Crockpot Hawaiian Chicken

 Day 24!  I'm proud we've made it so far.  Tonight we made another dinner in the Crockpot for our 30 day eating in challenge using this recipe.  We changed it up a little bit and made it with a Hawaiian marinade instead of with a barbecue sauce.

Hawaiian marinade, a can of pineapple chunks, 3 chicken breasts, a Crockpot and 4 hours later we had this:

And it was delicious!  We served it with white rice and broccoli.  The only thing I was a little disappointed about was that the pineapple absorbed so much of the marinade it burned your throat to actually eat it.  I guess it was just to flavor the chicken.  Maybe next time I'll save some extra for us to just eat. :)

Anyway, I hope you've been doing well.  Thanks for reading.  I'll see you tomorrow with my 100th post!

--CC

Recipe: No-Fry Parmesan Pork Chops

For Day 22 of 30 Days of Eating In we created a new recipe.  On Sunday I was trying to get together a meal plan for the week and realized we had a whole lot of pork chops we got on sale recently, so I scoured the internet looking for pork chop recipes and found this one on All Recipes.  I tampered with the recipe a little to create a fusion between it and a chicken recipe we've been using for a long time.  This is what I came up with:

No-Fry Parmesan Pork Chops! 

It was pretty yummy if I do say so myself.  Plus, since it's made in the oven, I was able to sweep the whole house and get a few other chores done while it was baking. That's my kind of meal!

To get the recipe, click "read more."

Romanian Ostropel

Tonight we tried out another new recipe for our 30 Days of Eating In challenge: Ostropel.  Ostropel is a Romanian dish, but an Americanized name for it is Chicken with Garlicky Tomato Gravy.

I found the recipe on Pinterest and thought it sounded tasty, plus it's all made in one skillet and can be served over rice, pasta or mashed potatoes.  We almost always have one of those staple sides leftover in our fridge, so I thought this might be another quick-and-easy weeknight meal.

I was wrong.  Maybe it was just me, but even though I read the recipe twice before making this dish, the directions were still hard to follow.  The steps seemed to be broken up oddly and I couldn't navigate through them quickly enough.  I kept having to take the whole skillet off the stove to avoid burning while I read what to do next.  Don't get me wrong--it wasn't that hard to make, it was just hard to read the recipe.

I also have gripes with the sauce.  It required me to buy ingredients that I don't normally have on hand (like chicken stock, tomato paste and chimbru) and it wasn't worth it.  I was expecting the sauce to be bold and flavorful with ingredients like tomato and garlic, but it tasted very bland.  And mixed with the chicken stock I felt like I was eating a watered down chicken/tomato soup over breaded chicken.

I guess there wasn't really anything gross about the dish.  It tasted fine and was really filling.  It was just very bland.  Honestly, after we finished eating we were full but still wanted to eat something just because we felt like we didn't get to taste much.  Usually we try things twice before calling it quits, but I don't think we'll be making this recipe again.

It wasn't all bad, though.  The chicken and the rice were good, albeit plain.  We're thinking of putting the chicken in a spicy orange sauce we've made before. (Coincidentally, we didn't like the meat that time, but the sauce was great).  We'd still serve it over the rice to make an Asiany dish.  We'll let you know how that goes and hopefully share the recipe. :)

I'm still glad we branched out and tried something new, though. 

Hope your dinner was more of a success than ours.  Happy crafting!

--CC

Easy Crockpot BBQ Chicken

For day 18 of our 30 days of eating in challenge we made Crockpot BBQ Chicken.  This recipe was absolutely phenomenal.  Let me list just a few of the things I loved about it for you.

1. Fix it and forget it!  I put it in at noon and didn't have to bother with it the rest of the day.
2. No defrosting.  I put the chicken in the crockpot straight-up frozen.
3. Only 6 ingredients.  And that's including the chicken.
4. So, so scrumptiously tender! Seriously, this chicken flaked like salmon when you poked it with a fork.
5. My house smelled like barbecue all day. Um, yes please.

Yet another awful picture.  My apologies.

 We served ours up with cornbread, homemade Parmesan potato wedges (leftover from another night and reheated in the oven while the cornbread baked) and green beans.  A very southern meal, huh?  But it sure was delicious!

Just a few comments about the meal:

We actually used chicken tenderloins instead of chicken breasts because that's what we had on hand.  If you do this, you'll want to reduce the cooking time just a little bit to prevent the meat from drying out.  And if you make yours from frozen chicken like we did, you'll want to add 1 cup of warm water to prevent sudden changes in temperature that could make your Crockpot crack.  Don't worry--the water cooks out.

As far as the recipe itself goes, we didn't care for the vinegar.  It wasn't bad if you like your barbecue sauce kind of tangy.  We just prefer ours a little sweeter.  And, honestly, I think you could probably just put plain ol' barbecue sauce with nothing else and it would still be delicious!

We'll definitely be making this again.  :)

I hope you enjoyed a marvelous dinner with your family.  Thanks for reading!

--CC

Turkey Pesto Sliders

More 30 Days of Eating In!  We were supposed to try this recipe on Wednesday, but we ended up having to eat a frozen pizza that my boyfriend insisted would fit in the freezer (it didn't) Wednesday night.  So here we are eating our Turkey Pesto Sliders on Thursday.  Consider everything on the menu moved back a day. :)

Ours aren't really so much Turkey Pesto Sliders as they are Turkey Pesto Sandwiches.  And they're not really Turkey Pesto Sandwiches so much as Chicken Pesto Sandwiches.  Hey, we used the supplies we had on hand.

But, anyway, here's how they turned out:

Once again, please excuse the awful picture.  Someday I'll have a nice camera and good lighting.

 Honestly, we didn't really follow the recipe at all.  We used totally different ingredients.

Their ingredients:

• Slider buns
• Turkey deli meat
• Provolone cheese
• 3 tbsp. pesto 
• 3 tbsp. mayonnaise
• 2 tbsp. butter, melted

Our ingredients:

• 2 Kaiser rolls
• Lemon herb chicken deli meat (from Sam's Club.  Awesome deli meat!)
• Provolone cheese
• Feta cheese (What can I say?  We like cheese.)
• A butt-ton of pesto

See?  Not the same sandwich.  We even cooked ours at a lower temperature (350 instead of 400).  So really we more borrowed the recipe as inspiration for our own toasty dinner sandwiches.

And they were pretty delicious!  The kaiser rolls were flaky and crispy on the outside but still soft on the inside.  And the feta and provolone cheeses were all hot and melty.  Mmm!  Plus, it was such a quick and easy dinner to throw together.  It took maybe 15 minutes and there wasn't really any cleanup.  We didn't even bother with sides, really.  Just some Baked Lays and fresh carrots. (Betcha can't guess what one of the only vegetables my boyfriend will eat is!)

It was really the perfect busy-weeknight meal and it feels really good to actually try out a few of those pins from my Pinterest.  They've really been piling up!  Lol.  I'm sure you understand. :)

How about you?  Have you gotten to try out any of your pinned recipes or tutorials yet?

--CC

Chicken Crescent Rolls

Yesterday I shared this post about how we're eating in for 30 days so I'm trying out some of the recipes I have pinned on Pinterest.  Today we made the Chicken Crescent Rolls.

Sorry for the awful photos, but we made dinner after dark and my camera is awful and my kitchen has bad lighting.

It wasn't a fancy meal, but it sure tasted good and was quick to throw together!  This is an easy weeknight meal whether or not you prepare the filling ahead of time.  And while it's in the oven you have time to do whatever else you need to do!  Pair it with some frozen or fresh veggies and you have a meal.

The only complaint I had about this meal was that it was too salty.  I'd leave out the salt altogether if I made this recipe again.  And I would also probably make it with the Big Flaky crescent rolls as opposed to the original size because I had leftover chicken filling that didn't fit in the original size.

All in all, a great meal that even my super picky boyfriend would eat!

Hope you've been fairing well. :)  Until next time, happy crafting!

--CC

30 Days of Eating In

Let me 'fess up to something.  Most A lot of nights my boyfriend and I pick up our dinner at fast food restaurants.  We have a tendency to not plan our meals ahead, which results in me working on a project or homework or whatever until about 9pm, then looking up and saying, "Holy crap I'm starving!"  By then it's too late to try and cook something, so we run to Burger King.  It's either that, or I get home from work/school and I'm too exhausted to make myself anything so we just pick something up.  Gross, right?

Well, recently we decided enough is enough.  We absolutely need to eat healthier or we'll die very, very young.  So we've challenged ourselves to 30 days of eating in.  We'll cook every day, every meal.  The idea is that by the end of 30 days, we'll have gotten used to cooking at home and made a major lifestyle change.  Hopefully by the end of the month when it's 9pm and I realize I'm starving instead of running to McDonald's I'll think to myself, "Sucks to be me.  I should have thought about this sooner" and make a sandwich.

We started our 30 day challenge on July 26.  That means we've been eating in now for 14 solid days.  Honestly, I'm surprised we've made it so far.  I thought surely we'd give up.

It's really taken some planning.  Like, if we go somewhere in the middle of the day I have to make sure we eat before we go or bring a snack because we won't be able to eat again until we get home.  (I've been very strict about this.  I didn't even allow us to buy a soft pretzel during an exceptionally long trip to the mall for an interview outfit.)  We're really getting the hang of it.

And since we're cooking at home so much and I have about a billion recipes marked on Pinterest, I decided to try a few of them out for dinner this week and share them with you here.  Here's what we'll be making:

Monday: Chicken Crescent Rolls

Image/Recipe Source

 We'll be making these with Pillsbury Crescent Rolls (my favorite!) and 2 cups of leftover rotisserie chicken from a few days ago.  Easy, economical and hopefully delicious!

Wednesday: Turkey Pesto Sliders

Image/Recipe Source

Okay, so I know this recipe is like, "Duh."  But we have leftover buns from dinner tonight and I have a job interview on Wednesday, so I thought this would make a quick and easy dinner.  We'll see how it is. :)

Thursday: Easy Crockpot BBQ Chicken

Image/Recipe Source

I'm excited for this because I'm always forgetting to thaw the meat beforehand (another reason we end up with take-out) and according to this recipe you can stick the chicken in the Crockpot still frozen!

Friday: Chicken with Garlicky Tomato Gravy

Image/Recipe Source

This is actually "Romanian Ostropel."  It sounds delicious and can be served over rice, pasta or mashed potatoes.  How versatile!  Plus, we always have leftover potatoes or rice from other meals, so it would really only take one skillet for me to make!

Tune back in throughout this week to see our meals and get the tutorial review!  Hope to see you again soon!

--CC