52 in 52 #33 - Homemade Chicken Fried Rice

I love chicken fried rice.  It is honestly one of my favorite things to order from any Chinese restaurant.  Other than egg rolls, but who doesn't love egg rolls?  I know that it sounds boring to say that fried rice and egg rolls is one of my favorite dishes to order, but anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not an adventurous eater.  I like certain things and I rarely step out of that comfort zone to test anything else. 

I wanted to figure out how to make chicken fried rice at home, because it seems like it would be easy and something that I could make quickly on a busy night when I have nothing else planned.  I found this recipe on Pinterest which made it almost seem comical how easy it looked to make.  I don't know that I have mentioned this before but thanks to Grace's generous grandmother we have been getting farm fresh eggs... they are awesome!  If you only buy eggs from the store, you forget what an egg is supposed to look like - note the awesome orange color of the yolk! 

It took a bit to prepare because you have several pieces (chicken and rice) that ultimately get combined together once they are cooked, but the combination of the items was super easy.  The result was something that tasted like it could have come from any half-decent Chinese food restaurant.  It wasn't the best fried rice that I have ever had but it was definitely something that I would make again, especially considering the ease that it came together. 

Try it and let me know what you think!

Homemade Chicken Fried Rice
Prep time: 35 mins
Cook time: 15 mins

Ingredients:
4 cups rice, cooked
2 chicken breasts, chopped and cooked
3 Tbsp sesame oil
2 cups frozen peas and carrots
1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
2 eggs
1/2 cup soy sauce

Instructions:
Prepare rice and chicken.  I cooked our rice according to the bag instructions and I sautéed the chicken in a little bit of olive oil with some salt and pepper to taste.  In a large saucepan, heat sesame oil over medium heat.  Add peas & carrots, garlic and onion and sauté until soft.  Once softened, add eggs and scramble.  Add rice, chicken and soy sauce and cook for approximately 5 minutes until all ingredients are heated through. 

Serve warm. 

Enjoy!

52 in 52 # 30 Salsa chicken

Over the last few years, I have a new found love for making food for my family.  Before that, I was never a chef, by any means.  I was capable of making simple items like a grilled cheese or some boxed max and cheese but nothing that would have been considered from scratch or that contained more than a few ingredients.  Over time I became more and more interested in cooking.  Fortunately, for people like me, there are a million websites for beginning chefs who need even the most basic of assistance, and now there is Pinterest, which is a cook-in-training’s best friend.  Because of the internet, thousands of recipes are available to you in the click of a button. 

 

My sister pinned the original recipe for Salsa Chicken from Pinterest a while ago.  I never looked at it because the picture isn’t the most appealing photo that could have been taken of that recipe.  One day, I was bored with what we had for dinner options and decided to give it a try exactly as the recipe stated.  We absolutely loved it!  My sister said that they have served it over rice, in tortillas, or just alone with a side dish.  It is amazing with any of those options.  Our favorite way to serve it is over a homemade Spanish rice. 

 

Of course, because we are who we are, the subsequent times that we made this recipe we changed up the ingredients a bit.  Now that we have a different version we like it so much more.  This recipe originally called for sour cream to be added into it, but we changed that to cream cheese and we love that addition.  It gives the dish a creaminess that fools your body into thinking that it is super cheesy without all of the added calories of putting cheese into the dish on top of the sour cream.  We also add more than double the salsa that it calls for.  We love spicy things and if Grace wasn’t eating with us and if the babies toddlers weren’t eating out of our bowls, we would probably make it spicier.  What makes this recipe even better is that it cooks in the crock pot and is completely a ‘set it and forget it’ style meal.  This recipe is very simple and easy to assemble. 

  

Salsa Chicken

Prep Time: 10 mins

Cook Time: 4 hours

 

2 frozen chicken breasts

1 can reduced fat Cream of Chicken Soup

2 cups your favorite salsa

3 ounces fat free cream cheese

3 Tbsp Homemade Taco Seasoning**

1 can black beans

 

**Refer to this post here, if you have not made your homemade Taco Seasoning.  If you don’t intend to do that, you would substitute an entire pouch of Taco Seasoning from the store in this recipe.

 

Place 2 frozen chicken breasts in the bottom of your crockpot.  Sprinkle taco seasoning evenly over frozen chicken.  Pour cream of chicken soup and salsa on top of chicken.  Do not stir.  Cook on high for 3.5 hours.  After 3.5 hours, remove lid, shred chicken, add can of black beans, and cream cheese and stir to combine.  You can either remove the chicken from the crock pot and shred outside of the container using whatever method of shredding chicken that you prefer, or you can use two forks and shred it while it’s still in the pot.  We have done it both ways and it yields a similar result both ways. 

 

Serve over rice, wrapped in tortillas, or on its own with a veggie or salad.  We have had it several different ways and I must admit that I love it served over rice.  You can easily substitute sour cream for cream cheese and you can use the full fat/calorie versions of all items as well but we are trying to make this as healthy as possible.  You can add more or less salsa depending on how spicy you like it.  The original recipe called for 1 cup of salsa and I don’t think that you should add any less than that for fear of it being too thick or losing some of its necessary flavor. 

 

Made as our recipe describes there are 302 calories in a 1 cup serving.  This will make approximately 6 servings of 1 cup each.  This is very filling and using our Spanish rice recipe makes the total calorie count still appropriate for a calorie conscious dinner and it is very filling. 

 

Try it out and let me know if you make any substitutions as I am always looking forward to trying new variations of my favorite recipes. 

 

Enjoy!

 

-Sara

 

 

 

52 in 52 #19 - Chicken Noodle Soup

I have been looking for a recipe for a decent chicken noodle soup forever.  All of the ones that I have tried so far have either had way too much salt, not enough seasoning at all, noodles that fall apart, or something else that made you think that you wasted an entire evening cooking something that you just want to throw away.  Since I have been having some luck with Pinterest recipes lately and since it was perfect soup weather today in DFW, I figured that I would try out one of the popular recipes that I found this afternoon. 

Thanks to wanting to make a chicken pot pie at some point during this month, I already had the ingredients for this recipe on hand.  I also took a look through the recipe to ensure that there weren't any steps that made me rethink the author's sanity.  This is a step that I used to not perform, and then I was burned by several awful recipes and decided that I had to start previewing the recipes before cooking.  This recipe did not seem to have any out of the ordinary steps, so I figured that we were good to go. 

This recipe is very good and was an excellent end to a cold, rainy day here in the Metroplex.  My husband said that the seasoning was lacking something but I think that he is looking for something that he is never going to find with a recipe for chicken noodle soup because my kids and I thought that it was great.  I did make a few minor changes to the recipe.  The original is here and you can find mine detailed below. 

Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup
Prep time: 15 mins
Cook time: 1 hour 30 mins

Ingredients:
2 whole chicken breasts
1 medium to large onion, chopped
3 tbsp. chopped garlic
2 tbsp. olive oil
1 lb carrots, chopped
1 bunch celery, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 tbsp. chopped, dried parsley
1/2 tsp thyme
1 tsp dried basil
1 tbsp. salt
1 tsp black pepper
water
16 oz egg noodles

Place chopped garlic and onion in large stockpot with olive oil and sauté over medium heat until tender.  Add carrots and celery and continue to sauté for 2-3 minutes.  Add herbs, salt, pepper and chicken breasts to pot and cover with 8 cups of water.  Bring the mixture to a boil and immediately reduce to a simmer.  Continue to simmer for one hour.  After one hour, remove the chicken and shred finely with two forks.  Add at least 1 tsp more salt at this time, depending on how salty you like your soup.  Add a little more than you care for, because you have yet to boil the pasta and add additional water and that will lessen the saltiness of a soup.  Add the noodles, raise heat and boil for 7 minutes.  After 7 minutes, add chicken back into mixture and add at least 2 cups more water.  I had to add another 5 cups to get the amount of soup that I was looking for and to even out the liquid to noodles mixture.  Ensure that water that you are adding is hot or else you will have to spend another 5 minutes heating mixture again to avoid hot and cold spots in your soup.  Season again and serve warm. 

Enjoy!

52 in 52 #15 - Southwest Chicken and Rice Casserole

I promise I am going to blog about something other than recipes... eventually.  I have been in the zone lately making recipes that I find from Pinterest, it seems.  And (knock on wood) they have been mostly positive experiences. 

Next up on the list is Southwest Chicken and Rice Casserole.  Let me be honest here... I was originally annoyed by this pin because it is just a picture when you click on it.  I don't understand why people do this for a recipe.  Take me to someone's blog or website that has made the recipe and can give clear, descriptive instructions.  I don't want to see a picture with your less than 100 words of description/recipe.

With that being said, I still took the chance and it turned out great.  Our latest version of taco seasoning that we made is a little bit more spicy than I care for, but it made this dish very flavorful. 

Southwest Chicken and Rice Casserole
Prep time: 15 mins
Cook time: 25 mins

Ingredients
2 large chicken breasts
2 cups instant rice - we used brown
3 tbsp. homemade taco seasoning or 1 packet
1 can tomatoes and green chiles
1 1/2 cups water
grated cheese

Instructions:
Cut chicken up into bite sized pieces.  Add water, taco seasoning and tomatoes and green chiles.  Heat until boiling.  Add rice and stir together.  This is where we differ from the recipe.  We heated our mixture to boiling again after the rice was added, then immediately covered and moved the temperature down to low on our stove top.  Once water is absorbed, stir completely to combine and top with shredded cheese. 

We served ours in a bowl and it was amazing!  It has great flavor and is super easy to make.  The cheese melts and makes it creamy and delicious! 

Enjoy!

November Meal Plan

We are in our third month of working on a monthly meal plan and I finally feel like I am getting the hang of it.  In earlier months, I was always forgetting something.  The first month I totally spaced on what I was going to serve for breakfasts for any of our family.  Then last month, I forgot to plan what Corry, Grace and myself were going to take for lunches.  Overall, this has been going well though.  I feel like I am saving money on groceries overall because I am making less shopping trips, resulting in fewer impulse buys.  Plus, I have been buying produce through a local CSA (review pending) thus reducing our produce bill to $15ish a week. 

As a reminder, I will run through the general steps that I follow to get a monthly meal plan.  I first look at a calendar that has our activities on it to figure out how many meals I will need.  I know that for November, we are camping two times for a total of 5 nights that I will not need to include in my standard meal plan.  I will plan those, but I will do that separately.  Based on where we are in the month and how many meals we are skipping, we need 23 meals for this month.  Then I go through my Pinterest, and my basic list of meals that I know that our family likes and decide what I want to make.  I usually keep it to the favorites and add in a few new recipes.  I also figure out how many meals that I am making to put in the freezer.  Normally I budget about 1-2 meals a week to make and stash in the freezer.  This post will cover the meal plan portion.  I will continue on the next post with the grocery list and how I plan my shopping trip(s). 

November Meal Plan

1. Pinto beans and cornbread
2. Beef chili - we eat ours with fritos and cheese
3. nachos - chips, cheese, jalapenos, beans, and taco meat with extras
4. pulled pork (recipe post to come), pasta side dish and veggie
5. country style pork ribs, mashed potatoes, and veggie
6. Grilled steak and chicken, rice side dish and veggie
7. Baked tacos
8. Stuffed bell pepper casserole
9. salsa chicken & Spanish rice
10. pizza roll ups & garlic cheese bread
11. chicken noodle soup & grilled cheese
12. chicken spaghetti
13. breakfast for dinner - pumpkin pancakes and sausage
14. chicken chili - same as beef chili for fixin's
15. chicken fried rice and egg rolls
16. ravioli with homemade spaghetti sauce & garlic cheese bread
17. beef tips, rice and gravy
18. cheesy chicken and rice
19. baked tacos
20. baked spaghetti (recipe post to come)
21. salsa chicken and Spanish rice
22. nachos
23. Grilled steak and chicken, red beans and rice side dish and veggie

Those are our basic meals.  I also planned this month to make stuffed shells, baked spaghetti, 2 more chicken spaghettis and another round of chicken chili for the freezer. 

Remember that even though my meals are numbered, this is just a list of possibilities for the month and not a day by date mandate.  There are times when I get home and don't want to cook a meal like chicken spaghetti, so I might pick a chicken chili that day.  It seems to work easier and allows us more flexibility on days when the meal that would be listed for that day isn't a possibility.  Recipes that I have available on my blog are linked above and I will be posting more in the days to come. 

What are some items on your meal plan for this week?  If you have any tips or tricks to further simplify this process, please share. 

Monthly Meal Planning - September

I like meal planning.  It gives my type A, list-making personality something to smile about.  I try to help my family stick to a meal plan/meal budget, but we can all do better.  For me, going to the grocery store weekly for a more frequent meal plan is the quick way to financial disaster.  Even at Aldi, there are times when I get out of there $30 over the budget that I came in with.   I got inspired by an awesome woman named Julie (mammaneedsanap) that I follow on Youtube who meal plans by the month, and I am going to give that a go for September. 

Luckily, Corry and I have been stocking up and keeping certain ingredients on hand for months now of foods that we favor, so the shopping trip for this month is not as massive as it would be if we were starting from scratch.  It is not a lie to say that thinking about spending a bulk of our grocery budget in one trip at the beginning of the month is a bit daunting.  I understand that we will still need to shop weekly or so in very small doses for things like milk and our CSA produce, but the vast majority will be purchased in this one day.  I decided to play it safe and stick with mostly meals that we have made before for this first month, however I did throw in a few meals that we have not had previously to test a few new recipes. 

I am not changing the way that I meal plan/build a shopping list/etc; I am just planning for more meals upfront.  I will include recipe links when I have them and will do recipe posts on the ones that I don't have yet.  I will also keep up the practice of not planning a specific meal for a specific day unless we have produce that is going to spoil soon, etc.  We are less likely to stick to a plan, for some reason, if we are "forced" to have a certain food on a certain day. 

Here are our meals for the month:

Salsa Chicken & Spanish Rice x 3
Breakfast Casserole
Grilled Steak & Chicken, grilled sweet corn & fruit salad x 2
Chicken Chili x 2
Spaghetti x 3
Tuna Salad (kids will have something else not decided upon yet) x 2
Baked tacos x 3
Pulled Pork & side dish
Spinach, Alfredo, & turkey pepperoni pizzas
Grilled chicken salads
Sandwich & Homemade Soup (cream of chicken with wild rice & chicken noodle) x 2
Chicken Spaghetti x 2
Red Beans & Rice
BBQ Chicken Sandwiches

I need 28 dinners total for the month of September.  This is technically 25, but I gave us three dinners eating out in case we are out later than expected or feel like a treat.  Most of these recipes are 'diet' and I will include the nutritional info on them in the recipe post if I have it.  If not, I will include the portion(s) that we are having so you can get a general idea.  I need to shop at three different stores to get all of the items that we need - Target, Aldi, and Walmart or Albertsons.  Target's shopping trip was a bit distracted because of diapers, a new skirt for Grace and a few other random items but we did manage to get $10 worth of grocery items.  Aldi was where I spent the bulk of our money and it amounted to $111 and some change, which wasn't bad considering that consisted of a large volume of meat.  I still need a buy 2 items from the list that they don't sell at Aldi and they didn't have for some reason at Target.  All in all, our budget this month for groceries should be less than $200, which is pretty good for a family of five.  Next month that will change because we won't have as many items on hand and we will have a different menu (hopefully).   

Have you ever done a monthly meal plan?  What did or did you not like about it? 

My mouth is on fire!

My husband had to work late tonight for his job and I get home later than most Americans, I think, from work which stinks especially considering that I leave my house in the mornings around 5:30am.   Because of this we decided that Chicken Express was going to make an appearance for dinner. Bad, I know, but still so good.  I must confess -  I am super excited (sarcastically) about cooking when I get home from an 11 hour workday and a 1.5hour commute each way.  Pretty much the only thing I am excited about after work is seeing my family, vegging out on the sofa and convincing my husband that I am not going to fall asleep watching television.  We have been together since 2007 and I would say that on average I fall asleep watching television at night at least 3-4 nights a week... for some reason he doesn't just leave me there.  I'm not going to lie that if I had to gripe to someone to get off the sofa and go to bed everyday for 5+ years, that I would be sleeping alone and they would be on the sofa!!

 

For all those who aren't swooning right now about our dinner, or those who live under a rock and are unfamiliar, Chicken Express is a fast food chicken place with awesome sweet tea (unsweet now for us), chicken and sides.  Up until today I had a love/hate relationship with their chicken tenders, okra, yeast rolls, and jalapeno poppers.  Now it's more of a straight-up hatred.  They have changed their recipe or started using only the seeds in their poppers or something.  Normally you got one really hot one in a batch and the rest just have the awesome flavor of cheddar cheese and jalapenos without the insane heat.  That was refreshing because you could get the heat but still taste the rest of your dinner.  The last time we ate there all four of them were BURNING hot.  I do not appreciate spicy foods to begin with, and especially not hot enough food where I feel like smoke is coming out of my mouth.  I like the taste of jalapenos and I like to cook with jalapenos but that's where I draw the line.  I don't need to cry while eating my food and I don't need to have my tongue burned off in order to feel like I had an awesome eating experience. 

Now, after five of them, I think that my tongue has been singed and is potentially going to crumble to ash in about five minutes.  Not a good feeling.  Now that we know this little piece of information, will we continue to order them?  In all honesty, yes, because they are awesome.  If I could figure out how to make these at home, we wouldn't eat there nearly as often and I would still have some feeling in my tongue. 

-Sara

Cheesey Chicken Spaghetti recipe

A few observations for a Sunday:

First, Sunday comes WAY too early in my weekend.  It feels like yesterday was Thursday and here I am back to dreading going back to work tomorrow.  How does this happen? 

Second, Lemonade Vitamin Water Zero rocks my world...until I saw the ingredient list... It's supposed to be a water substitute - why does it have ingredients that I can't pronounce? 

Third, when my children don't get their scheduled naps, being a mom who drinks wine out of a sippy cup and pops pain pills doesn't seem so bad.  Silas missed enough of his normal nap(s) today that he fell asleep during dinner tonight.  Big problem.  Anyone who has had to wake up a child like that knows the Hell and torture that is to come until you can get that child back to sleep.  Luckily, he loves sleep like Corry and I do so he was right back to sleep after his bath and a bottle. 

Today was supposed to be productive.  I had an unstated to do list that was mostly done.  There were several items that had to get done:

1. Section out that bacon and ground beef that I bought yesterday and get that in the freezer.
2. Do at least a few loads of laundry.
3. Make at least one freezer meal. 

Chicken spaghetti it is.  This recipe was adapted from the Pioneer Woman's awesome chicken spaghetti.  Sometimes I will go back and make hers but usually I tweak it to our family's interests.  We have recently discovered roasting our own Poblano chiles and so we include a sizeable amount of those in our adaptation. 

Cheesey Chicken Spaghetti
3 cups cooked spaghetti - broken in half
2 chicken breasts - cooked and cubed
2 cans cream of "something" soup - you can use your favorite mixture of mushroom, cheddar cheese, or chicken)
1 cup chicken broth
1 jar diced pimentos, drained
1 small onion - diced
roasted poblano peppers to taste - we used two whole peppers this time and it was a bit spicy
1.5 tablespoons seasoning salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
salt and pepper to taste
2.5 cups shredded cheese - we Colby Jack but have previously used cheddar/mozarella blend

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 13x9 pan and set aside.
-Cook chicken until done then cube.  We boil on the stove.  Place in large mixing bowl.
-Add salt to same water used to boil chicken and cook broken pasta according to directions on package.  Drain and put in same bowl with the chicken. 
-Add both cans of soup.  Normally we use one cheddar cheese and one cream of chicken but we have also used one cream of mushroom instead of cheddar cheese soup and it turned out great as well. 
-Add your broth, pimentos, onion, peppers, seasoning salt, cayenne, salt, pepper and shredded cheese to the pasta and chicken mixture.  Stir until well combined. 
-Pour into greased 13x9 pan and place in over for 45 minutes or until bubbly around the edges.  Allow to set for at least 5-10 minutes before serving. 

Let me know how you like it!!