This Week's Tastiness Part Two

I loved the Chile Verde recipe I made last week so much, that I decided to make it again this week. I hope that makes it a strong enough endorsement for you to consider adding this recipe to your arsenal of favorite recipes. I know I've added it to mine. It's so easy.  It takes about ten minutes of chopping vegetables, but then you just dump it all in a crock pot and let it cook for eight hours and you're done!

Mom and Dad were here this weekend and while they were getting packed up this morning, I went ahead and started making my meals.  This gave Mom the chance to taste a fresh tomatillo and Dad the chance to correct my pronunciation of it (he doesn't like tomato-like products).  It also gave me the chance to impress Dad with my ability to cook two meals simultaneously.  He's a great multi-tasking cook, and he was proud to have passed the skills on to me.

My second recipe I found on the Bell Plantation web site.  Bell Plantation makes PB2, a powdered peanut butter product that I've heard lots of people rave about on various diet/healthy living blogs.  It is just ground peanuts with a bit of salt and sugar, so it is much healthier for you then the peanut butter you buy in the store. You can either mix it with water to make peanut butter or you can use it in the various recipes they have on their site.   If you've been reading the blog, you know I love peanut butter, and I thought this would be both a healthier way to eat it and a simple way to control it (you only mix up enough peanut butter for one serving at a time.)

I decided to order some this week, because I've been curious about it.  Mixing it with water actually makes pretty tasty peanut butter, but I also wanted to try some recipes. So I found  PB2 and Pasta Bake on their website and set about making it. It wasn't until I was done that I realized the recipe never told me when to put the PB2 in!  It has it listed in the ingredients, but never told me what to do with it, so it ended up being a regular old pasta dish, with no exciting peanut buttery twist.  Oh well, it's still pretty good.

Here's a picture:

This Week's Tastiness

This week I made two recipes. One was recommended by able-bodied girl in one of her recent blogs and can be found online at the Year of Slow Cooking. It is called Chile Verde, and it involves chuck roast, tomatillos and diced tomatoes.  I was interested to try it because of the tomatillos.  Tomatillos are from the tomato family, but are smaller and green.  I had seen them in the produce section back when I was regularly searching for new fruits and vegetables to try for your reading pleasure, and thought they looked interesting. Plus, I love the green salsa at Moe's, and I think tomatillos are what makes that so tasty.

It cooked all day in the slow cooker today and it was DELISH! I'm not the best at describing flavors, but this had a sweet, almost tangy taste. I highly recommend it.  I served it with crushed tortilla chips on top.

These are tomatillos.

My second recipe was Chicken and Broccoli Casserole.  Despite it  receiving rave reviews on Sparkrecipes.com, I was not sure it would be good.  I've made a similar casserole before that I did not love.  I swapped the recommended Cream of Mushroom soup for Cream of Chicken, basically because Cream of Mushroom is gross.  I also thought about reducing the cheese to make it lower in calories and fat, but I'm glad I didn't.  It was super cheesy.

Enjoy!

Today's Tastiness Part Two

Today is Sunday! That means I made my two meals for the week.  One is an old favorite and one is brand new recipe.

I've been craving some soup because of the cold.  I'm not much of a soup person, though, so I wasn't sure what to make.  But then I found this recipe  in my stack of recipes. It was sent to me by my friend Monica last February, but I've never made it.  I'm not sure why except that I think I really have to be in the mood to make soup and I just haven't been.
It doesn't have a name (she sent it to me by email), so I'm just going to call it Sausage Soup.

1 garlic clove, minced
1 red onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
15 oz kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 can diced tomatoes with juice
Turkey sausage, cut into bite-size pieces
1/4 tsp thyme
1/4 black pepper
6 cups of chicken broth
1 cup of rice
Put it all in a crock pot on low for four hours.

My modifications: I'm not sure I got the right kind of sausage, I didn't have six cups of chicken broth (used three instead) and I only put in half cup of rice.  Plus, I swapped the kidney beans for black beans, because kidney beans just turn me off.  

I haven't tasted it yet (it's still cooking), but last year when she sent it to me, Monica said her family enjoyed it often.

My second meal this week, I've made a bunch of times. It's filling and tasty and reheats well. It's called Chicken with Rice and Peas. I'm just going to type it in with my modifications.

1 bag of frozen pea

1 cup of microwaveable brown rice

Cooking spray

1 pound chicken breasts, cut into bite size pieces

1/4 cup of soy sauce

Cook rice in microwave. Brown chicken in skillet with cooking spray. Once browned, add rice, frozen peas, soy sauce to skillet and heat through. 

So that's what I'm eating this week. What's cooking at your house?

Today's Tastiness

I've had some requests recently to share more recipes. I thought maybe I could make it a weekly thing, where I share the recipes I make?  We'll see. This week I made two. Click the recipe title to see the full recipe.

Black Bean Chicken
This was super easy. It was an open and dump it in the slow cooker kind of meal.  I added a package of frozen corn and a package of frozen peas to up the veggie content, although next time I might replace the peas with some other vegetable..  I left out the rice and was going to cook it separately, as I saw a lot of comments on the recipe that said that made it mushy.  However, when I sat down to eat it, there was so much food to a portion I didn't think I actually needed the rice. It was really good. Here's the finished product:

Crustless Spinach, Onion and Feta Quiche
Now something you may not know about me is that I hate eggs. They are revolting to me.  They have always grossed me out, especially the smell. Mainly this affects breakfast, especially when you're getting fast food (Of course, I don't do that so much any more) because every bloody breakfast sandwich has a disgusting sheet of egg on it. But I digress.  I'm trying to be a bit more grown-up in my approach to egg, plus eggs have a lot of protein, so when I saw this recipe and the picture looked pretty tasty, I thought I'd give it a whirl. I added green peppers to the spinach and onion to up the veggie quotient. It was pretty good hot, but rewarmed today for lunch was not the greatest thing.

Here are some pics of the progress.

Egg. Gross.



Added the veggies.


  

Finished product.