You can't win 'em all

Tonight was my last night of new recipes for this week, a Mexican rice casserole. Seasoned hamburger mixed with cooked rice, tomato sauce, black beans and cilantro then topped with sliced of tomatoes and cheese.

After baking for about 30 minutes I cut us each a slice to accompany our salad and green beans and had the following reaction - meh. Not bad, just not a panty dropping recipe. I should have topped it with guacamole and sour cream, but the Canadian thinks guacamole is the devil's food so it's never in the house. We'll eat the leftovers, but definitely don't need to spend my oh so precious time making it again.

Tastes like pizza

Tonight the hubs and I took a quick break from watching football (way to go Niners!!) to whip up a new chicken recipe out of the current Cooking Light issue - chicken with pepperoni-marinara sauce. Ridiculous I tell you, ridiculously good that is. Skillet cooked chicken covered in a marinara sauce that's been simmered with chopped pepperoni, garlic, oregano and basil, and then topped with mozzarella cheese before being stuck under the broiler for a few minutes.

The sauce literally tasted like you were eating a really saucy pepperoni pizza. I'm glad the Canadian liked it because he'll be eating it for lunch most of next week. I didn't realize that when you saute pepperoni it releases a bunch of it's oil which is what really flavors the marinara sauce. Now to figure out what to do with almost a whole pack of pepperoni since I only needed 16 slices for the recipe.

Time to get beautiful

For the second time in 2011 I ordered Today's Special Value from QVC and it just arrived on Monday.

A Laura Geller makeup kit. Eyelid and makeup primers, a dual eye shadow powder, a foundation powder, and a blush powder. They're great colors and I've been wearing them all week.

Tuesday night we went to the movies and saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I really wanted to see it, but I found it to be kind of boring. Lots and lots of talking and not one bit of action. I prefer car chases, shoot outs, gratuitous nudity, and explosions. You know, the American dream on the big screen.

Tonight I tried another new recipe - Asian dumplings. They're basically homemade potstickers. I filled won ton wrappers with a cream cheese shrimp mixture (with water chestnuts, green onion, red bell pepper, teriyaki sauce, and soy sauce) and seared them in a non stick skillet before steaming them for a few minutes.

A little time consuming for a regular work night dinner, but really tasty and fairly easy. I made sure to take drugs so that the wheat laden won ton wrappers don't kick my ass tomorrow like earlier in the week when we ate the buffalo chicken cup leftovers. That was brutal. We've been really lucky this last week with some really good recipes. Tomorrow is another new meal out of my latest Cooking Light magazine. Chicken breasts covered in a cheesy, pepperoni marinara sauce - how can that not be a winner?

Salvation Army

Tonight was my turn to serve dinner at the Salvation Army. I serve with some other people from church who actually do all the cooking. However, tonight, a new Hispanic gal I'd never met before made pots and pots of Posole (Mexican stew with pork and hominy) for us to serve. Each of the bowls were topped with shredded cabbage, minced onions, and a wedge a lemon. On the side we served chips and homemade salsa.

Although I never eat dinner there with the rest of the workers, for the first time in over a year I did ask to bring some leftovers home. How could I pass up pork stew for the boy?

I saved them for Chris' lunches since I already had dinner plans at home. Tonight I made buffalo chicken muffins. Layers of won ton wrappers, shredded rotisserie chicken mixed with blue cheese and Frank's hot sauce, diced celery, and shredded cheese. An absolute hit!

I made them in my spanking new muffin tin which I greased up like nobody's business with cooking spray. By God, nothing's going to stick to that thing! 

New and old recipes

I've been using my awesome new meal planner book to write down recipes I find to try since by the time I sit down to write my shopping list I've usually long since forgotten all the recipes I wanted to make. One "new" recipe was mini taco salads. We've made them before, and I even have a taco salad shell form to bake the tortillas in, but this recipe called for corn tortillas instead of flour (which is necessary for me) and showed how to tuck them in between the groves of an upside down muffin tin to bake them into shape.

Super easy and practically finger food. I definitely like these smaller corn shells over the larger flour shells we usually make.

This morning I made a new breakfast recipe that were sausage, egg and hash brown muffins. Although the "hash browns" I bought at Grocery Outlet turned out to be square shaped like southern style potatoes. Anyway, you mix the thawed potatoes with oil, salt and pepper and scoop them in 12 muffin cups and then use a pestle-style implement to make a well in the center of the muffin cups while pushing the potatoes along the sides of the cup to form the sides of the muffins. While the potatoes bake for about 20 minutes you cook up some turkey or chicken breakfast sausage and then chop it up. After you pull out the potatoes you add a sprinkle of low-fat cheese in each muffin cup topped with a few chunks of sausage and then you fill each one up with beaten egg and it all goes back in the oven for about another 15 minutes. After all of that, you end up with this;

Suck ass. When they say to spray the pan with non-stick spray they don't mean a light, half-hearted spritzing. They mean douse every freaking square inch. The pan is a total loss. After 6 hours of soaking in two different refills of boiling water I still can't get the potato debris out. If I ever make these again I will definitely use cup liners. Besides all the devastation left behind, they were really good and the leftovers will make the next few breakfasts' a breeze. Live and learn, right?

Tonight for dinner we did an old favorite, Eggplant Parmesan.

The recipe was out of one of my Healthy Cooking magazines my mom got me a subscription to last year. I half the recipe and it fits perfectly in an 8x8 and makes four, 3-layered stacks of eggplant parmesans.

I bread the eggplant in gluten free bread crumbs and that little tweak makes them perfect for me. It's layers of baked, breaded eggplant slices, marinara sauce, jarred mushrooms mixed with oregano and basil, and low-fat mozzarella cheese. Yum, yum, yum.

I've got two more new recipes to try this week. Buffalo chicken "cupcakes" and then a chicken sausage and spinach risotto. They sound delicious and I have high hopes for their tasty success. That should be a 2012 resolution - no bad recipes. Ha, I wish!

Dusting off the craft room

Apparently the last page I scrapbooked was the trip to the monk's winery in Vina that we took my mom on in November 2010. Oye! My two weeks off from work ended up getting spent on random this and that's and I never sat down and did any crafting as previously planned...until yesterday. I found an envelope with a couple of pictures I'd printed in anticipation of scrapbooking the last few pages of 2010 so I dug through my supplies and put together a page about my friend Alicia's 40th birthday in December 2010.

Chris took advantage of another day of unseasonably warm January weather (63 yesterday, 59 today) and spent some time outside today at the bbq wood smoking grains for a new beer he's brewing this afternoon.

Thankfully my cookie sheet made it through the process unharmed. It looked a little iffy there for a while. Now he's commandeered the kitchen for his diabolical brewing purposes so be prepared for a beer update from him.

Happy New Year!

We actually made it until midnight! Unfortunately, by then I'd reached my second wind and then couldn't go to sleep. I started off 2012 with a bang - I apparently wasn't listening (surprise, surprise) or didn't get the memo that there was only one church service today at 10:00 a.m. instead of one at 9:00 and at 11:00. So, after waking up early, off I roar out of the driveway at 8:55 a.m. only to pull up to a completely empty church. I just looped around the corner, came back home, and checked my January church newsletter for any hint of a special, single new year's service. Nothing mentioned, but I doubt Jesus takes a Sunday off so I'll swing back by at 10:00 and see if there's any action then. Doh!