Portabello Mushroom Pizzas

The ingredients can be switched out with any pizza toppings of your choice. I created these pizzas on baby bellas, but the large sized mushrooms would work best. I wish I had a picture to share with you. The sauce came out juicier than I was expecting, but the final product was delicious.

INGREDIENTS:

• Portabella Mushrooms
• Packet of pizza sauce
• Mozzarella Cheese (shredded or cut into slices)
• Olives
• Pepperoni

DIRECTIONS:

• Remove the stems from each mushroom and place on a cookie sheet.
• Pour a light serving of pizza sauce into each mushroom.
• Top with shredded cheese, 1/2 of an olive, and a slice of pepperoni.
• Bake for approximately 10 minutes. 

Slow Cooker Shredded Chicken Tortillas

Ingredients (makes 3 large tortillas):

• 4 large pieces of chicken
• 3/4 cup chili con queso salsa (or regular salsa)
• 1/2 can cream of chicken soup
• 1 packet taco seasoning

Directions:

• Place chicken in crock pot and cover with packet of taco seasoning.
• Mix salsa and cream of chicken soup, then pour over chicken.
• Cook for 4-8 hours
• Shred chicken with a knife and fork. Serve into tortillas.

Bon Appetit!

Pork Chops- with Cream of Chicken Soup

INGREDIENTS

• Pork Chops
• 1 small can cream of chicken soup
• Hidden Valley Ranch dry powder mix
• Salt
• Milk (optional)

DIRECTIONS

• Cook pork chops for 2-3 minutes per side on the stove. Sprinkle with salt while cooking.
• In a separate pan, heat up one can of cream of chicken soup mixed with 2 tbsp ranch mix (or more, for taste). Add milk if you would like the sauce to be creamier.
• Pour sauce over chicken and serve.

For an even easier way to cook this...

• Place all ingredients in the crock pot. Cook on high for 2 hours or low for 4-5 hours.

When cooking in the crock pot, the sauce will be very thin. Add milk after cooking to thicken it, if preferred. 

Honey-Glazed Chicken

I've purposely never tried honey-glaze chicken recipes before. In general, I don't enjoy the taste of honey, so it wouldn't make sense to make an entire dinner devoted to it. However, after coming home late from work and looking for something to cook, I just happened to have all of the ingredients for this one in my cabinet. So I gave it a try.

 

While the sauce was heating up, I dipped a spoon in to try it out. It's my favorite part of cooking. I became a little worried though... I hated the taste of it. I was pretty much assuming I'd be putting on some shoes and socks and heading to the hot dog store down the street.

 

Don't be fooled though. When it all came together I was really quite happy with the meal. The honey wasn't as strong as I thought it would be, but it added a really nice taste that was different from what we were used to. I'm not sure if the soybean oil was the best choice though. Next time I make it I might skip it and see if it makes a difference.

 

 

INGREDIENTS:

3-6 pieces of chicken
1 cup flour
1 tsp Salt
2 tsp Chili powder
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp soybean oil or 1 tsp soy sauce
1 tbsp curry powder
1/2 cup honey
3 tbsp butter



DIRECTIONS:

• Pour melted butter in a casserole dish. Set aside.
• Mix flour, salt, and chili powder.
• Coat chicken in mixture and place in casserole dish. Flip chicken once to coat both sides with butter.
• Bake for 15 minutes.
• While baking, use a small sauce pan to make honey-glaze.
• Mix brown sugar, soybean oil, curry powder, and honey. Heat on stovetop.
• After 15 minutes of baking, pour honey-glaze mixture over the chicken and continue to make for another 20-25 minutes.

Notes: Half-way through the baking I used a spoon to take some of the sauce that had fallen to the bottom of the casserole dish and poured it over the chicken to recoat with honey-glaze.

Scalloped Potatoes

My favorite side dish yet...

This is the first time I've ever enjoyed Scalloped Potatoes, but I do have to admit that this is the first time that I've eaten them when they didn't come out of a pre-cooked box or bag. Give them a try... I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

INGREDIENTS

• Potatoes (3-6)
• Butter (3 tbsp)
• Flour (I've been using wheat flour for all of my recipes recently) (3 tbsp)
• Salt and Chile Powder
• Milk (1.5 cups)
• Cheddar Cheese (1.5 cups)

DIRECTIONS

• Peel potatoes and cut into slices about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick
• Butter a small casserole dish and layer half of the potatoes in the dish
• In a small pot, melt butter and then mix in flour.
• Once flour is completely mixed in, remove pot from heat
• Add milk to the pot, along with about 1/2 tsp of salt and a dash of chile powder. Mix together.
• Put pot back into the heat, whisking regularly until liquid starts to boil. Add 1 cup of cheese and stir. Mixture will be thickened.
• Pour half of the mixture onto the potatoes in the casserole dish. Put a second layer of potato slices over the mixture and top with the remainder of the sauce.
• Sprinkle the remaining 1/2 cup of cheese on top.
• Bake for 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Mixture will start to brown on the top when it is done.

Check out the "before" picture...

I served this with pork chops covered in the mustard sauce I posted a few months ago. The mustard sauce was a lot better over pork chops than it was chicken.

Baked Mashed Potatoes

Here's an easy way to make mashed potatoes with a slightly different taste.

INGREDIENTS:

• 4 large potatoes
• 1/4 cup milk
• 2 tbsp butter
• Parsley and Garlic Powder (optional)

RECIPE:

• Wrap each potato separately in tin foil and bake for 45-60 minutes. Sticking a fork through one potato after cooking will tell you if it's soft enough to continue.
• Using a paper towel to hold onto the first potato (they're obviously pretty hot), begin to unwrap from the tin foil. Peel off part of the skin and begin to scoop out the insides into a separate bowl. Do this for all four potatoes and throw away the skin.
• Begin mashing with a potato masher. Add butter and milk and stir until the texture is soft and smooth. Stir in about 1 cup of parsley and garlic powder to taste.

I like cooking mashed potatoes this way because the insides are guaranteed to be very soft after baking. So it's REALLY easy to mash up. Although you have to wait an hour for it to cook, it only takes about 5 minutes of actual preparation.

Stuffed Crust Pizza

Today's blog is less of a recipe and more of just an idea I hadn't thought of before... stuffed crust pizza. I was somewhat skeptical as to how this would turn out, but the process of making stuffed crust pizza was really straight-forward and produced exactly the result that I wanted.

The pizza that I made was approximately 12 inches in diameter. To stuff the crust, use 3-4 sticks of mozzaralla string cheese cut in half hot-dog style (remember hot-dog-style from grammar school??). Once cut, arrange the cheese around the perimeter of the pizza and fold the dough over, pressing it in to stick around the dough.

The rest can be assembled to your own tastes. To make the pizza above, I spread about 30 oz of Boboli Original Pizza Sauce, then lightly coated the pizza with shredded mozzarella cheese. Next I spread chopped up olives, artichoke hearts and mushrooms. I topped it off with the remainder of the bag of shredded cheese.

Since it's a thicker pizza, it took about 15 minutes to cook through.

Chicken Marsala

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 chicken breasts (flattened with meat mallet)
• 2-3 cups baby bella mushrooms (each chopped into four pieces)
• 1/2 cup parsley
• Vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup flour
• Salt, pepper, 1 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/2 cup marsala wine

DIRECTIONS:

• Cooking in vegetable oil in large skillet, cook mushrooms, parsley, and garlic powder for 5 minutes. Stir frequently.
• While mushrooms are cooking, coat chicken in flour.
• Cook chicken for 15 minutes (flipping once) with the mushrooms. Try to scoop as many of the mushrooms onto the chicken as you can... the mushroom flavor will begin to soak into the chicken. This will also keep the mushrooms from burning and will lessen the amount you need to stir/flip them.

• Add marsala wine and continue to cook for another 6 minutes. Flip twice.

When finished, not much liquid will remain in the pan. The wine will almost completely have soaked into the chicken.


Note: This chicken is quite easy to cook stovetop since the chicken is flattened. Be careful after adding the wine that you don't start to burn the chicken. Flip several times... the chicken should be sufficiently cooked through before adding the wine.



Derived from Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Twice Baked Potatoes

INGREDIENTS:
2 Russett Potatoes
2 tbsp milk
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 stick of softened butter
Salt and Pepper
Parsley

DIRECTIONS:

• Scrub potatoes and poke holes into each with a fork. Bake in casserole dish for 1 hour 15 minutes.
• Remove from oven and cut each potato in half. Scoop potato out of the skin to make "bowls". Leave skins about 1/8 - 1/4 inch thick. Put potato in separate bowl.
• Mash up potatoes with a masher. Add about 2 tbsp. milk and continue to mash.
• Stir in butter, salt, and pepper.
• Stir in cheddar cheese and add a bit of parsley.
• Scoop potato back into each skin "bowl".

Stuffed Potatoes before Baking

• Bake for 20-25 minutes. Let cool for about 5 minutes. Potatoes will form small brown spots on top when finished.

Recipe derived from Betty Crocker Cookbook.

Chicken Kiev

INGREDIENTS:

• Chicken breasts- flattened with meat mallet
• Butter (1/8 tbsp per chicken breast)
• Parsley
• Flour
• 1 Egg
• Breadcrumbs
• Salt/Pepper

DIRECTIONS:

• Flatten chicken breasts to about 1/2 inch thickness
• Sprinkle about 1 tbsp parsley on top of each chicken piece along with a dash of salt and pepper, and then place a 1/8 tbsp chunk of butter in the center of each.
• Put 1/4 cup flour into a bowl, 1 egg mixed with 1 tbsp water into another bowl, and 1/2 cup bread crumbs into a third bowl.
• Fold the first chicken piece into a ball. You'll need to hold it together completely and work on sticking the edges as you complete the next step.
• Dip chicken piece into flour bowl, egg bowl, bread crumb bowl... continuing to hold into a ball, pushing together the sides. Then dip back into the egg bowl and back into the bread crumb bowl. Place on an oven-safe dish and continue with remaining chicken breast pieces. This gets pretty messy... I pretty much submerged my hand into each mixture so that I could continue to hold together each piece of chicken.
• Top with parsley. On a skillet, gently cook chicken pieces on the stovetop for about 3 minutes per side. Then bake for approximately 20 minutes.

Enjoy!

Derived from Better Homes and Garden New Cookbook

Fettucine Alfredo with Chicken

INGREDIENTS

• Chicken- cut into strips or nuggets
• Flour
• Parmesan Cheese
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
• Salt, pepper, and parsley

DIRECTIONS

• Cook fettucine
• While water for fettucine is boiling, wash chicken pieces, coat in mixture containing half flour/half parmesan cheese, and cook over medium heat on stovetop until done.
• In the meantime, begin making alfredo sauce. In a saucepan, heat butter and whipping cream until butter is melting and liquid is lightly boiling. Continue to cook for 5-10 minutes on low. Then stir in cheese, salt, and pepper. Keep stirring on low heat until chicken and fettucine is finished.

Once everything is cooked, drain the fettucine and mix alfredo sauce into the noodles. Pour into a casserole dish and put the chicken pieces on top of the noodles to serve. Top with parsley.

SPECIAL NOTES:
This recipe originally called for 1/2 cup of butter, but next time I make this I am cutting it down to 1/4 cup to make it a little less fatty.

Alfredo sauce derived from Betty Crocker Cookbook- 6th Edition- 2010

Banana Pancakes

My track record with pancakes is pretty dismal. They're never circular, never thin enough, and often wind up one big pile of mush. However... when I made this banana pancake recipe, it didn't matter... they for once tasted delicious.

Don't get me wrong... these pancakes still didn't look the part. Matt took one look at the skillet and was convinced I was making some sort of exotic banana burger. They looked a mix between that and a well-done pork chop. However... I was SO surprised when I took a bite of one and realized that what was created was the most amazing pancake that I myself have ever cooked.

I followed the recipe almost exactly. So here is the link if you want to give this one a try:
http://www.howsweeteats.com/2011/06/whole-wheat-brown-sugar-banana-bread-pancakes/.

Next time I make them, I think I better use more milk than the recipe calls for or perhaps add an egg to the mix. They were very thick and it was hard to make them spread thin enough on the pan while they were cooking. Still... very good. I'll be making them again in the future, especially since the ingredients are mostly items we always have in the cabinet.

Shrimp Tacos

Tonight's shrimp taco recipe is based off of a recipe I found on Pinterest via my sister's repinning. The original recipe came from www.cleananddelicious.com if you would like to check it out. I changed it up just a bit, but mostly took their advice on how to make a special lime/cilantro sauce for the tacos. Here it goes...

INGREDIENTS

• Corn Tortillas
• Lettuce- shredded
• Tomatoes- chopped into small pieces
• Shrimp- 1/2 - 1 pound (tails removed and cut into small pieces)
• Optional- Salt/Pepper/Lemon Seasoning

For the Sauce:

• 1 cup (6 oz) Greek Yogurt
• About 1/4 cup cilantro
• Juice from 1 lime
• Chili Powder (about 1/2 teaspoon)

DIRECTIONS

This recipe is quite simple once you have the lettuce shredded, tomatoes chopped up, and all of the ingredients nicely layed out and ready to go. Before you start heating anything up, the sauce can be made simply by mixing up all of the ingredients in a small bowl. Set aside until you're ready to start assembling your tacos.

Next, heat up each tortilla on the stovetop until brown spots begin to appear. Set aside and cover with a paper towel until you are ready to assemble.

Finally, heat up the shrimp. I started with a bit of vegetable oil in the skillet (olive oil would have been preferred). I mixed in the shrimp pieces along with a dash of chili powder and a lemon-pepper seasoning. They only took about 1-2 minutes to cook.

Once you have the tortillas, sauce, and shrimp ready... it's time to dig in and assemble your first taco!


COMMENTS
The sauce easily could be made with sour cream, but neither my husband nor I can stand the taste of sour cream. Plus... the Greek yogurt is much, MUCH healthier. I'm still not totally thrilled with the taste of Greek yogurt, though, so I'm working on coming up with another alternative.

Slow Cooker BBQ Meatballs

The first half of this recipe is from The Slow Cooker Bible- Your All-in-One Guide to Successful Slow-Cooking

Ingredients

• 1 pound of ground beef
• 1/3 cup ketchup
• 3 tbsp. bread crumbs
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp. dried onion flakes
• 1/2 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp. black pepper

Mix all of the above ingredients together in a medium bowl. Form meatballs 1 inch in diameter. Place in a pan and bake for 18 minutes.

Additional Ingredients

• Barbecue Sauce
• Montreal Steak Seasoning

Once meatballs are browned in the oven, remove and carefully mix meatballs into about 1 cup of barbecue sauce. Place in slow cooker and cover with an addition 1/4-1/2 cup of sauce and top with the steak sauce seasoning.

Cook on Low for 4 hours.

We ate this one along with mac n' cheese.

Side Dish: Garlic Cheese Rolls

I'm not a fan of the typical spaghetti sauce. So when I make a spaghetti dinner I mix up the noodles in an Alfredo Mushroom sauce by Bertolli that I buy from Jewel. I love it and that's what we had for dinner tonight. We also used whole grain noodles, which taste pretty good and are much healthier (which balances out the Alfredo sauce which isn't all that good for you)!

Rather than having garlic bread, I changed things up and tried out something new. It was based off a picture I saw on Pinterest for Garlic Cheese Rolls. I couldn't find an actual recipe that I liked, so I made my own. Day 7, here we go...

Day 7- Side Dish: Garlic Cheese Rolls

INGREDIENTS

• Pizza Crust
• Butter
• Garlic Powder
• Sliced Pepper Jack Cheese (mozarella would make more sense, but I'm using up the Pepper Jack from yesterday's quesadillas)

RECIPE

1. Cut pizza dough into circles about 1 inch thick. Place on a buttered cookie sheet or pizza tray and smash down the center to create a bowl.
2. Put a small slice of butter into each bowl that will melt when put in the oven.
3. Cover each dough in sliced cheese.
4. Sprinkle just a dash of garlic powder onto each bowl.
5. Bake for about 10 minutes at 375.

Before it's cooked



After

Chicken Quesadillas

This is not my most creative of meals. I started out with the intention of making fajitas... then I switched to enchiladas... but really what I wanted all along was a good old quesadilla. Plus, by the time I got home from class at 7pm, I was ready to cook something easy and familiar and the quesadilla is what I decided to embark on. It's not the most visually appealing of my meals, but don't judge a book by it's cover!!

 

 

 

Day 6: Chicken Quesadillas

 

Earlier this morning I marinated chicken for this fajita/enchilada/quesadilla recipe. Here's what the marinade involved:

• Juice from one lemon (I realize a lime would have been ideal- but a lime didn't already exist inside our refrigerator)
• Cilantro
• Cumin
• Chile Powder
• Red Pepper Flakes
• More cilantro
• Parsley

 

The marinated chicken turned out to be tasty. We had some chicken bits left over and Matt and I both just ate them plain. I can't emphasize enough how much better this meal was with the marinated chicken!

 

 

You probably already know how to make quesadillas, but just in case...

  

INGREDIENTS

• Soft flour tortillas
• Cooked chicken
• Pepper Jack cheese with jalapeno bits (or Monterey Jack, of course)

 

DIRECTIONS 

• Cut up the chicken into cubes and cook on a frying pan. When finished, place off to the side until you're ready for it again.
• Heat up the tortillas on the frying pan, flipping every ten seconds or so, until it starts to bubble.
• Add cheese to each tortilla and chicken bits (on only half of each tortilla) and continue to cook without flipping
• Once the cheese seems almost all melted, fold over half of each tortilla making "sandwiches".

 

Your quesadillas are then ready to eat. I folded the tortilla over before the cheese was fully melted, because it was starting to look burnt. Even so... they didn't really taste like I burned them, they just tasted done.

 

 

 

We enjoyed these with a side (or appetizer) of chips and salsa.

Creamy Mustard-Sauced Chicken

This recipe is based off of one I found on letsdishrecipes.com via a post I saw on Pinterest. I've been planning this recipe all weekend and now finally got to try it out. I'm normally not a fan of mustard on sandwiches and such, but as part of this mixture to season the chicken I thought it was delicious.

Day 5- Dijon Chicken

Begin by seasoning the chicken with pepper and any dry herbs. Saute it over the stove. About half-way through add any fresh herbs you would like to include. I used sage and rosemary.

When chicken is fully cooked, place chicken on a separate dish and begin to make the sauce in the same pan you just used.

To make the sauce, just whisk together the following ingredients for about 2-3 minutes.

• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1 cup heavy whipping cream
• 3 tbsp. Dijon Mustard
• Oregano

Pour over chicken and enjoy!


Serving Suggestions
I poured the sauce over the chicken in a shallow bowl, because it turned out less creamy than I was planning. There was a lot of extra sauce, so I poured some of the excess in a mini-serving bowl and dipped pieces of chicken in it as I was eating. I served it with the same crock pot- corn on the cob recipe that I used last week.

Day 4: Jalapenos are Lethal

Recipe for the Day: Jalapeno Pepper Steak

Warning: Wash your hands thoroughly after handling jalapenos before itching your eye! Will cause dangerous burning. !!!

Ingredients:
1/4 cup of flour
Salt
Pepper
Jalapeno Peppers (I used 3)
2 tsp Worcestshire Sauce
Pepper Steak

• 1 bought about 1 lb of Pepper Steak to make a meal for two
• In a large shallow bowl,I poured the flour and added a dash of salt and a generous amount of pepper.
• I then took the pepper steak, which was already cut into strips, and I put it in the bowl and mixed everything around until all the steak was coated. I then placed it in the crock pot.
• I then cut the jalapenos into strips, not including the seeds. Add them to the crock pot.
• I then put about 2 cups of water, 2 tsp of worcestshire sauce, and then sprinkled on some garlic powder and onion flakes that weren't entirely necessary.

I cooked on high for five hours and then spread it over a casserole dish filled with rice to make a nice little beef mixture.

Special Note: Matt loved this meal and said it was his favorite this week. I, however, thought it was disgusting! I hope you'll agree with Matt and not me!!

Day 3: "Not-Parmesan-Chicken" and Crock Pot Corn on the Cob

My plan all day was to try a really easy parmesan chicken recipe. I could have sworn we had a half-full container of parmesan cheese in the cabinet.

But it turns out we're fresh out, which means breaded chicken is on menu for this evening!

First things first- corn on the cob in the crock pot.
At around 1pm I buttered two cobs of corn and lightly coated it in parsley.
Next I wrapped them each tightly in tin foil and placed them some-what verticalled in the crock pot. I filled it with water so that the water covered a little less than half of the corn.
I left it in there on low for about 4 hours.


The chicken was real simple, too (simple seems to be my thing).
I dipped six chicken legs in eggs and coated them with Italian Style Bread Crumbs.
I placed each of them snuggly in a small casserole dish.
I chose dill weed as my choice of spice for the day... for no other reason than I hadn't used it in awhile. I suppose just about any spice on our rack would have worked fine. I put a solid amount of dill weed on each chicken leg.

This cooked in the oven at 400 degrees for 60 minutes. I carefully flipped the chicken every twenty minutes.

Last time I cooked a similar meal it turned out awful, because I didn't let the breadcrumbs cook long enough.

Day 2: Spicy Shrimp Stew

Woah was that spicy!

Ingredients used:

• Chicken Broth
• Shrimp
• 3 Jalapeno peppers
• Red pepper flakes
• Curry
• Cumin
• Parsley
• Cilantro
• Juice from 1 lemon

Matt and I could hardly eat it without our eyes watering... it was SO spicy! I enjoyed it though quite a bit.

It was pretty easy to make, just throwing it all into the crock pot and stirring occasionally. I had class at 4pm, which made it a good meal that I could let cook while I was away.

Bread in the oven! Time to go check on it!

Day 1: Lemon-Salmon with Rosemary

Today I become a chef.


I just picked my first fresh batch of rosemary, thyme, and sage today from my little window-sill herb garden. What's on the menu for dinner, you ask? Lemon-salmon with a few sprigs of rosemary. I'm excited about actually having a meal that looks the part... and these fresh herbs I think are key.

I wasn't sure exactly what to do with these leaves, seeing as though it's my first time. So I google-imaged a few pics and watched a few youtube videos and decided to pick as many branches as I could... sealed the herbs in a few ziplocs... and have them neatly lined up in our freezer. Crossing my fingers that this is the "right thing to do".

I've also washed my hands about seven times since I finished these preparations and my fingers still smell like herbs. I'm enjoying that.

Before we get into the actual recipe, you should know that I am not a cook. I have been married now for just shy of two years (yes, I still consider myself a newlywed) and have yet to find a knack for this cooking business. It's especially tough working full-time and trying to learn something SO BIG. So I'm using my summer off from teaching this year to take risks in the kitchen, document them, and figure this cooking thing out once and for all. I hope you'll join me on this journey and try a recipe or two out for yourself.


Recipe 1:
Ingredients:
1 lemon
A few sprigs of rosemary
Salmon

I layered a oven-safe dish with tin foil and sliced up the lemon into about 4 full slices.
Then I placed each piece of the two pieces of salmon over 2 slices of lemon and placed it all on the dish. I always seem to have trouble with food sticking to the dish or tin foil, and I felt these lemon slices solved that problem.

Then I chopped up the rosemary (or you could use dry rosemary) and sprinkled it on top. This added some flavor, but mostly it just made it look pretty "official".

I then cooked it all for about 25 minutes and it was done! Cooking the salmon on top of the lemon gave it a TON of lemony flavor. The lemon just sizzled amazingly while cooking the the salmon absorbed it all quite nicely.

This was easy. No matter your ineptitude at cooking, I assure you this one is cheap and painless!