Avocado Chicken by The Kitchen Life of a Navy Wife

I needed some inspiration to cook chicken, yet again, for dinner last night.  So I went to my Poultry Recipes board on my Pinterest account looking for something new, easy and consisting of ingredients I had on hand.  I don't know about you, but I pin things all the time and can't remember all of them.  Looking through my own boards is like Christmas morning!  hehehe

I found this gloriously simple recipe for Avocado Chicken from The Kitchen Life of a Navy Wife.  Definitely something new, quite easy and I had just bought tomatoes and avocados from Costco the day before.   *Ding, ding, ding*  We literally had a winner, winner, chicken dinner!

You know me, I can't make any recipe exactly the way it is, so I finished off the oven time by turning the broiler on for a little color.  The hubs is quite picky, and not a fan of tomatoes, but he agreed with me that dinner was delicious!

Adding this one to the rotation during tomato season.  Thank you, Navy Wife! 

I just scored $64 worth of meat for $25!

I love getting a great deal and I have to share with y'all my trip to Harris Teeter just now.  The hubs wanted lottery tickets for tonight's $400M jackpot and asked me to run out for them.  He is already out but is unable to stop.  *sigh*  I was not happy about going to the ATM for cash and then hitting a grocery store at evening rush hour, but out I went.

As I'm walking in the door, I glance at the front page of the sales ad that ends today and see B2G3 free of shrimp.  Shrimp is B's favorite food in the world, so I headed back to the seafood department after getting the lottery tickets.  Turns out it was buy two 2 lb bags of shrimp and get three 2 lb bags free.  Ten pounds of shrimp is a bit much ;o) so I passed.

But while I was in the back of the store, I perused the meat section.  I only shop at the Teeter if I need one or two things (and I don't want to go farther to Wegmans) or I'm getting Teeter's Friday night fried chicken special.  But if I need to be in the back of the store, I check the meat department for markdowns.  I hit the mother load today!

1. Ready to Cook chicken breast stuffed with Bleu cheese and wrapped in bacon, 9oz.  Regularly $4.99, got it for $1.99.
2. Ready to Cook Chicken Cordon Bleu, 10oz.  Regularly $4.99, got it for $1.99.  Both this one and the one above have a sell by date of 3/19/14, so dinner for tomorrow is done!
3. Three Ribeye steaks, totaling 2.63 lbs.  Regularly $36.79, got them for $12.86.  
4. Trimmed and tied pork loin roast, 2.32 lbs.  Regularly $9.95, got it for $4.71.  That works out to $2.03/lb and I know I can buy a whole pork loin on sale for $1.99/lb.  But I'd have to wait for a sale, unwrap it, break it down into small roasts and chops and rewrap for freezing.  This roast is already trimmed and tied and a perfect size to feed my family for a week or to serve the next time we have guests.
5. Fresh Johnsonville Irish O'Garlic sausage.  Now, this one wasn't as big of a savings as the other items.  The 1 lb 3 oz package is regularly $5.49 and had a store coupon of  $1.50 on it since St. Patrick's Day is over.  This is for the hubs who will literally do a jig when he comes home and sees it.  Since I got such good deals on the other meats, and I want to see his jig, I "splurged" on this for him.

With tax the original price of all this would have been $63.77 but I got it all for $25.18.  It was meant to be and my freezer and I are very happy (we were down to just chicken breasts and ground beef before I went to the store).

Giving Freezer Cooking a Try

First of all, I want to apologize that the picture is not of all the freezer food I made over the past 4 days. Both my food photography skills and the lighting in my kitchen are atrocious.  So, although I took pictures of everything I made, the pictures did not all turn out well.  The wonderful colors of the foods  have disappeared in most of my pictures and very few are even in focus.  So, I'm showing you the big salad I made, the hot dogs and chicken I grilled, the bread I baked and a spoonful of soup I pulled out of the pot to taste.   Onto freezer cooking…

I've wanted to do if for some time but was afraid - of the amount of time needed, the cost of buying all that food at once, the kitchen being such a disaster that I would run from the house, screaming.  See, I had this idea in my head that Freezer cooking meant cooking all the meals your family would eat for an entire month, all in one setting.  That was the wrong impression I got from all the articles and books out there from people who spend time, one day a month, freezer cooking.  I equated "freezer cooking once a month" to "cooking everything my family will eat for the next 30 days".  It's not so.  Phew!

I decided to start small on Thursday but it wasn't small enough for this scatterbrain, because I didn't cook everything I thought I would.  I didn't get upset, though, and did a little more on Friday.  I did well, so I did some more Saturday and today, too.  Although I don't have every meal, not even every dinner, my family will eat this week, I have some meals and a some meal elements in my freezer that I can go to on those days when life gets away from me.  Those days when I didn't plan ahead or I just don't feel like cooking.  I enjoyed it because I took baby steps and I'd like to do this regularly to keep my head above water in the kitchen.

BABY STEP #1: Doubling Up.  I made Salisbury Steak, mashed potatoes and roasted green beans for dinner on Thursday.  While I had the ingredients out and my hands were in raw meat, I decided to make enough steak for two dinners.  Just the Salisbury Steak, mind you, I didn't make extra potatoes nor green beans.  But the protein is always the hardest part of meal planning, for me; throwing sides together are easy.  So the extra portion of Salisbury Steak is in the freezer.

On Friday, I decided to make a fake-lasagna bake for lunch, so I doubled the recipe.  I dislike making lasagna.  The noodles are a pain to cook, they peel apart while I'm trying to put the lasagna together and all the layering is messy.  So now I just heat all the lasagna ingredients in a skillet, along with whatever shaped pasta I have on hand (B's fav is Rotini), pour into a baking dish, top with some more cheese and bake until the top gets some color on it.  The extra one went into a baking dish and received cheese on top, but went to the freezer before baking.

Yummy Dinner of Broccoli Patties, Chicken and Homemade Bread!

FIrst of all, I want to say that dinner pictured here, is in a bowl.  That is not a dinner plate completely filled with saucy chicken to the rim.  It's a soup/cereal bowl.  This dinner was sooooo gooood.  I didn't plan it to be this good; I was going to serve the saucy chicken over pasta and just serve the broccoli patties with it.  But the hubs reminded me that I had made a loaf of whole wheat bread yesterday and that we should have a slice of that instead of the pasta.  Good call, hubs!

I found this fabulous recipe for Broccoli Bites For Kids on Pinterest a month or so ago and decided to try it today.  Easy to make and a hit with all 3 of us.  I cut the recipe in third and made 4 patties for us.  The loaf of bread is The Master Recipe from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, the sequel to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day which got me not only baking bread but loving it.  So simple!

The chicken I just made up with what was in the house and needed to be used up.  I sautéed half a sweet onion, half a red pepper, a small shallot, 2 cloves of garlic and some "use or lose" mushrooms in equal parts butter and oil for about 15 minutes.  BTW, you can make this with whatever veggies you have on hand/you like or no veggies at all!  I removed them from the pan to a bowl.  I chopped up 2 chicken breasts, sprinkled them with salt and pepper, cooked them in the same pan then put them in the bowl with the veggies.  I added 1/2 tbsp of butter to the pan and, after it melted, added approx 1.5 tbsp flour.  Whisked that around together for a couple of minutes to burn off the "floury" taste and added chicken stock.  Continued to whisk until it thickened somewhat and then added a splash or two of half & half (I had no heavy cream.  You could also use whatever milk you have in the house or just use the chicken stock.)  Once everything was the thickness I wanted, I seasoned with a little more salt & pepper, turned off the flame, added the veggies and chicken to the sauce, married all those beautiful flavors together and ladled it into a bowl.  Finally I added a broccoli patty and half a slice of buttered, homemade, whole wheat bread and then moaned through the whole meal!

DIY Ziploc Perfect Portions Bag

Have you seen or do you use Ziploc Perfect Portions?  Brilliant!  I must admit that when I saw the commercial for the first time, I did a "Doh!" face palm.  So simple, yet so needed, why didn't I ever think of that?  Oh, well, no matter.  They came up with the idea, I do it cheaper.  :o)  Very simple to do yourself with plastic wrap.

I made a white chili the other day with chicken thighs and needed to freeze the rest of the package.  I ripped off about 1 square foot of plastic wrap, covered my hand with it, picked up a chicken thigh, used my other hand to wrap the plastic completely around the piece of meat and put it in a freezer bag.  Voila!

According to Ziploc's website today, you can buy a 75 count box of their Perfect Portions at Target for $3.07 ($0.04/ea) or at Amazon for $4.74 ($0.06/ea).  I don't know what my 3,000 sq ft container of Kirkland plastic wrap from Costco cost me because I got it a while ago.  However, Amazon is selling it today for $25.34.  That's only $0.008/sq ft!  Even if I bought the 100 sq ft package at Wegmans grocery store for $1.99, that's still only $0.02/sq ft!  And plastic wrap is something most of have on hand already.  Thank you, Ziploc, for your inspiration!

Recipe for My Creamy Spinach Pasta with Grilled Chicken

A couple of weeks ago I got a craving for some pasta with a creamy, spinach sauce and some grilled chicken on top.  Yesterday, I finally decided to make it for myself for lunch and it was delicious!  I usually make creamed spinach from scratch, but I didn't have any fresh spinach in the house so I improvised.

1 clove of garlic, minced
1 tbsp of minced shallot
9 oz box of frozen, creamed spinach
Milk
Pepper and nutmeg to taste
Butter
Asiago cheese, freshly grated
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
You favorite pasta, cooked

I fired up my countertop grill/griddle with the grill plates, rubbed a little Wegmans Basting Oil onto the chicken breasts and grilled them for 4 minutes with the grill top down.  I put the frozen, creamed spinach in the microwave to thaw.

I heated 1/2 tbsp of butter into a small saucepan (you can use any kind of oil, instead, if you like) and sautéed the shallot for 5 minutes until very soft.  Then I tossed in the garlic and sautéed for another minute or two until the garlic was cooked (you can smell the difference) but didn't brown.

My Chicken Noodle Soup Dump Recipe For Kathy

• Dice up half an onion, 2 carrots, a couple of garlic cloves, and grate at least 1 tsp of fresh ginger. If I have shallots on hand, I'll dice up one of those, too.
•  Salt and pepper 1/2 of a chicken breast and cook it in a pan with the fat of your choice.  Set aside on a cutting board.
• Add a little more fat to pan you cooked chicken breast in and then add your onion, carrot, garlic ginger and shallot.  Saute until onions are translucent.  If I have leftover cooked veggies from dinners in the fridge, I add them now and then saute for another minute or two.
• If you have any spices or herbs you'd like to add for extra flavor, this is the time to do it!  Drop them in with your sauteed veggies and stir to coat and heat them up, releasing their flavors.  I find I get more flavor out of herbs and spices when I add them before liquids then I get when adding them at the end.  Salt and pepper, however, should be added at the end.
• Add 3 - 4 cups of Kitchen Basics Unsalted Chicken Cooking Stock and bring up to a boil.
• Once stock and veggies are boiling, add a handful or 2, at the most, of your choice of pasta, turn the flame down so that stock just simmers and cook until the pasta is al dente.  I pick a small pasta, like ditalini, alphabets, mini shells, mini farfalle, orecchiette, or elbows if that's the smallest I have.  You can even break up spaghetti into small pieces.  Add a pasta too big or too much pasta and it will absorb all or most of your stock.
• While pasta cooks, dice up your chicken breast.
• When pasta is al dente, turn off the heat, add in your diced chicken breast to warm it back up and taste your broth.  Do you want to add salt and or pepper?  I add both, to my taste.

Depending on how much I serve myself, I get 3 - 4 bowls from this.  If I have a chicken or turkey carcass around, I'll make a pot of stock from that, make a big pot of soup without the pasta, and freeze in quart-size, zip-top bags.  Take out when you are ready to eat, thaw, bring up to boil, toss in your pasta and then simmer until al dente.  Or freeze in gallon-size bags and use when you want to take a family a meal.

Chicken and Butternut Squash Lasagna

When I posted about making Sloppy Joes for the first time last month, I mentioned my Chicken Lasagna and said I would post the recipe later that week.  I never did, so I am posting it now.  But I have another reason for posting it.  A friend of mine commented on my blog's Facebook page that she is not adventurous in the kitchen at all.  She follows recipes to a "T" and does not experiment or try to create with what she has on hand.  She doesn't think she would be good at it and worries her family won't like what she makes.  Well, I want to address her and others out there with some "baby steps" to being more adventurous in the kitchen, and the lasagna I made last month is a great example.  So here we go!

My friend, Julia, who is always sharing great recipes, provided me with the following Chicken Lasagna recipe:

Lasagna noodles
2 cups chopped, cooked chicken
8 oz sour cream
2 cans cream of chicken soup
1 packet of Good Seasons dry Italian dressing mix
Shredded cheddar cheese

Cook lasagna noodles.  Mix chicken, sour cream, creamed soup and dry dressing mix.  In a 13"x9" pan, put a small amount of sauce on bottom followed by a layer of noodles, a layer of sauce and a layer of shredded cheddar cheese.  Repeat until you have 3 layers.  Bake at 375 for 35-45 minutes.

It's very good and is a great dish to give someone for new baby in the house, recovering from injury, etc.  But 4 years ago, I was inspired by Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious to reduce or eliminate the creamed soup, and I was successful.  I substitute pureed vegetables for 1 or both cans of creamed soup. I've used yellow squash, carrots and pumpkin but the most popular, and the one I used most often, is butternut squash.  I tried it with the canned stuff once, out of curiosity, and it was awful!  Roasting and pureeing whatever vegetable you decide to use yourself is best.  Here's what I do.

Grilled Bruschetta Chicken

Here's another great recipe that my friend, Julia, shared with me - Grilled Bruschetta Chicken from Kraft Foods.  I declared it International Night in our house and made Grilled Bruschetta Chicken, guacamole and fried rice for dinner.  :o)  This chicken dish is easy and fast, a great last minute entree you can throw together in 30 minutes or less.  It's so easy, that I don't even follow the recipe measurements; I just eyeball and dump things together, depending on how many I'm cooking for.  So here we go...

You only need 5 ingredients: chicken, sun-dried tomato vinaigrette (or just Italian dressing if that's what you've got), basil, fresh tomato and mozzarella cheese.  First, pour some dressing over the chicken.

While the chicken is marinating, wash and chop a tomato and fresh basil.

Cooking Class instead of Leftover Wednesday

I don't have a Leftover Wednesday post this week.  Yesterday I gave my first private cooking lesson.  It  was 5 hours long, we made some great food together and had so much fun!  B and my student's children played well the whole time.  We chopped, talked, mixed, laughed, basted, cried, roasted, laughed some more and cleaned up.  My student bought all the food, enough for both of us to split; I couldn't have been "paid" any better than that!  ;o)  And she ordered pizza for lunch.

First we put a Beer in the Rear Chicken in the oven.  Here's all that's left of my half:

Next we made pico de gallo.  We put some of it in a bowl with mashed avocados for guacamole and some in another bowl with corn and black beans for salsa. There was leftover pico de gallo for my student to put over chicken, in tacos or to just eat with chips.

Then we made a huge batch of The Pioneer Woman's Chicken Spaghetti; enough to fill a casserole dish for me, one for my student and one for her neighbor!

I came home with so much food, dinner tonight will be all these wonderful leftovers.  I truly enjoyed cooking with a friend.  I'd love to do that on a regular basis - get together with friends, make big batches of dishes and we all go home with meals for our families.

Leftover Wednesday - Salad!

The hubs was really in the mood for a salad and I caught the fever.  Except for a BBQ, what says "Summer" more than a fresh salad?!  So, I pulled all of these ingredients out of the fridge and off the window sill to make dinner tonight:

• Cilantro
• Tomato
• Red onion
• Swiss cheese
• Iceberg Lettuce (still in the wrapper because we had such good intentions to eat salad daily when we bought it!)
• Carrots
• Celery
• Turkey lunch meat that was on day seven - use or lose
• A Ree Drummond Ranch Chicken Sandwich breast leftover from our water park picnic dinner, Monday night
• Bacon

I threw all seen above, including some shredded cheddar not pictured, into the fabulous, wooden salad bowl my MIL gave me for Christmas several years ago.  It was so delicious! Unfortunately, the avocados I wanted to include expired yesterday and did not make it in the salad.  :o(  There were leftovers for the hubs to take to work with him tomorrow for lunch, as well as for me to eat for lunch.  :oD

Leftover Wednesday - Monterey Chicken & Dirty Rice

After I graduated from college, I went to work at a restaurant named Steak & Ale.  I loved that place - the food was awesome and my co-workers were great.  My favorite dish was Monterey Chicken.  So, when I scoured the fridge and cupboards looking for something to do with the very last 3 chicken breasts in the house, Monterey came to mind.  I wanted something more flavorful than just plain rice to go along with it so I scoured the internet for a dirty rice recipe.  They all called for fresh peppers, which I did not have.  Then I found this recipe from VeggieBelly.com.  It's a homemade dry mix in a jar for gift giving and no fresh peppers needed!  So let's get started on what I did.

Here is a pic of (almost) all the ingredients I found in the house to use.  I had no green onions for the Monterey Chicken so I sautéed a Walla Walla Sweet because I just love them.  After taking this picture and then chopping all that needed chopping, I found 2 ears of cooked corn leftover from the weekend.  So I sliced the kernels off of one cob to add to the chicken and heated the other one up for B to eat with his dinner.

I roasted the corn kernels in a dry pan,

cooked the bacon,

and sautéed half an onion in the bacon drippings.

Salted and peppered both sides of the 3 chicken breasts and cooked in the bacon drippings for 2 minutes a side.  Drained them on paper towels and let the chix ingredients sit until dinner time.

Then I made the rice.  Brought 2 1/4 cups of water to boil and added 1 chicken bouillon cube.  I didn't even remember I had chicken bouillon cubes!  I bought them years ago when I was going to make a Paula Deen recipe and then decided not to make anything with a bouillon cube b/c of the ingredients.  However, I did not have any chicken stock on hand yesterday, so I decided to give it a try.  It worked out great.  After the cube dissolved, I added paprika, garlic powder, 3 times as much fresh oregano and thyme than the dry amount the recipe called for and 1 cup brown rice.  Brought back to a boil, stirred, covered and cooked on low for 55 minutes.

When it was time to eat, I turned on the broiler, rubbed one side of the chicken breasts with some BBQ sauce and put under the broiler for a few minutes.

Took the breasts out of the oven, turned them over and covered 2nd side with BBQ sauce.  Then topped with roasted corn, onions, chopped tomatoes, bacon and shredded cheddar cheese.  Put back under broiler for a few more minutes to heat up.  The broiler really crunched up the cheese.  Next time, I won't put the cheese on that early.  The heat of the chicken and toppings will be enough to melt the cheese if sprinkled on top immediately after coming out of the broiler.

All three of us completely enjoyed this dinner!  I hope you do, too, if you give it a try!

Recipe: Pan-Seared Chicken with Balsamic Cream Sauce, Mushrooms and Onions

I found this wonderful recipe for Pan-Seared Chicken with Balsamic Cream Sauce, Mushrooms and Onions from Peace, Love and Low Carb on Pinterest.  Chicken, butter, heavy cream, shrooms, onions...all my favorite things!  Oh, crap!  I just looked at the recipe again and realized that it called for parmesan cheese!  I totally missed that when I made the dish the other night.  LOL  I love parmesan cheese, too!  Well, I'll have to make it again and it will be even better with that addition.

This was a hit with all three of us, thank goodness.  Definitely adding this to the dinner rotation.  This is also a "guest worthy" dish, IMO.  The author made it in 2 pans but I just used one.  Why wash another pan if you don't have to?  As you can see, I served it over pasta, very unlow carb, but all that yummy, creamy sauce (sauce that would have been even creamier had I put the parmesan cheese in it) needed something to run into, cling to, and what better than shells?

The pictures on this blog look fabulous and I'm sure I will be making other recipes from it.  The author has beautiful, step-by-step pictures to walk you through this recipe, so go check it out!

Leftover Wednesday - Trial & Error Chicken

Saturday through Tuesday we were out of town, visiting my in-laws at their Summer home in the mountains of western North Carolina.  The hubs and I thought we had emptied the fridge of all potentially lethal-foods-if-left-unattended-in-the-fridge before we left, but we were mistaken.  ;o)  We came home to a smelly fridge and it took me a bit to identify the culprits - decaying cilantro and an avocado past its prime.

I awoke this morning with the intent to go mega-grocery shopping since there was not much in the house, but the hubs had other plans.  I am so impressed with the progress this man has made during our 17 years together!  He declared that since tomorrow, Thursday, was our BIG shopping day, we should "make do" with what we had today.  So, after taking B to see the movie, Brave, this afternoon, the hubs and B went off to the range, and I was left to figure out what to make for dinner (popcorn at the theater was lunch).  As you know, I always have chicken breasts on hand and usually chicken wings, pork chops and ground beef.  Before leaving for the range, the hubs said we can do "something" with chicken breasts.

I opened the fridge, stared and tried to receive inspiration.  I saw Brussels sprouts (thank you, Robin D., for correcting me on my reference of this vegetable!) and grape tomatoes, both of which were on the cusp of being thrown out.  Finally, inspiration hit me - Grilled Bruschetta Chicken!  I love this recipe!  It's one of the recipes my friend, Julia, passed onto me.  Although I did not have Kraft's Sun-Dried Tomato Vinaigrette Dressing on hand, I had over a pint of grape tomatoes, and I figured I could make something close to that.  I was patting myself on the back for such brilliance (waaaaay too early, it turns out).

I looked online for recipes of Sun-Dried Tomato Vinaigrette and decided I could substitute the "sun-dried tomatoes" with oven-roasting the grape tomatoes I had on hand.  @@ (That mean "eye rolling" in type.  You may already know that, but I did not always know that, so I am sharing in case you did not know that).  Then I looked online for a recipe to slow-roast tomatoes.  I found 2 that I liked.  One called for roasted grape tomatoes (which I had) for 3 hours at 225 degrees and one called for roasting plum tomatoes (which I did not have) at 450 degrees for 25-30 minutes.  Since it was already 4:20pm and I did not have 3 hours to roast said tomatoes, I opted for the higher temp/shorter time recipe.  Unfortunately, I did not allot for the fact that I had grape tomatoes and the recipe called for plum tomatoes.  So, I cut all the viable grape tomatoes in half, sprayed them with grape seed oil (I am allergic to olive oil), grinded fresh pepper corns over them and sprinkled them with Kosher salt.

Don' they look nice?!

I put them in an oven set on Convection Roast for 30 minutes and they came out looking like this...

OK.  So my attempt at Grilled Bruschetta Chicken! did not go as planned.  You know what?!  My "vacation" away with the in-laws did not go "as planned" either, but I was not going to be defeated.  By now, it was after 5pm, so I made myself a drink, and knew the hubs would help me figure out dinner when he and B came home from the range.  And he did!  He went out back and snipped some of our fresh herbs:

He snipped Rosemary and Thyme and mixed them with Panko bread crumbs, salt, pepper and I added Parmesan cheese and did the traditional flour, egg wash, seasoned bread crumb mixture into a pan with oil.  And that's all we had for dinner - chicken.  No Veg.  No starch.  Just chicken.  And it was so wonderful and flavorful that we did not need anything else!  We went/are going to bed as happy campers with full bellies!  Woohoo for Leftover Wednesday!

Recipe: Chicken Stir-Fry

Not the best photo! I totally forgot to take a picture of the wok or a plate before we dug in. So, this is what was left in the wok after we had devoured our shares.  Sorry!

The hubs made a double batch of rice last night to go with our Quick and Tasty Tilapia and I wanted to incorporate it with dinner tonight.  I was not in the mood to make the labor intensive Benihana Attempt, so I just made my simple Chicken Stir-Fry.  Stir-fries, like soups, are a great way to use up leftover or near-their-expiration-date veggies.  Tomorrow is our major, once-every-2-weeks shopping trip.  I had the following in the fridge left over from the last trip:

• one broccoli crown, 
• one-third of a bag of baby carrots and 
• baby bella mushrooms.

To those I added:

• half a sweet onion, 
• garlic, 
• ginger, 
• chicken breasts and
• Wegmans Stir-Fry Sauce, all of which I always have on hand. The Stir-Fry Sauce is not only flavorful, it's gluten-free, lactose-free, fat-free and vegan!

Recipe: Grilled Greek Chicken Kabobs

My friend, Julia, is a whiz on the grill and she always made delicious dishes that looked so elaborate to me.  But she shared the "secret" to her menu planning a number of years ago with all her friends: Kraft Foods.  She got their quarterly cookbooks in the mail and chose several seasonal recipes from them to add to her dinner rotation.  Luckily for me, they have a website full of these recipes.  Grilled Greek Chicken Kabobs was one she highly recommended, and it has been a staple in our house ever since.  I will use the grill no matter what the weather and this recipe does not use "seasonal" ingredients.  Chicken; yogurt (we use mayo); Greek salad dressing; red onion.  Does it get any simpler than that?

Served with rice and green beans.  I know, I know. You see A LOT of green beans in my pics.  But when the farmers markets are not open in my area, there are very few veggies we buy frozen - peas, corn and green beans.

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul

I have felt like crap for a week.  Like most people around here, I seem to be developing allergies in my old age.  My nose is running like a faucet, my lungs are full of gunk that I cannot blow out my nose quick enough, I had the croup for 2 days last week and have a cough that keeps me up.  I have gotten very little sleep which has made me short-tempered and very crabby.  I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired!


I've had no energy nor desire to cook while I've been sick.  You know I have got to be pretty bad off
to not want to cook!  Cooking is my happy place, my stress reliever.  As I lay awake Friday night, I realized I needed some homemade chicken noodle soup.  In addition to tasting good, making you feel all warm and full and reminding you of your childhood sick days when mom fussed over you, chicken noodle soup really does have "magical" properties that help get you better physically.  I usually make soups from scratch, starting with homemade stock, but had none in the freezer.  *sigh*

Recipe: Sautéed Chicken with White Wine and Shallots

I made one of my kick-ass dinners tonight.  I won a Weight Watchers cookbook a while ago; I believe it was a book of recipes from 2007.  I no longer have the book, but this recipe is a staple in my house and I highly recommend that you add this to your rotation.  It's not complicated and is very tasty!

Here's the recipe:

3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 tomato, seeded and chopped
1 large shallot, sliced
1 large clove of garlic, minced or pressed*
1/4 cup white wine
1 tbsp butter
Olive oil, salt, pepper, dried thyme, parsley**

Season both sides of chicken with salt, pepper and dried thyme and let sit.

Heat oil in a sauté pan; add garlic, shallot and tomato.  Sauté for a few minutes until shallots are softened.

Add chicken and cook halfway.  (I buy the 10 lb bag of Perdue Perfect Portions chicken breasts from Costco.  They are approx. 5 oz each and are fairly flat.  Therefore, they only need to cook 2-3 minutes/side.  Thicker chicken breasts will need to cook longer.)

After cooking chicken halfway, turn chicken over, add wine, cover and cook chicken the rest of the way.

Remove chicken to platter and continue to cook sauce to thicken to your taste.  Add more salt and pepper to taste, if you like (I never need to), and add some parsley and the tbsp of butter.  Once butter has melted and incorporated, pour sauce over chicken and serve.

See?  I told you it was pretty easy, and the taste really is kick-ass.  I served this tonight with rice and green beans.

*FYI - I usually double the amount of garlic called for in all recipes.  I mean, come on, 1 clove of garlic?!

**I do not buy fresh parsley and I feel that dried parsley is a waste of time b/c it is flavorless.  I have never tasted the difference in a dish with parsley in it so I don't bother with it.  If you feel differently, please add it.  Also, I am allergic to olive oil, so I substitute Wegman's Basting Oil.

I passed this recipe onto a friend of mine and she and her husband loved it.  While eating it, the husband wondered aloud if it would be great with shrimp, too.  They tried it with shrimp and said it was fabulous.  I can't wait to get some East Coast shrimp this Summer and try it myself.

Recipe - No Peeking Peking Chicken

Last week I made a new crock pot recipe out of my Rachel Ray Magazine called No Peeking Peking Chicken.  It was a big hit with all of us - phew!  As usual, I did not make the recipe according to directions; I made my own adjustments.  Did you expect any less?  ;o)

The recipe called for 8 bone-in chicken thighs, but I am only cooking for 2 1/2.  I bought a whole chicken, cut the two leg quarters off and just cooked with those.  The breast I will use in another recipe.  You have to fill your crock pot at least 2/3 of the way with food in order for things to cook properly.  The 2 leg quarters did not fill my 4 qt crock pot enough but were too much for my 1 1/2 qt crock pot.  So, I decided to slice up a few organic carrots on the bias and put them in the bottom of the pot to bulk it up.  That worked.  I put the leg quarters on top of the carrots and mixed the full recipe amount of sauce to pour on top.  It really did not make a ton of sauce.  However, after the cooking was done, there was plenty.

The recipe said to cook on low for 4 hours.  After over 2 hours the chicken, which I could see through the lid of the crock pot, had not even started to change color and I was worried it would not cook al the way through in time.  So I put the temp up to High for 1 hour and then put it back down to low for another 45 minutes.  When I opened the crock pot and took the meat's temperature, it was really high.  I took the thermometer out when it reached 192 degrees b/c it was still climbing!  LOL!  It did not matter, however.  The chicken was plenty tender and juicy.  Next time, I will let it cook at the recipe's time and temperature.  We served the chicken with brown rice and the carrots were flavored wonderfully with the sauce.

In the magazine, Rachel said to take your leftovers and make fried rice later in the week.  We, unfortunately, did not have any leftovers with which to make fried rice, but no leftovers is a good thing in my book.  Enjoy!