What I cooked this week

I'm thinking I want to start doing a weekly post sharing the meals I've cooked with links to recipes and how they turned out. So here goes.



This past Saturday we hosted a picnic at our house. Our main course was fried chicken, then I made a few things and had friends bring something if they could. My sister came over Friday to help me make:
Vegetable soup (my own recipe, which I'll write down and share next time I make it.)
"The Ultimate Baked Beans" from Tyler's Ultimate: Brilliant Simple Food to Make Any Time, you can also find the recipe here, but everything I've made from that book has been excellent.
Macaroni and cheese from The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl (I add paprika). Possibly my favorite cookbook.
We also made a couple Pinterest finds, Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Brownies, and Pumpkin Pie Dip.
Everything was great, and people seemed to like it all. I do have to remember though, when I make those baked beans again (I've made them once before), to drain the canned beans. The recipe doesn't say to, or not to, so we drained half and they were still very liquidy.
We also made some chipotle ranch with peppers left from the baked bean recipe by modifying a recipe my sister found online. A little spicy for some, but it was excellent for dipping (even chicken) and mixed into the mac & cheese!

I didn't cook as much as usual this week because we had leftovers from the picnic.

For our regular meals this week I made roast chicken from The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook: Recipes for the Best Pan in Your Kitchen, slightly adapted and I didn't use the cast iron skillet this time because I was in the process of re-seasoning it.
For some reason I keep trying different roast chicken recipes, I guess because I don't want to do the same one all the time. I should though, because nothing compares to the Peruvian Roast Chicken from the February 2009 issue of EveryDay with Rachael Ray.
We had mixed veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots) with it—which is what Will ate that night—and I made a little pasta and alfredo sauce. The sauce is a couple tablespoons of butter, flour, milk, garlic salt, pepper, cream cheese, and parmesan.
I like to do a whole chicken every couple weeks, we usually get 3 meals out of it, plus lunches. Sometimes I make stock using the bones and innards. This time I saw part of the innards I didn't care to see and then could not use them. Let's not talk about it.
I also made open-face sloppy joes from the same cookbook. That's when I realized my skillet needed re-seasoning. Uneatable.
Our second chicken meal was a chicken pot pie. Unfortunately, I didn't make enough sauce/cream/whatever-you-call-it for the filling, so it was a little dry. Whatever that is was composed of butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper, thyme, and oregano.
Today, I actually made breakfast! I love making breakfast, but as I've mentioned before, it doesn't happen as often as I'd like. Thanks to the veterans, husband was off today so I made breakfast before we headed to Thomasville for some what-I-wish-was-more-than window shopping. I made Basic Breakfast Potatoes from The Pioneer Woman. On the site she says to boil your potatoes first, but in the book it says to bake them, eh whatev, I microwaved them because I didn't have the 45 minutes to spare. I was also out of onion, but I had a bell pepper, so I used that. Add some fried and scrambled eggs, and bacon and that was breakfast.



Tomorrow, Will and I are going to a little brunch, so tonight I baked too many of these pumpkin muffins from Smitten Kitchen. Smitten Kitchen is my absolute favorite website for recipes and the photos are uh-may-zing. Of course we had to test a muffin from each batch. The second batch I only used one egg instead of two, because, well, I only had three eggs. Somehow they seemed more moist, Shawn liked the first batch the best. I didn't use liners; I don't know if I've ever bought liners. I just sprayed the pan a little and there was no sticking at all. Mmmmm.