As someone who loves Applebee's, it's a great restaurant, and it's reliable in pretty much any town in the US, if you can find one. As someone who's cooked professionally for many years, I know that if I am to make anything that is an Applebee's copycat, it's probably gonna have a lot of appeal to a lot of different people.

Often, sometimes we have challenges cooking for picky eaters, but I think this list here has a lot of great recipes that have a good universal appeal and might even sneak in a few vegetables for those people who aren't too fond of them.

1) Classic Applebee’s Spinach and Artichoke Dip

You can use frozen spinach for this also. Fresh spinach is quite easy if you just put it in, heat up a pan, and make sure it's a pan with a lid. Get some fresh spinach, throw in a couple of tablespoons of water, then put the lid on top, and that'll wilt down really quickly.

So if you're not wanting to work with frozen spinach that will have a lot of moisture in it that you're gonna have to squeeze out, you're still gonna have to squeeze out the fresh cooked spinach, but not as much.

Also, I would recommend that you, if you happen to have a food processor, chop up the spinach and the artichokes just a little bit. Don't purée them, but if you just hit the food processor button a couple of times to break it down, it makes using it as a dip when it comes out of the oven a lot easier.

And another thing, you can put some Panko breadcrumbs on top of it, and you can either put them straight on top and then put them in the oven, or you can toast them in a skillet with some butter, depending on how much extra work you wanna make for yourself. But yeah, the Panko is really a game changer because it adds a nice texture.

2) Applebee’s Three-Cheese Chicken Penne

I think that this is a hill I will die on. Always make sure to salt your pasta water. It makes a huge difference, and you want to use a lot more salt than you think you need.

If you have a family-sized portion that you're making, you turn on the water and throw in like almost a handful of salt. I think maybe about a third of a cup, and that will be it; it's just such a game changer if you do that with the al dente pasta. It's perfect for the sauce.

What I normally do is heat up the garlic and a little bit of shallot and just cook that until it's soft.

You wanna make sure you don't burn the garlic, and then throw in a splash of white wine and cook that down a little bit before you add the other things. If you cut the broccoli small enough, once you cook the pasta and you've drained the water, you do wanna save a little bit of your pasta water to add to all of this because it really helps the sauce cling to the noodles more.

So add that in as you're adding the pasta to the pot, and if you cut the broccoli small enough, you can just go ahead and add that right in with the sauce and the pasta, and it'll cook itself.

3) Applebee’s Fiesta Lime Chicken

OK, I like where this recipe is going, but I think that you want to marinate the chicken with the lime juice, a little bit of olive oil, garlic, a pinch of chili powder, and salt. Always make sure to add salt. But then add mayonnaise to that marinade so that when you do grill it, you're gonna get a nice color on it.

Then I would add the cheese and use the other ingredients to make a sauce. I don't know that adding mayonnaise, sour cream, salsa, and lime juice and putting it under the broiler is really gonna get the color that you want because there's so much moisture going on here with the salsa. But you can broil it with the cheddar and then use the rest of the things for a sauce.

That's what I would recommend. Definitely rice and black beans.

I would add cilantro to that cause I'm always thinking about the color and textures. But rice, black beans, cilantro. Maybe some sliced tomato or a pico de gallo.

Or you could do tortillas on the side, so you could go a lot of different directions with this thing.

4) Applebee’s Bourbon Street Chicken and Shrimp

I think another addition to this would be a starter; as far as sides go, you could do a polenta. You cook the chicken first and then take it out, deglaze the pan with a little bit of wine. Even though you're cooking for kids, if you reduce that enough, it's gonna cook out the alcohol, but it's gonna have a really nice flavor to it, and that will really help with the shrimp too.

I think it's super important that you do not overcook shrimp. Cook it quickly.

You can add a little bit of dried herbs if you want. Fresh thyme is great, some chopped cilantro, something like that. You don't need to add cream if you don't want to.

Butter also works, although it also makes it a little richer. Green beans are great; broccoli would be great. Maybe a Swiss chard that's also sautéed in a little bit of that wine garlic situation would be nice.

5) Applebee’s Oriental Chicken Salad

This is always one of my favorite salads from back when I was a kid. Any sort of chicken salad with an Asian vibe to it.

The dressing looks great. I would add a little bit of sesame oil, and if it's toasted sesame oil, you gotta be careful with that stuff because it can take over things very easily. But if you just have a little bit of sesame oil, you could also throw in some toasted sesame seeds, or some grated fresh ginger would be nice.

And you can make this ahead of time in the blender. Because you have the mayonnaise in here, it will thicken up pretty easily.

6) Applebee’s Crispy Orange Chicken Bowl

The pan-fried coating and flour thing: I would recommend mixing a little cornstarch with your flour and then, of course, the salt and pepper. You will hear me say this 1 million times: always make sure to properly put salt and pepper on your food, but mostly salt; pepper's a different subject.

And then the orange sauce, I think that you would have more luck if you took this orange sauce and added a cornstarch slurry to it on a stove, because then you're gonna get it thickened. Once you have the chicken pieces come out from being fried, of course, dry them on a paper towel. I wouldn't toss the chicken pieces in the sauce until right before you're gonna serve.

But if you heat the sauce with the cornstarch slurry, you're gonna get that nice thick, sticky glaze, and it will be the same temperature, so you're not trying to put a room-temperature sauce on a hot thing. That can not go well, and also all of those liquids are gonna just take the crispiness of the chicken pieces down immediately unless you have it as a thickened sauce.

I like the steamed rice and the veg. You can put some sesame seeds on there. Having favorite toppings is cute; you can have a little topping bar.

You can cook the chicken in batches and then freeze it, and then reheat it in the oven if you feel like doing a mega sort of thing.

7) Applebee’s Chicken Wonton Tacos

This looks great. If you cut the cabbage on a mandolin, you couldn't find it in any Asian market; they help you cut vegetables very thin. Definitely don't let your kids use them though, it's very easy to cut yourself, so make sure to use the finger guard.

But anyway, if you do all of that and you have all these nice fillings, you could totally make a cute little spring roll out of this if you get the rice papers also from the Asian market. The kind that you soak in water; they look like a circle. Soak them in water very quickly.

You just basically dip two in the water and then lay them down on top of each other.

A lot of people don't know that the trick to making a decent spring roll is using two at a time, so you stack them on top of each other. Then I would put down the cabbage first for the little cabbage and carrot thing, and then a little bit of the chicken and roll that up like a burrito. That goes with my great little snack, snacks for a picnic lunch or something.

8) Applebee’s Quesadilla Burger

I think this would be fun if you made a little, like a Crunchwrap kind of situation out of it too. Maybe you could get those flat tostadas. So you put all the things in there that it already mentions and then put the tostada in there too, so then you get a nice crunchy situation.

And of course, maybe you want to add some refried beans. Take out the ketchup, mustard, and relish, and then add some taco seasoning, some lime, and some cilantro. I think that's great.

9) Applebee’s Riblets with Honey Barbecue Sauce

You can add some chili powder to that sauce to bring out a little more; I don't know, it's just kind of deep in the flavor a little bit. You can also add bourbon if you want, so it turns glossy without burning.

I would advocate for some char, so you wanna leave the pork ribs in the oven until yes the meat pulls away easily, and then take them out of the foil, of course, put them on a rack, and then brush them with the sauce. Turn your oven up, too. Then you brush it on, you put the ribs on the rack, brush it with the sauce, put it back in the oven at like 400.

Keep an eye on it; after about 10 minutes, take it out, brush it again, and put it back in. You're aiming for the sauce to thicken, and you want to see some nice color on it. That's the good stuff.

A little bit of char is good; it's a good flavor, especially on a really fatty meat like this. Obviously, put extra napkins on the table.

10) Applebee’s Double-Glazed Baby Back Ribs

This might not be Applebee's specifically, but with the double-glazed baby back ribs, you can also make a sauce with tamarind. That's my favorite sauce, like a tamarind barbecue sauce.

Make sure to cover them when you're cooking them low and slow. I know that a lot of people like to individually wrap their rib racks, but I prefer to just put it all in a pan and cover it tightly. It does the same thing, and then you're not worried about pieces of tinfoil coming off on your meat, especially if you're trying to handle it after it's been in the oven for a long time.

And yeah, caramelizes without burning. As I said before, I think a little bit of burning is good.

11) Applebee’s Mozzarella Sticks

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I love mozzarella sticks, and I think they're better if they're allowed to sit for 10 minutes after they come out of the oven. It's kind of like pizza. If you just dive into the pizza when it first comes out of the oven, you're never in the league, and it burns the top of your mouth.

You can also do this with other kinds of cheese. Like a Gouda or maybe like maybe a Oaxaca cheese; that would be pretty good, or the type of cheddar that is not too aged, because aged cheddar gets a little bit too crumbly and and I don't think that that would go well.

12) Applebee’s Boneless Buffalo Wings

You can do all sorts of sauces with this, of course. I always go back to mixing your chicken pieces with your seasoned coating. Make sure you put some cornstarch in that, but you can do a honey mustard.

You can do a tamarind barbecue; that's one of my favorites. Any type of sweet and spicy. Obviously, blue cheese is ready if you're doing buffalo sauce.

13) Applebee’s Neighborhood Nachos

I think another fun thing to do with the nachos is to just get a brick of Velveeta cheese from that or some equivalent of that from the grocery store and melt it in a double boiler. Or if you just have a pot and then a metal bowl that you can put in that that you can put on top of the pot so you can boil the water. That is actually ideal: a metal mixing bowl.

That's what we use in restaurants for melting all kinds of things.

Anyway, you get the Velveeta cheese, you get a little bit of cream, you melt it, have a whisk ready, and then depending on who you're cooking for, you can add Tabasco. Works quite well. I don't normally use Tabasco in cooking, but Tabasco to make a nice queso nacho cheese is actually pretty good, because you've got a little bit of vinegar and some pepper and stuff, so I would recommend that.

You can also do shredded pork shoulder; if you have an overnight-cooked pork shoulder, shred it down, throw some sauce on it, and that makes great nachos. Obviously, always have the guacamole. That is imperative for everything in my kitchen.

14) Applebee’s Broccoli Cheddar Soup

You can save yourself a lot of time if you happen to have a food processor. With the broccoli, just rough chop it and then pulse it in the food processor a couple of times. You don't even really need to wash out the food processor cause it's all going into the same pot.

If you just take your cheddar, rough chop that and pulse it a few times in the food processor. Obviously if you have a shredder you can use that too, but I just skip that if it's gonna be something that I'm melting straight into a pot because it doesn't really matter, as long as you're not throwing giant chunks of cheddar in; it will melt but it might take a while and you'd have to stir it constantly otherwise it might burn.

15) Applebee’s French Onion Soup

One thing I learned the hard way is that one of the best ways to get caramelized onions is to cut them all really thin. You can use the mandolin. Make sure they're all cut evenly.

Use the butter, of course, but put it all in a pot. Put the lid on the pot. And the lid will basically steam the onion so all of the liquid will come out, and you want to leave that on.

Obviously, keep it on a low flame because that's like the one thing that people always do is get impatient with the onions.

If you're cooking onion soup, you need to emotionally prepare yourself for the fact that it's gonna take a while, but it will be worth it. So keep the lid on the pot. And maybe after 20 minutes, check it, and there's probably gonna be a ton of liquid in there.

It will caramelize in a much more even way than if you were just to throw it all in a pan at high heat with butter.

And this may be an unpopular opinion, but when I'm doing the toasted bread and the Swiss cheese melt thing, I do that on a separate pan in the oven. I think it's because I used to make enough soup for like 75 people at a time, and I didn't wanna make my poor dishwasher suffer by having to scrub all of that melted cheese off of the rims of the bowls of the soup.

So what I normally do is put all of the bread and cheese on a sheet tray, put it in the oven, melt the cheese real quick, and then you can just take a spatula and take those off of the sheet tray, and then don't put them right on top of the soup.

16) Applebee’s Loaded Mashed Potatoes

You know, when I make mashed potatoes, I always leave the skin on. I just put all the mashed potatoes in a pan, fill it up with water, boil them, skin on, everything. When they come off, you drain them and let them sit in the container for a little bit so that the water that is on them will steam itself off, and then throw them in a pot with butter and cheese and some heavy whipping cream and a ton of salt and pepper.

And that's how I normally make my mashed potatoes. You mash them. That works fine if you get a sturdy metal whisk, or if you have somebody there that's willing to help out, a strong kid that needs to expend their energy on something; give them this pot and a whisk and have them go at it.

Keep the skins on. You can do all these things too.

But the shredded cheddar I would add at the end, after you've played it, just because then you're getting a nice color. I do that sometimes too, where I'll make mashed potatoes and then I'll put them in a baking tray after they've been all mashed up with whatever I put, and then I'll cover all of that with cheese and put it back in the oven so that it's on top. It gets really bubbly and has a little bit of color on it, and that's quite good too.

17) Applebee’s Garlic Parmesan Shrimp

Shrimp again; put those on top of some polenta. You can either make it in the oven, or you can make it in the oven and then, whatever you have left over that's still warm, pour it into a sheet tray, put it in the refrigerator overnight, and then you can cut it into squares and fry it in a pan and then put shrimp on top of that. Would be great.

And again, I would add some wine with the shrimp when you're cooking.

18) Applebee’s Maple Walnut Blondie

This looks fantastic. You could totally do it with pecans, though. I would do it with pecans, and then if you wanna do an ice cream with bourbon in it, make a no-churn ice cream with bourbon and bacon.

No-churn ice cream is very easy to make. It's usually three ingredients. It's whipped cream folded in with heavy, no, whipped cream that you whip yourself, fold in some sweetened condensed milk and then a little bit of booze of some sort, and then you freeze it, and it's to die for.

But I think that would be great. Bourbon vanilla ice cream and a pecan-walnut maple pecan blondie.

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