Freezer Cooking

I've had several requests for recipes I use for freezer cooking.  Honestly, before Oliver and Pinterest, I never cooked to freeze - now it's how we eat!  If you follow me on Pinterest, you have all of my recipes - but if you don't, here are some of our favorites.

Spinach & Artichoke Pasta

Chicken and Wild Rice I

Tomato & Spinach Pasta

Chicken and Wild Rice II

Mexican Layer Bake

Lasagna Layers

There are probably others I'm forgetting, I make these most frequently and other times just toss random things in a dish and bake it.  My sister and I lived together for eight years and she'd often pick on me for making up random casseroles.  I like to keep things interesting :)  Granted, they weren't all very good!

The Chicken and Wild Rice I is by far my most favorite.  Another one we like frozen is penne pasta with a jar of marinara sauce and a jar of alfredo sauce mixed and topped with mozzarella cheese.  I think there's a pin for that on my recipe board, but it's so easy there's no point in directing you to it.

For now, since Oliver eats so little, I can get two meals from each recipe.  Sometimes I'll double the recipe to have four meals.  I mainly do that with the Chicken and Wild Rice I b/c it takes a little longer to make and we all love it.  We use the small square baking foils and cover with two layers of heavy duty foil.  I normally just write what's inside along with baking instructions and the date so Chandler can pop them in the oven if I'm not home.

I normally devote an afternoon to cooking and make several things at once.  I find that it's much easier for me that way, and I like knowing I have a few weeks worth of meals.  It's also easy to coordinate ingredients that way too - for instance, today I made four recipes and three called for sauteed onions and most all had pasta.  It's just nice to be able to use and re-use pots and pans without completely overloading the dishwasher.  Every now and then I'll cook during the week, but usually I only make crock pot recipes during the week and pull out freezer meals or something else to fill in the other days.

I'm a huge fan of crock pot/slow cooker meals.  I have a handful of go-to meals for that, again, on Pinterest.

What are your favorite recipes?    

White Pizza

Why haven't I made this before now?! Easy and delish. Had to share!

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VA has a sweat shop...

...and it's at my house.

BUSY weekend of sewing... I ended up with EIGHT stroller blankets (a small sampling below)

and had some fabric and minky left over, so I decided to try a burp cloth: 

I like!  If I can remember, I'm going to pick up some cloth diapers at Babies to make some more with all the extra fabric pieces I have laying around... 

It's been a while since Belle made an appearance, she's enjoyed the cool weather and walks to the dog park we have tucked at the back of the neighborhood.  

 This picture is just for Clarky... my Pampered Chef guru.  Wonder if she remembers this recipe??

(Hint: that's chicken in between the red pepper and broccoli)

The best part, is that I laughed when I was making this because it was a PC recipe and I just happened to be using ALL PC utensils - Clarky could only be more proud if I was a consultant! :)

Muffin Cupcakes, Mmm!

Tonight I attempted Butternut Squash soup - did you know that power tools are required to cut those things?!  I didn't think I'd ever cut into it... I finally gave up and had to go find Chandler to cut it for me.  The soup looked really, really good, but was a complete let down.  Maybe I just don't like butternut squash. 

What WAS good though, were my pumpkin muffin cupcakes - DELISH!  And they were the easiest things ever.  I read several different ways to make them and in the end didn't use any particular recipe - instead, I combined a few things and just made my own.  Box of spice cake, 20oz pumpkin, 1/2 c water, chunk of butter, mixed well - then I baked them at 350 for 20 or so minutes.  I think it was longer, I didn't really time it to be honest.  We had them plain with our gross soup and then put cream cheese icing on top of another for dessert.  We really like pumpkin around here! :)

Mom makes the BEST pumpkin roll ever!  It's in the Joy of Cooking so I should make it sometime, but it's just better when someone else does it, ha!  Do you know of any good [easy] pumpkin recipies?

Bon appetit - dégoûter! Or, ewww!

Not too long ago, I might have mentioned on Facebook that I enjoyed some Wendy's chicken nuggets dipped in a chocolate frosty.  I might have done that.  It should be noted that I really don't eat meat.  I'll eat chicken from time to time, but for the most part (that's for you Irene), I don't eat any meat.  Since Bino has been in the belly, I've been extra aware of what I eat... that's not to say I haven't consumed chocolate pie, but I have eaten some things I wouldn't normally eat - chicken being one of those things. 

Tonight, however, I saw THIS video.  I am a Jamie Oliver fan (did you know he named his new baby boy Buddy Bear Maurice?  Yeah, and you thought Gilgamesh was a bit over the edge...), but don't have any of his cookbooks.  I hope the recipe on the video is NOT in any - ha!  Unlikely.



Do YOU eat the nuggets?  It's safe to say my nugget days are over.  NASTY!  I can't believe I let myself eat that stuff... I thought about not posting because this was a little to might-barf-everywhere, but then decided that it's worth sharing.  Sorry.  But aren't you glad you saw?  Doesn't it make you think?  Even if our favorite Christian chicken, Chick-it, Chick-fil-a didn't use mechanically separated chicken, doesn't it make you wonder?  Zaxby's is another chicken place I will eat from - I might have to question my attempt at eating meat.

AND - get this... so I have this thing where I'll order a kids meal from McDonald's or Burger King, take the meat out, and put french fries in the middle - well Burger King has a veggie burger now (whoo to the hoo! Actually, a few had them back in '99 when I was in undergrad in the mountains, but the only reason was because it was a super crunchy artsy town of just students for the most part) - it's a Boca patty.  I was running around last week and decided I needed some lunch and drove through the BK.  I'd planned on getting a kids meal but then thought about a veggie burger.  The kids meal was $2.71 with tax.  That included a burger, fries, a small drink, and a cheap BPA ridden plastic toy (there's no proof on the BPA it just seemed to fit with the point here...).  The veggie burger - JUST the burger, was $3.79 - before tax.  WHAT is wrong with this?!  You are telling me that MEAT is cheaper - WAY cheaper if you consider all that was included in that $2.71 meal - than vegetables?  NUTS.  There is something seriously wrong with our food. 

We saw Food, Inc., Super Size Me, all of the big foodie documentaries - but it obviously didn't sink in with me.  We try to eat local whenever possible and had I not had some major all-day sickness going on for weeks on end, we would have joined the CSA up here.  Thankfully, they let us just pick up food when we were able without a full share since I was so sick and couldn't stomach much.  We've joined the fall share though so lots of root goodness to come.

I don't have a good way of wrapping this up - so many things wrong - so many questions - Chandler is totally sick of my rant about marketing (bigger, more for your money crap food advertising) so I thought I'd just take it to the mattresses, err, the blog.  No Godfather fans?  Actually, I've never seen the movie - I just like that line in You've Got Mail. 

Must eat...

Aside from Dole's Orange Peach Mango juice, red grapes, and Eggo waffles - THIS is a must eat in the house lately...

DELISH.  Chandler mentioned wanting key lime pie last weekend, which led me to the jello/cool whip pie... we'd gotten enough cool whip for two pies (I needed a strawberry too!), only after I read the recipe for chocolate pie on the top of the cool whip container, it was all over...

Since you may not have cool whip in the fridge to get the recipe, here's what you'll need:
-2 small boxes of instant chocolate pudding
-1.5 c milk
-1 container cool whip
-graham cracker crust

Mix pudding and milk.  Once well blended, add half container of cool whip until it's all smooth and chocolatey.  Fold into pie crust, top with the remaining half of cool whip - voila!  It's the easiest pie ever and tastes SO good!

Cream Puffs

A friend (who obviously knows my weakness) sent me a rockin' easy recipe for homemade cream puffs and may I just say - YUM! They are SO good - and I was able to use my Kitchen Aid for the first time, which - um, I may be having a slight love affair with - it is amazing! (Thanks Rob!)

I've had a few people ask for the recipe - instead of typing it, here's the link! I leave you with this ... Mmmm! (Mine were a little darker than the ones in the link above but they were SO good!)

Domestications (that actually used to be the name of a company that is now called The Company Store and is a little better quality)

We had the best weather this weekend! Saturday was 57 and today was 61 - so warm! Since it was so nice, we decided to tackle one of our t0-be-done projects, painting furniture.

A few months ago, we started shopping for bedroom furniture since we are planning to get a new bed and both of our furniture sets are at least 300 years old. (Ok, almost 300 years old.) The more we thought about it and really looked at where we wanted to spend money, we realized that this wasn't one of our priorities. BUT - I still wanted a new look, so - let's paint! It's been sooo cold lately we just haven't felt like doing it, so this weekend's weather was perfect.

(I don't know why the pictures are so small, blogger's upload must be having a bad day.) It took us ALL day to get this done and we might have rushed it... there is a chance we'll be stripping and re-painting in a few weeks, but I LOVE the way it turned out.

It is going to look sooo nice with the grayish color I've picked for our bedroom. We'll also be painting another piece similar to this one that will be the same color with the same hardware (that I found for $1.47 a piece at Home Depot - score! We used different drawer pulls on the top drawer because those were smaller).

I also went out on a limb this weekend and tried three new recipies. They all turned out great! On Friday, we had this souffle - oh man, it was SO good! I added mushrooms and a tiny bit of green pepper. I probably wouldn't add the pepper next time but will always use mushroom! The pepper didn't make it bad, you just couldn't really tell they were in there. I also used regular monterrey jack cheese as I generally don't prefer too much flavor. I didn't have enough small baking dishes (might be updating our registry!) so we only made three, but they were delish! We saved the other one and ate it Saturday for brunch and it was great for a breakfast too and still tasted just as good as it did when I made them Friday. The fluff was gone but everything else was the same. I will be making this a LOT!

On Saturday, we had cinnamon bun pancakes - SO YUMMY and potato soup for dinner. I got the recipe for pancakes from Tastey Kitchen, Ree's cooking blog/community. Did you know that Pioneer Woman had that?! I didn't! I made the pancakes just as the recipe called but then added a lot more milk later because the pancakes were too thick and I was having trouble cooking them. The potato soup was REALLY good! I didn't use ham though as I don't eat meat and I added an extra chicken bouillon packet and some left over green onions from the souffle. I also added a little more butter and salt/pepper and milk. It was easy enough that you can pretty much modify it as needed and it was super easy. I'm learning that I really enjoy cooking and I actually eat a LOT less when I do cook because I'm so tired of being in the kitchen smelling the same things. Ha! Who knew that you could lose weight by cooking more?!

I have to share this, the ENTIRE time I was making the potato soup, I laughed because of THIS video my friend Liz showed me at work around Christmastime. I've never really used bouillon much and this is probably the first time in years that I've had to buy it and I just couldn't stop laughing about the "booyons" while I was cooking. You have to watch the video! It is hilarious!

Since I've become a weekend chef, if anyone has great recipes, send them my way! I'm thinking I might try this breakfast casserole this weekend. Looks yummy (with some modification of course)!