Sunday Dinner

We attend a very small church, my family makes up half the members. We usually go out to dinner as a group of 11 to 15, which I might add is a bit difficult to get seated quick at a restaurant. We also try to swap hosting dinner at our houses. This week we decided to be host. Since we decided at the last minute and didn't want to do any huge special trips to the store I checked my pantry and came up with chicken noodle soup, chili, and Pioneer Woman chocolate sheet cake. My mom and sister will bring crackers and corn bread and we are all set.  So tonight I've gotten my meat cooked for chili, and I have chicken and vegetables going for soup.  Even though these are super simple to do I thought I would go ahead and write down recipes for them, or at least what I'm doing this time, its different every time I make either soup or chili. These recipes make it so easy to feed a crowd. Before we head off to church we will get the chicken soup going and boil the noodles and add it to a slow cooker on warm, put all of the chili ingredients into another slow cooker and by the time we get home it will be heated up. Cake is done, it only bakes for 20 minutes and icing takes about 10 minutes start to finish. Yum! Looking forward to spending time with my family and not have to spend a lot of time getting things put together and clean up will be a snap.

Chili

• 1 1/2 pounds ground beef, cooked
• 2 cans Hot Chili beans
• 2 cans Red beans, rinsed and drained
• 2 cans Diced or Crushed Tomatoes
• Chili powder or Chili seasoning packet
• 2 cans of water

Place all ingredients in slow cooker and cook on low until heated through.

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Chicken Noodle Soup

• 2 pounds Chicken Thighs with bones
• Water
• 2 tsp Poultry Seasoning
• 1 cup Frozen sliced Carrots
• hand full of Onion
• 1 bag whole wheat egg noodles

Place chicken in 4 qt stock pot, cover with water or combination of water and chicken broth/stock. Add remainder of ingredients except noodles. Bring up to boil. Cover and turn on low for 2 hours. Take out chicken, let cool, take meat off bones and add back to pot, discard the skin and bones. Bring back up to bubble and cook noodles according to packaged directions, Serve.

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Pioneer Woman Chocolate Sheet Cake

CAKE:

• 2 cups Flour
• 2 cups Sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon Salt
• 4 Tablespoons (heaping) Cocoa
• 2 sticks Butter
• 1 cup Boiling Water
• 1/2 cup Buttermilk
• 2 whole Beaten Eggs
• 1 teaspoon Baking Soda
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla

FROSTING:

• 1/2 cup Finely Chopped Pecans
• 1-3/4 stick Butter
• 4 Tablespoons (heaping) Cocoa
• 6 Tablespoons Milk
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla
• 1 pound (minus 1/2 Cup) Powdered Sugar

 I use an 18x13 sheet cake pan.

In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt.

In a saucepan, melt butter. Add cocoa. Stir together.
Add boiling water, allow mixture to boil for 30 seconds, then turn off heat. Pour over flour mixture, and stir lightly to cool.

In a measuring cup, pour the buttermilk and add beaten eggs, baking soda, and vanilla. Stir buttermilk mixture into butter/chocolate mixture. Pour into sheet cake pan and bake at 350-degrees for 20 minutes.

While cake is baking, make the icing. Chop pecans finely. Melt butter in a saucepan. Add cocoa, stir to combine, then turn off heat. Add the milk, vanilla, and powdered sugar. Stir together. Add the pecans, stir together, and pour over warm cake.

To serve, cut into squares.

*note I did not add nuts to our cake this time*

Our Favorite Pork Loin

Just so you know its hard for me to get a pork loin done since there is such a fine line between done and over done. I do enlist the help of the husband most of the time when it comes to pork since his hobby before woodworking was bbq contests. He is kind of particular when it comes to pork loin, pulled pork and ribs. I get the meat marinating and leave it to him to get it cooked just right.

Balsamic Pork Loin

• 2 tablespoons steak or grill seasoning (our favorite is tastefully simple Everyday Grill seasoning)
• 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 pounds boneless pork loin roast

Dissolve steak or grill seasoning in balsamic vinegar, then stir in olive oil. Place pork into a resealable plastic bag and pour in marinade, seal bag.  Marinate 2 hours to overnight.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Place pork into a glass baking dish along with marinade. Bake in preheated oven until the pork reaches an internal temperature of 145 degrees, about 1 hour. You can use sliced pork loin as well just cook it in half the time. Let the roast rest for 10 minutes before slicing and serving.

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Steamed Zucchini

• Diced Zucchini
• Salt
• Pepper
• Grill Seasoning
• Olive Oil

Mix all and steam in the microwave for 4 minutes, or until zucchini is tender.

Slow Cooker Whole Chicken and Broth

My very least favorite part of cooking is dealing with meat. I'm not sure it will ever be easy for me to pull the gizzards out of a chicken, or if I will ever be able to pat out hamburgers or not cringe when breading fish. I still use wooden spoons and gloves to get a meat loaf put together. Go ahead and laugh, my husband laughs at me for that too. You would think that after 9 years of marriage and experimenting in the kitchen I'd already be over my meat issues, granted I am better, well a little better than I was 9 years ago. I used to bypass the meat section at all costs, and just go for frozen chicken breasts and send my husband to Sharps (local grocery store) just to get ground beef. Now, I do pass through the meat section, grab what I need and get out..that's an improvement, right. Alright I'm sure you will read more about my issues with meat in later posts now back to that chicken. Note that every time I do a chicken in the slow cooker its different than the time before so feel free to tweak it to what you have on hand.

Slow Cooker Whole Chicken

• 1 whole Chicken, thawed (be sure to pull out the bag of 'goodies' from the neck, it will ruin the whole chicken if its left in, yeah I learned that the hard way)
• Raw Carrots (whatever you have on hand, I ususally add about 10 baby carrots)
• Poultry Seasoning or Season Salt or Grill Seasoning
• Minced Garlic (optional, or about 2 tbsp)
• Salt and Pepper
• Water
• And if your adventurous you can add butter under the skin (I've only managed to do that once, and it wasn't a pleasant experience, wooden spoons and gloves did not make it any easier)

Place chicken in slow cooker, toss in carrots, garlic, sprinkle with seasoning, salt and pepper. Add enough water to cover half the chicken, turn on low and cook all day. Shred the meat for a couple meals that week. Save the bones for free broth!

Broth

Place the bones back into the slow cooker with the carrots and other juices from the chicken, add 6 to 8 more cups of water. Turn the slow cooker on low and cook all night, in the morning let it cool a little and strain out the chunks and bones. Pour it into jars or plastic containers, put lids on and let cool on the counter for a little bit, place in the fridge. If you have a grease separater use it, if not just scrape off the gelled fat from the tops after its cooled in the fridge. I fill my containers with 1 or 2 cups to make it easier to use in recipes. Then freeze them until your ready to use them.

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Making FREE Broth is so rewarding! Try it and you will see what I mean!

Alfredo Sauce

My favorite homemade sauce to make has to be Alfredo sauce. I had found a quick recipe for homemade Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo with Veggies in with the Sunday coupons back from 2011. It wasn't homemade enough for me so I had to tweak it and 'google' a recipe for Alfredo sauce. Most of the recipes I found had cream but I didn't have cream, I hardly ever have cream on hand. I hit it lucky when I found a recipe that used cream cheese instead. So easy and I always have stuff on hand to make a quadruple batch, one batch isn't quite enough for a full pot of fettuccine, but one and a third is perfect. So my quadruple batch is really enough for 3 meals. It's so easy to make a huge batch and freeze the rest for later, might as well since your making a mess anyways.


Alfredo Sauce (quadruple batch)

• 4 tbsp Butter
• 8 tbsp minced Garlic
• 4 tbsp Flour
• 4 cups Milk (or if you don't want to use up 4 whole cups of milk, use part chicken broth)
• 1 cup Cream Cheese (1 full block)
• 1 cup Parmesan Cheese
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Saute butter and garlic for 30 seconds. Whisk in flour until it bubbles and soaks up butter. Whisk in milk (and broth).  I like to use half chicken broth and half milk. Cook continually until slightly thick, about 2 minutes. Stir in cream cheese and Parmesan until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Divide into thirds, use one for dinner tonight and freeze the other.

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If you want to try the recipe out for just one dinner, here are the amounts for a single batch.

Alfredo Sauce

• 1 tbsp Butter
• 2 tbsp minced Garlic
• 1 tbsp Flour
• 1 cup Milk (or half milk and half broth)
• 1/4 cup Cream Cheese
• 1/2 cup Parmesan Cheese
• Salt and Pepper

 Saute butter and garlic for 30 seconds. Whisk in flour until it bubbles and soaks up butter. Whisk in milk (and broth).  I like to use half chicken broth and half milk. Cook continually until slightly thick, about 2 minutes. Stir in cream cheese and Parmesan until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Divide into thirds, use one for dinner tonight and freeze the other.

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Now on to my tweak of the found recipe for Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo with Veggies.

Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo with Veggies

• 1 box Fettuccine
• 1 bag frozen Veggies- about 3 cups (I use a combination of broccoli florets and carrots with about a cup of mixed vegetables of corn, carrots, peas and green beans)
• 1 batch Alfredo Sauce (which is 1 1/3 of the quadruple batch
• 1 1/2 cups cooked chicken

Start by boiling water in a big pot for pasta and cook as directed by the package.While pasta is cooking, in a  separate pan heat up Alfredo sauce and chicken.  Midway through cooking the pasta (stop your timer) toss in the frozen vegges into the boiling pasta water, bring back up to boil and restart your pasta timer. Check pasta and vegetables for tenderness. Drain pasta and veggies, reserving 1 cup pasta water. Add Alfredo chicken mixture to the pasta and 1 cup reserved pasta water and toss until coated.

Crockpot Mexican Shredded Beef

We absolutely love Mexican food. We went to a tiny Mexican restaurant in St.Louis just down the road from Barnes hospital called Tortillaria Mexican Kitchen & Tortilla Company. First of all I could have eaten an entire jar of their homemade salsa. And second their shredded beef for their tacos was so good. My husband and I were talking and wondering if we could make taco beef at home with a roast. You know there is only so much you can do with a roast, although I do have a good recipe for roast which I will post some other day. So back to this experiment. I saw a couple recipes that sounded alright but I was too scared to go full throttle and follow the original recipes so I tweaked them into my own. Also this is my absolute first time ever using chilies in Adobo, (which was in the salsa at the restaurant that I liked so much).Well, we will see how it turns out.

Crockpot Mexican Shredded Beef

1 Roast (no idea how big it is or what kind of roast it is)
2 Tbsp chilies in adobo (blended until smooth)
a generous sprinkle of garlic salt
a generous sprinkle of Cumin
1 can of Dr.Pepper or 1 can of beef broth

Place roast in your crock-pot, dump in soda, spread chilies across roast, sprinkle on spices. Put the lid back on and set it on high for 8 hours. Shred it and separate the bones and fat. Serve with favorite taco toppings or use for nachos.

**Note- I used 1/3 of a can of chilies in adobo and it was too much, too spicy.**

My Mom's Smoked Sausage with Green Beans and Potatoes

When I was growing up my mom would fix smoked sausage with green beans and potatoes and honestly I wasn't a fan of it. She continues to make it for lunches and I have gotten to where I enjoy it now. I decided to finally try making it myself for my family. I just started winging it and it turned out just like moms. My husband liked it too! Win! My kids also eat it very well at grandmas and eat it great at home too. Here goes my recipe.

Smoked Sausage with Green Beans and Potatoes

1 package of Smoked Sausage, cut into 3 inch chunks (I use Eckrich Turkey Smoked Sausage)

3 slices of Bacon

4 Potatoes, peeled and sliced 1/2 inch thick

2 cans Green Beans

Handful of onion (optional)

Drizzle a little olive oil in a skillet, add potatoes and cook on med/high heat until browned on both sides.

Add bacon and onions, cook a few minutes. Add green beans with their liquid (you can drain and rinse the green beans to lesson the sodium and use water instead). Add sausage. Lower heat to med/low. Cover and simmer until sausage is warmed through and potatoes are tender. Feel free to tweak it to your liking.

*Don't let the rest of the bacon go to waste. Bake it at 375 on a slotted baking sheet (broiler pan or metal cooling rack placed into a sheet pan) for about 18 minutes until crisp. 

Pizza and Pancakes

My husband is typically in charge of homemade pizza and pancakes. I've managed to make pizza crust once. And pancakes once. Here are our favorite recipes for both. I will go for pizza crust first. Although I don't remember exactly how its all done. I may have to consult the expert on this post. The instructions for pizza crust are directly copied from Barefoot Contessa on food network. We've been using this recipe exclusively since 2008.

Pizza Crust

• 1 1/4 cup warm Water
• 2 pkg Yeast
• 1 tbsp Honey
• 3 tbsp Olive Oil
• 4 cups whole wheat flour
• 2 tsp kosher salt

Combine the water, yeast, honey and 3 tablespoons of olive oil in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook. When the yeast is dissolved, add 3 cups of whole wheat flour, then 2 teaspoons kosher salt, and mix on medium-low speed. While mixing, add up to 1 more cup of flour, or just enough to make a soft dough. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes until smooth, sprinkling it with the flour as necessary to keep it from sticking to the bowl.

When the dough is ready, turn it out onto a floured board and knead it by hand a dozen times. It should be smooth and elastic.

Place the dough in a well-oiled bowl and turn it to cover it lightly with oil. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and allow the dough to rise at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Dump the dough onto a board and divide it in half and cover them with a damp towel. Allow the dough to rest for 10 minutes. Use immediately, or refrigerate for up to 4 hours.

Press and stretch each ball into 2 big sheet pans lined with parchment paper or coated with a little oil (If you've chilled the dough, take it out of the refrigerator approximately 30 minutes ahead to let it come to room temperature.)

Add your toppings. My favorite is green peppers, onions, black olives and mushrooms. Bake 10 to 15 minutes at 500 degrees. Yum!

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I do hope you know how to cook pancakes, so I'm just going to post the recipe without the steps of cooking and flipping pancakes. And I have absolutely no idea where or how we came up with this recipe. With help from the pancake chef of the house I found the original recipe on the Gold Medal website. Breakfast for dinner happens a couple times a month plus a couple weekend mornings as well. It's a definite dinner that my husband, Chuck, can pull off without any help or ideas from me, and its always perfect.

Pancakes

• 2 cups Whole Wheat Flour
• 1/4 cup Sugar
• 2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/2 tsp Salt 
• 2 Eggs 
• 2 cups Milk
• 1/4 cup Oil

Cook on a hot griddle, they are ready to flip when you see bubbles.
We make a huge batch of these and freeze them. We fold them up in wax paper, then pop them in freezer bag them the freezer and reheat in the microwave for breakfast.

*I  just saw from the original recipe that you can substitute melted butter for the oil and make waffles. We haven't found the perfect waffle recipe yet, so this one we have got to try.

Bowtie Pasta with Roasted Red Peppers

I couldn't help but to post another recipe...or two....and a tip.  Today I was home with 2 sick kids so I spent some time in the kitchen cleaning and getting a menu plan  ready for the week. I also cooked a partial bag of frozen chicken tenderloins to use for dinners this week. I have found it so  much easier to cook a whole bag of chicken at once to make dinner prep that much faster, especially on days that I work and my husband is in charge of getting dinner on the table. I try to plan easy dinners for him to get ready, and do more prep ahead of time. Half of the chicken I baked got sliced for this bowtie pasta, and the other half of the chicken got chopped into small pieces to go into chicken cheese crescents (recipe below) for Thursday dinner that I will put together Wednesday morning while my daughter is at preschool, so when my husband does dinner he can just pop them in the oven and heat up a veggie for dinner.


Broiled Chicken

Turn on the broiler. Dump a whole bag of frozen chicken tenderloins on a big sheet pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper or grill seasoning. Bake at 350 for 7 minutes, flip and bake another 7 minutes until done. Let cool a little bit then chop or slice as needed and divide in meal portions and toss in the fridge.

This will be our dinner tomorrow night. It was originally found here. So here goes my tweak...


Bowtie Pasta with Roasted Red Peppers and Grilled Chicken

• 1 lb. bowtie pasta
• 1-1 1/2 lbs. grilled chicken, sliced
• handful of diced onion (since my family isn't fans of onions, I chop and freeze them and use them sparingly)
• 3 tsp minced garlic (I sometimes have garlic on hand or a store bought jar)
• 4 Tbs. butter
• 1 cup milk (I rarely have half and half on hand, some times I add 2 oz of cream cheese along with the mlik to make it creamier)
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 1 tsp. grill seasoning (tastefully simple is my favorite)
• 12 oz jar roasted red peppers, sliced
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Cook the pasta according to the package directions. While it cooks, melt butter in a skillet over medium heat and cook the onion and garlic till soft. Whisk in milk and chicken broth. Stir in grill seasoning and mozzarella. Lower the heat to keep the sauce from boiling.

Add the chicken and red pepper slices to the sauce. Stir frequently and keep and eye on the heat so it doesn't boil. Drain the cooked pasta and stir it together with the sauce.

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Here goes my mother-in-laws recipe originally made with tuna, then she tweaked it by using a can of chicken. It quickly became my favorite meal to request for my birthday dinner every year, for about 13 years in a row.

Chicken Cheese Crescents

• 2 cups Chicken, cooked and chopped 
• 1 can Cream of Chicken Soup (Homemade version found here, of course I tweak that too) 
• 1 can crescent rolls 
• 1 1/2 inches of velveeta cheese 
• 1/2 soup can of milk 

Mix chicken with 5 tbsp cream of chicken soup and about 1/2 inch chunk of velveeta cut into small cubes. In a microwave safe dish (I use an 8x8 square baking dish) add remainder of chicken soup, 1/2 can of milk, and 1 inch velveeta cubed. Microwave on high 3 minutes until melted. Unroll crescent rolls into individual triangles, divide chicken mixture into each one and roll up starting at big side and roll to small point. Place rolls into cheesy 8x8. Bake 375 for about 30-40 minutes until brown and bubbly.

Chicken Cheese Crescents can be made a few days in advance and put in the fridge, or even frozen up to a week. They can be made using grilled chicken, canned chicken or rotisserie chicken. It can easily be doubled in a 9x13.

There ya have it, 2 more recipes and some tips.