Custom Post Type Excerpts…

Hi – I have done a search for my questions – but I am afraid most of this is above my abilities – or I need some really slow help 🙂 I would like to make my custom post type show up as excerpts on a page. Ideally, it would be a page that I created where I can add information above post feed. (But I would settle for just showing excerpts.) Here is the page currently showing the custom post type:
http://kitchencavalry.com/whats_cooking_today/
I want to make it a page so I can also require login… is this too much info for one post?
I have tried a lot of things I found regarding function.php code but most of them created an error.
FWIW, I have allow excerpts set to true in CustomPress and I am using Custom Post Archives plugin to display this currently. Thanks so much!