What I cooked this week: Better late than never edition

Monday, I thawed out some chicken that's been hanging out in the freezer and made BBQ chicken, green beans, and potato salad. This is kind of my favorite meal, I think it's at least my favorite for my mom to make. Pour BBQ sauce on chicken, stick it in the oven. I prefer French cut green beans, but I've only ever seen those in the can and we don't really do canned veggies around these parts anymore. I'm not about to get all fancy with my cutting of green beans either. I should have made potato salad like my mom does, instead I made Pioneer Woman potato salad, it was rather strong.
Tuesday: Salmon patties, fries. I went grocery shopping this day, I like to cook simple meals on grocery days. Canned salmon (make sure it says "wild"!), drained, flaked, egg, bread crumbs if you're fancy (or if you actually have some bread, I didn't). Fries: cut potatoes, fry them.
Wednesday: I made that sausage pasta again except this time I ruined it. I tried a different kind of sausage. I thought it was called apple-something-or-other, didn't realize it actually had apples in it. It was sweet, which is fine for breakfast sausage, but not for sausage in an Italian warm pasta salad type dish. Bleck.
Thursday: Roast chicken, sweet potato fries (with cream cheese brown sugar dipping sauce), mushrooms and onions. Chicken was roasted using the Peruvian chicken recipe from an old Everyday with Rachael Ray issue, I've talked about it before. Sweet potatoes were cut and baked with a little olive oil (these are what Will had for supper that night as well, sans dipping sauce), mushrooms and onions were sauteed together in a little olive oil. Mmmmmm......
Friday: Oh, Friday? We went out on a date! No baby and everything, first time ever. More on that later.


(Oh, that first pic? Yeah, it's from some time before last week, I just wanted a square. And can you guess which is the "his" and which is the "hers" of the bottom 2 pics?)

What I cooked this (last) week: Thanksgiving

Here is where I try to remember what I cooked last week since I should have posted this sooner.

As far as I can remember, I only made a few things and they were all one-dish meals.



I know there was a pasta bake. I mixed elbows and shells, added some jarred sauce (Newman's Own Sockarooni, I believe), ricotta, Italian cheese blend, mozzarella, parmesan, and some extra seasonings. It all goes together on the stove, then I spread it into a baking dish, top with cheese, and bake until bubbly.

I also made this "Hawaiian rice" dish that I've been making since I copied it out of my text book for cooking class in 9th grade. It's cooked rice, onion, soy sauce, salt, pepper, scrambled egg, cooked bacon (crumbled), and green onion. I mix it up a bit sometimes, this time I added toasted sesame oil. Sometimes I add chicken, I've also used chicken sausage instead of bacon and replaced the green onion with bell pepper. Peas are good in it too.

While browsing through a magazine (I want to say it was Rachael Ray), I spotted an ad (don't remember what it was for, Hillshire Farms maybe?) that had this pasta dish with sausage in it; it looked good so I did my own version with items I had on hand. Elbow pasta, asparagus, mixed frozen veggies (green beans, yellow beans, carrots), beef polska kielbasa, salt, pepper, parsley, what little Italian dressing I had left, and olive oil. All of the ingredients were cooked and then combined. It's kind of like a warm pasta salad. It was a hit.

I also made stuffing for our Thanksgiving meal. The recipe I used was "Mushroom and wild rice stuffing" from the Thanksgiving issue of Everyday with Rachael Ray.

And then there were left-overs.

Oh, and here's a tasty treat:


Peanut butter banana open-faced s'mores.

What I cooked this week: Sick

Not much cooking was done this week since we have all been sick. A lot of canned soup was had and we had some chicken pot pie left from last week.
Here are the few things I did cook:
My chicken and rice soup using the rest of the chicken from last week. I don't know if it was because I was sick or what, but it was soooooo good this time. We ate this for a couple of days.
Last night we had "Bratwurst and Apple Kraut", a recipe from theBetter Homes and Gardens Crockery Cooker Cook Book, except I replace the bratwurst with polska keilbasa. Gag! Blehg, yuck. The apples (it calls for tart apples) make it so sour I could hardly eat it. I tried adding extra brown sugar but it didn't help much. I cooked us each a baked potato to go with it and mixing the kraut with the potato really helped. I won't be making this again.
Today was grocery shopping day, so I usually prepare and easy meal on those nights. Tonight it was tuna burritos, yes tuna, if you try it you'll understand.



Mine consisted of: whole wheat tortilla, re-fried beans (canned), tuna (we get the low sodium Starkist can), and Mexican cheese blend, and was topped with taco sauce, jalapenos, pepper jack cheese, and sour cream, with avocado on the side.

Wow, I really didn't cook much this week.



(Soup photo from Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr.)

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.