outfit, because each time you seat a person on a stool with the same color you will earn huge bonus points. Besides color-matching you are also able to earn massive amounts of points by chaining similar actions, such as clearing dishes, or serving and cashing out customers.

Your goal is to constantly serve entering guests with meals like fries, cutlet, pizza, ice cream or pineapple juice. To increase your effectiveness you can upgrade your equipment at the beginning of each level, or boost Flo's and Grandma Florence's skills. Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios offers a decent amount of decorative as well as functional upgrades, such as a more elegant interior design, quicker grills or an additional prep-table.

The two most important and noticeable changes from the first Cooking Dash game are "celebrity power-ups," and the Cookie-Meter. Celebrity power-ups can increase Flo's walking speed even further, cause every currently eating guest to instantly finish the meal, or give every seated guest a patience boost. These power-ups are activated the very moment you clear the dish of any celebrity.

This complicates the effective usage of power-ups strongly, since it constantly gets in the way of your chaining. However, after the player gets used to those power-ups and integrates them into the general routine, they are a welcome addition and interesting twist to the gameplay.

The same basically goes for the addition of the Cookie-Meter. After delivering a certain number of correct orders to the guests, you are able to click on a phone to call Cookie, who will immediately  appear and take on the task of cooking the dishes and giving Grandma Florence new orders. Like the celebrity power-ups, the cookie meter makes the pace of the game even more frantic at first, but when you have used it a couple of times, it really simplifies the otherwise challenging levels in the later stages.

The game is as fast-paced as one expects a game in the Dash series to be, and fortunately you will also find the general dose of humor which is so typical for games from the DinerTown universe. Graphics are lively and extremely colorful, the animations are smooth and quite cute.

Regarding difficulty, Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios is definitely easier than the first game, and experienced time management players might be disappointed in how quickly they will have finished the story mode with expert score on every level. However, the endless mode offers an additional challenge with lots of replay value, and it can get quite addicting to keep trying to improve scores in story mode as well.

Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios certainly has not moved mountains in comparison to its predecessor, and significant changes are few and far between. However, the game concept still has not lost its appeal, and fans of the dash series will be absolutely satisfied by this product without any doubt.
For similar games, try Cooking Dash, Delicious - Emily's Taste of Fame, or Cake Mania 3.

Review from Gamezebo Inc.

Burger Shop 2

From the makers of Burger Shop comes the wildly anticipated Burger Shop 2! In Burger Shop, you successfully created a universal chain of restaurants and found fame and fortune... Until one day, you found yourself in a dumpster with a bump on your head, your restaurants boarded up, and no memory of how any of it happened. Now in Burger Shop 2 you must rebuild your restaurant empire, adding new twists to your menu to entice new customers while uncovering the truth about what happened to your original restaurant chain. Grab ingredients from the BurgerTron2000 to create tasty food items to serve hungry customers in this fast-paced food making game! Burger Shop 2 game features 120 levels of story mode, 120 levels of expert mode and endless play in Challenge and Relax Mode. Start your food making adventure today!

Delicious - Emilys Taste of Fame

The newest installment of the Delicious series, Emily's Taste of Fame takes you on a journey with Emily and Francois as they make their way to Emily's new cooking show. With all sorts of hazards and detours along the way, it will take creativity and strategy to proceed in this outstanding new time management title brought to you by GameHouse. 

The game begins with a flashback to one month ago, where a wrecked car sits on the side of the road near a diner. Emily and her friend Francois enter the diner to think of what to do next: they're on their way to Emily's new cooking show, but they don't have enough money to repair their car. Instead, Emily strikes up a deal with the owner of the diner to do what she does best: cook and work in the restaurant and earn enough money to get their car fixed. Emily and Francois find themselves in interesting new places at every turn as they make their way to Emily's cooking show, but time is running out and the producers are waiting! 

Emily's Taste of Fame is the fourth official Delicious title in the series. Continuing the legacy of the series, Delicious: Emily's Taste of Fame is a restaurant-based time management title controlled solely with the mouse. Emily must cook and prepare food in a variety of combinations for a variety of customers, all while being careful not to make them angry and instead have them leave satisfied.

Delicious features two daily goals: a standard goal that will allow you to progress, and an expert goal. Achieving the expert goal allows Emily to earn extra money, which can be used to decorate the restaurant. Each decoration has a special quality that will improve Emily's service or the customer's actions in the game. True to the previous installments, Emily's Taste of Fame also features five main restaurant areas with ten days each, for a total of 50 bustling levels. In each of the 50 levels are hidden a mouse, allowing for bonus play and challenges all while maintaining the restaurant. There is also a variety of Easter eggs that GameHouse has cleverly slipped into various levels. 

Emily's Taste of Fame is a whole new animal compared to the previous and even recent Delicious titles, improving and expanding with flying colors. This particular title features a new and refreshing feature in which every single day has a particular challenge or task that needs to be accomplished in addition to running the restaurant.

Tasks can be as simple as picking up packages, or complicated as saving a life. The tasks are also varied in style, some departing completely away from time management and straight into the genre of hidden object. With a strong non-corny storyline and lovable characters, and furthermore an entirely new cast of customers, this game is a beautiful blend of heart-warming adventure, hidden object, strategy, and of course true to its core, time management.

Featuring an improved sprite and animation style, in addition to a thoroughly enjoyable and environment-complementing soundtrack, Delicious is more expressive and enjoyable than ever. But that's not all. Instead of taking place solely in restaurants, this title allows Emily to also work in shops, and even on a farm. While previous titles may have felt repetitive due to the strict restaurant environment, this one is anything but. 

The only drawback to this title is the fact that "Emily's Diary," a feature in the previous game Delicious: Emily's Tea Garden, will not be returning. Emily's Diary allowed the player to play through various days with various special challenges, including a non-stop game mode in which you served as many customers as possible until three left angry, or allowing you to perform such challenges as cooking strictly barbecue for customers. Hardcore fans of the series may be disappointed to see this feature gone, but Emily's Taste of Fame still provides a good amount of replay value in the mice, Easter egg, and trophy challenges. 

Without a doubt, Emily's Taste of Fame is the best game of the Delicious series yet, and takes it in a whole new direction without straying from the core and heart of the series. It does an excellent job of balancing old with new, providing a seamless adaptive gameplay for veterans of the series and an outstanding tutorial and hint system for people new to the game.

Hints and tutorials can be skipped or turned off at any time, but even more impressive is the adjustable difficulty, allowing each player to choose exactly what fits them best. Hardcore fans can play at the super-hard difficulties and those new to time management can play it at easy. The normal difficulty level is a very sound line that should be comfortable for old and new players alike. The difficulty can be changed at any time, even during gameplay. It's an excellent feature that should really be implemented into more time management titles. 

Delicious - Emily's Taste of Fame is a truly wonderful game for anyone: young or old, new to the series or well-acquainted, and has rightfully proven itself as one of the best time management titles released yet.

Review by Gamezebo

Wandering Willows

Is it possible to get cute-poisoning? I'm feeling a little faint. It could be abundance of happy, awesome, adorable-ness-itude-ism of this game I'm playing, or maybe it's just the fact that I've been sitting in one position in front of my computer all through the night. Hmm.

Wandering Willows begins by dropping you on a mysterious island in the middle of nowhere. This initially sounded a bit too much like the plot of Lost for my taste, but luckily there aren't any mysterious "Others" running around trying to kill you. Who would guess that falling out of the sky and crash-landing could be fun, anyway? Most people would be overcome by such trivialities as internal bleeding and broken bones, but not your character. No, you're tough. You pick yourself up, brush yourself off and start exploring the new world around you. Friendly (albeit weird) people, yummy food and cute critters (such as a donkey-triceratops lovechild companion that follows you around and does your bidding) abound.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the game experience/controls, I should say this: It's funny. The character interactions and dialogue are extraordinarily cute and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious. The writers/designers employ innuendo and silliness to make Wandering Willows a joy to play. My neighbors probably think I'm nuts from all the snorts and chuckles coming from my apartment.

Anyway, this game requires the acquisition of a lot of stuff. You get to gather stuff, grow stuff, make stuff and distribute stuff, all in the name of helping the other people on the island. That sums up your activities pretty neatly, methinks. What, no? Oh fine, I suppose I can elaborate. In order to repair the hot air balloon that you crash-landed on the island, you need to make friends. In order to make friends, you have to do a lot of favors in the form of errands. These errands range from collecting berries to sewing fuzzy bear costumes. One by one, they help you collect the items needed to repair your balloon and get the heck out of dodge.

The controls are straightforward. Point and click to direct your character (and/or your little animal buddy) around the island. You can either move about freely on the main screen or select a faraway part of the island to travel to with the help of a small world map. If you select a person or place on the world map, your character automatically walks from where you are currently to the selected spot, unless you see something or someone you would like to interact with instead.

You get to find and collect a wide variety foods, natural materials, sewing supplies, flowers, recipes, critters and much, much more. You spend your time exploring, gathering, growing, sewing, cooking and even soldering. In order to sew a costume, you first need to find a pattern, gather the required materials (by growing cotton, gathering dye, saving some money and purchasing thread), then you actually get to make the desired item. The process is similar for recipes and floral arrangements. When you are out and about gathering items, you and your little animal companion come across other animals. There are all kinds of creatures that you can charm to drop items. If you are lucky, they drop an egg that you can use to hatch a controllable companion animal. Each animal has different attributes — some are great at climbing trees, while others are better off digging or charming other animals. Luckily you can train any of them to improve their skills and equip them with items that boost their attributes. For those of you who are achievement happy, you can earn medals for things like finding every recipe in the game, or collecting one of each and every animal species.

I have very few complaints about Wandering Willows. Actually, I just have one. It's not even a real complaint, really, depending on how you look at it. I found one of the food items to be visually distracting. The designers of Wandering Willows may want to reconsider the appearance of the maple syrup. If you look at it and don't understand why, well, you're a much better person than I am. Seriously. But you'll just have to get the game to see what I mean.

Overall, it's a really fun experience. The game is cute, quirky and surprisingly long for a casual game. I would even go so far as to call it delightful. If cooing at cute virtual creatures warms your heart and running around doing in-game errand-quests gives you a false sense of accomplishment, then this is the right game for you. It's like someone threw a unicorn that poops rainbows in a blender with an RPG, snuggles and your silly aunt Karen.

Review by  pragmacat

DinerTown Tycoon

DinerTown Tycoon - Get The Zombies Out!

While PlayFirst are mostly known for their dash games, now they offer us a totally new genre in the old good atmosphere of DinerTown - a tycoon game. Here you'll have a possibility to try your prediction and strategy skills and see whether you can compete with the evil corporation.

Let Grub Burger turn everyone in DinerTown into zombies? Never!

Mayor Whimple, the leader of DinerTown, is not willing to accept the generous "donation" from the large fast-food corporation Grub Burger at all. He knows very well that the citizens of his city have enough great restaurants to satisfy the most exquisite demand. But the owners of Grub Burger have their own opinion about this. And they have a powerful weapon to support their point of view - Ingredient X. As soon as you taste any food containing it you turn into zombie - and get under full control of the dishonest businessmen. Very soon their restaurants start appearing on every corner and someone has to repair the situation ASAP. Who will it be? You, of course!

You will start from Darla's Sidewalk Cafe and try to conquer DinerTown's eaters back district by district. For each district you'll have a goal - to serve each customer type a certain minimum number of healthy meals before the Grub Burger makes a certain progress. The meals are served during a day, but you can't influence anything at that time. Instead you have a number of tools to get prepared before each day's work.

First of all, you'll have to check the news and see the estimated crowd and demand for the coming day - this will help you plan your menu and stock. After you've got all the information you go to Prep (separate for each restaurant you already own) and determine menu by buying new dishes and setting prices (sale or regular), stock ingredients according to the crowd prediction and purchase some decors for your diners (those become available consequently one after another). All those items need careful budgeting, as the money you have are limited, and the needs grow every day.

After you have prepared everything you can go to your neighborhood and start your day. But before that you'll have a couple more options, like advertising helping to draw customers to your places or new restaurants available for purchase. Once the day is started all you can do is click customers with coins over their heads for extra tips and watch your progress. There are some hints that will help you build a better strategy, like broken hearts when a customer is dissatisfied or red crosses when you run out of a certain ingredient. There are also some special people who can help you advertise when clicked, like Flo, for example.

After each day you can see you progress to the goal. If someone is not a frequent customer at your restaurants, you can order a market research and see what you should do to please him or her. You can also win the Chef Challenge for each day (look for it in the News screen). Doing this will slow down your competitors.

On the whole DinerTown Tycoon is a quite addictive and interesting sample of tycoon genre, so if you like the genre - it's a perfect choice to try!

Review by GameMile