This is one of the dishes we are making, Chicken Cordon Blue casserole. I made it the last time I freezer cooked and it was a raving favorite! We are definitely making more of these! Yummo!
Sometimes I’m not sure why I’m not a chef…I love to cook. I wish I had an unlimited budget to cook with and a fully stocked pantry with everything you could think of in it! Anyhow I digress…today I had a massive cook day. I started at 10:15am as I had decided to not go to The Multiplex after my Yoga date fell through. Instead I cooked meals for the week. I made a crock pot of chili, taco beef for our Taco Tuesday night, adobo shredded pork for Taco Tuesday Night, cabernet braised short ribs with roasted potatoes, asparagus and rosemary pull apart bread. I prepped all the veggies for tomorrow’s soup. I made carrot muffins with cream cheese icing from scratch. I was so hot by the time I was done I thought I would die! I was all done by 11:30am. The chili turned out smoking hot…I can’t seem to tame it down. It’s for lunches so hopefully it won’t be so hot after being frozen and re-heated. The rest are in the fridge labelled with which day it’s for and the rest of the instructions on how to prepare in case Randy beats me home.
We’re on a budget of $100 a week for groceries. We are shopping at Superstore and No Frills for most of our groceries and getting our meat at Blackmans’ Butcher Shop. We’re trying to avoid Costco as much as possible lately…it always sucks us into buying things we don’t need! I’m only buying what we need for meat and groceries and so far so good. It’s nice to pare down to the basics every once and a while! I have lots of food in my freezer so the goal is to use it up. So I’ve been creating a menu plan to use up what I have stocked in the freezer. For this week’s menu all I had to buy for meat were the short ribs and 2lbs of lean ground beef. Everything else comes from my freezer.
I’ve gotten back into my menu plans…with structure to them. Sunday is roast night, Monday is soup and sandwich night (Crockpot), Tuesday is leftovers or something quick (I’ve got water aerobics!), Wednesday is Burger night (Chicken, fish, beef, buffalo), Thursday is ethnic night or crockpot night (Water aerobics again!), Friday is usually seafood/fish night and Saturday is something that is a home cooked meal kind of meal.
For example here is this weeks menu plan:
Sunday: Cabernet braised short ribs, roasted potatoes and asparagus, M&M Meat shop rosemary pull apart bread.
Monday: Crockpot Creamy leek and potato soup, cod fish sandwiches, Caesar salad.
Tuesday: Beef tacos, shredded pork tacos, burritos, Spanish rice.
Wednesday: Chicken burgers, sweet potato fries, tossed salad.
Thursday: Chicken Curry, coconut basmati rice, homemade peach chutney, steamed broccoli
Friday: BBQ’d Pork chops, mashed potatoes, corn, tossed salad.
Saturday: Chicken parmesan, spaghetti, roasted broccoli, tossed salad.
I have everything pulled the night before to thaw and ingredients laid out before I leave for work so I can walk in the door and start cooking right away! We’ve managed to not spend our $50 dining out budget for the last 2 weeks as a result and I know we’re having a healthy, nutritious meal! I plan my meals two weeks out and make up a grocery list that reminds me in my blackberry on Friday to pick up stuff we need before the weekend. It’s been working for the last 3 weeks for me…hope to keep it up! I’m going to make a menu plan coil bound book so that I can keep my menu plans for the year…it will be easy to get ideas for meals when I’m stumped then! If you want one, let me know…I’ll charge you about $10 for one. Are you menu planning? What works for you? Drop me a line and let me know! Take care and happy cooking!
The other day Ethan and I were hanging out at home and I said to him “Do you want a cookie?” It was no shock that he said “Yes, cookie please” So then I told him he would have to help Mommy make them, he was all for it! YAY! Our first cookie baking adventure together! We headed to the kitchen and while I gathered up the stuff to make yummy chocolate chip cookies he got his stool.
It was our first time making cookies together so I thought I would get some pictures! He was so cute and knew what to do, amazing how much they soak up from watching!
He was good at adding all the ingredients and then making sure that all the dry ingredients were mixed well…
Then he helped make sure that they were on the pan….just so!
We put them in the HOT oven and waited so patiently for them…
They took so long!!!! When they finally came out, they were ‘HOT’, “Blow Mommy” is what he told me! I told him to blow, here he is trying to cool them off!
Then we finally got to eat them! MMMmmmm! So soft and chewy on the inside with warm melted chocolate!!! We each had 3 with some milk! Cookie eating is serious business as you can see…no smiles here!
We used the recipe from the cookbook ‘Sugar’ by Anna Olson that I got for Randy for our anniversary. They are a perfect chocolate chip cookie that stays soft and chewy for days! If I had more time I would type it out but if you want the recipe just drop me an email and I’ll send it off to you! I’m looking forward to more fun days like this one with Ethan over the years making yummy treats together and teaching him great life skills! He’ll be able to impress the good girls if he can bake!!!
So let’s be honest…we’re Canadian. So we BBQ year round. Winter just means that the BBQ is closer to the door and we eat inside! But when summer comes we BBQ almost every night of the week. There is nothing better then a good steak on the Barbie. It’s not something we have every day, about twice a month we’ll have a great steak with all the fixings. We wouldn’t want to ruin our stylish figure right?
Anyhow, during the winter when we want steak we run to Blackmans Butcher Shop just down the street and grab a yummy Rib Eye steak. A hot $30 or so dollars later we are home…too expensive for us to do very often! So when summer comes I head over to Costco and buy a whole Rib-Eye and make my own steaks.
For $117.65 we got enough steak for Randy and I to have 9 Steak dinners…..$13.07 a meal, a much better improvement on the prices we pay at Blackmans. Quality wise I think the they are just as good as the ones we get from Blackmans and for 20 minutes worth of using my butcher knife we get to enjoy steak almost all summer! As you can see from the pictures I cut a generous steak, so if you don’t like your steak as thick you could get many more meals then I did! I got this huge cost saving trick from my BFF Melissa. Thanks chicky!
And yes, I do wear an apron when cooking…it’s my fancy Williams Sonoma apron…I feel like a chef in it, LOL! Someday my pink and white kitchen will be re-done so that my apron matches it, LOL! For now, I bring the style to it….well enough of that! Enjoy your BBQ’s this summer, I know we are going to…let us know you’re coming, I’ll pull some steak out!With my new stove. Seriously. I would have it’s babies. I went from my Habitat for Humanity $40 stove to the most gorgeous piece of machinery I have ever owned. Anyhow, I did take some pictures of course to show the before and after:
The Before:
Decent stove when it was new I’m sure. We bought it at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $40 when we bought our house. Everything worked on it however we determined that it had probably been on fire at one point because there was burnt insulation falling out of the back of it. Because of that I never used the self-clean feature. I was too scared of it lighting on fire. You had to be a magician to use the oven on this stove, some days 350 was like 450 and other days it was like 250. It just depended on how it felt I guess…but it was always a crap shoot as to what result you would get. It also had coil burners and knobs which I hate, hate, hate cleaning!!! Not at all sad to walk past this in my garage right now…
This is my new beauty:
I bought a LG Self Cleaning, Smoothtop Convection Range. It has lots of the bells and the whistles! I could have got the additional oven drawer for another $200 but I knew I would not personally use it. I use my bottom drawer for storage…We spent a bit of money on it but so worth every cent! I cook all our meals as well as bake mostly from scratch. This range cooks and bakes like a dream. Randy made cookies the first night we had it and they are so soft and tender and flaky, cooked perfectly! I have coveted a convection oven for awhile and wasn’t going to get it but I got a really nice bonus from my work and thought I would treat myself. I love the smooth top, I love that there are no knobs (I so hated cleaning around them!) and I love having so much control over my temperatures. It is taking some getting used to as I find out what each temperature setting is on the smooth top but so far no problems! I love that it is stainless and black; it matches my other appliances so well. We have a stainless fridge, black dishwasher, stainless toaster, black and stainless Kitchenaid Mixer, coffee pot, crock pot and bread machine. It all works so well! Of course it is making me want to re-do my kitchen…I really hate the narrow 70’s cabinets and the pink countertops…but that will come in time. Anyhow, I promise to stop ranting about my stove one of these days, for now I’m just going to love it!!!
We LOVE our hot stuff in this house! So much that we always have taco beef made in the freezer, salsa and tacos in the cupboard and pickled jalapeños on hand. Problem is, I’m cheap and pickled jalapenos are pricy so I taught myself a couple of years ago how to make them at home. We just ran out of them a couple of months ago from the ones I made in the summer of 2008. So since we were on a roll on Sunday night I went to the store again (if you are counting that is 3 trips to the store in one evening, LOL!) and I picked up jalapeños to make it. They cost a whopping $5.69.
So how to make Pickled Jalapeños? It is actually ridiculously easy! Start by cutting up the jalapeños however your like them. We like ours with seed and in rings so I got to work cutting them up! I was smart enough this time to pick up some gloves to wear while cutting them.
Just to prove that the gorgeous hand model is me:
Then you pack them into jars. Make an acid mixture for them of 4 cups of vinegar, 4 cups of water and 2 tsp of salt. Simmer but do not boil the mixture and ladle it over the packed peppers. Process in a hot water bath for 20 minutes. We processed for this long to cook the peppers a bit more then the last time. We wanted them a little softer…you could do less time, the recipe suggests 15 minutes.
Enlist strong man again to pull the hot jars out…just saying, much easier to have a strong man around sometimes….
Let them sit and pop their little heads off sealing nice and tight!
So here are the spoils of our evenings’ work:
We ended up with 4 large jars and one small of Pure raspberry jam, 4 large jars and one small of Triple Berry Jam and 3 large jars, 7 very small jars of Jalapeño peppers. I didn’t want to make huge quarts of jalapeños so I used small jars which will pretty much be good for one meal. I usually make them in 250mL jars because its the perfect size but I was all out of that size.
Anyhow, we won’t have a need to buy jam for the next couple of years and we should be good for jalapeños too! I’m thinking I want to try to can some peaches some night this week. I’ve never done it before but peaches are so cheap right now and it would be tasty to have summer fresh peaches in our lunches year round! I’m sure I’ll be calling you for help Mom!
We went berry picking for the last two weekends. We made jam from both trips…however we had two very different experiences in making it. Only us I tell you!
So last weekend we went to Dunvegan Farms. We got a pail and a bit of strawberries and decided to make strawberry jam. We had jars and sugar already and just needed to pick up some pectin. So we set out to make jam one night after Ethan was in bed. First of all I had to hull the strawberries. As you will remember from my post on the subject, the strawberries were very small this year. So it took forever to hull them!
Once I got that done we washed them up and started to prepare the jam. This is where I screwed up and added the pectin too early…oops. Not to mention we had too much in the pot and this was the result.
Yup, a colossal mess! It boiled over, all over the stove, almost light on fire and resulted in runny strawberry jam.
Fast forward to yesterday. We went out to Old Bezanson Town Site, about 20 minutes from Grande Prairie for the afternoon. We had stumbled upon it last year and remembered that there was a lot of saskatoon and raspberry bushes there. So we went out and walked along a path picking berries and playing with sticks. Ethan had a blast and once he petered out we put him in the truck with Randy while I walked along the road picking berries. Again there wasn’t much for berries, they were very small and slim pickings. I managed to get about a quarter of a pail of raspberries with a few saskatoons. There were quite a few saskatoons but Randy is not a fan so I didn’t bother picking many.
We got home and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them because I didn’t have enough to make jam. So I decided to thaw out some berries I had in the freezer and mix it all up and make a triple berry jam. While I was thawing the berries, Mary showed up for a pail and returned with almost a full pail of raspberries that she picked from a friends house. So now I had enough berries to make a pure Raspberry jam as well as a Triple Berry Jam. Off to the store went Randy for Pectin and sugar. He barely got back before I sent him again for more raspberries because I was sure I would need just a few more berries to make the recipe.
Anyhow long story short, here are the pictures of the whole jam making experience!
How do you make jam? Here you go!
Start with yummy berries. this was before I picked out the saskatoons I had picked. It looks pretty though eh?
Mash so that your berries are all crushed.
Dump in a big pot…special note here, make sure your pot is big enough for everything!
Add sugar,
Lots and lots of sugar!
Mix together the berries and sugar and 1/2 tsp of butter.
Wait for the sugar to dissolve then bring to a full rolling boil that can’t be stirred down. THEN add the pectin and continue to boil and stir for 1 minute. (This is where I always screw up and add the pectin too early…I didn’t this time though)
Ladle your jam into hot sterilized jars, leaving 1/4” of head room. Wipe the rim and seal with a ring and seal.
Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes or longer if you are above sea level. We processed for 15 minutes total.
That’s how you make jam! Next post is how to make pickled jalapeño peppers…mmmm good! Plus pictures of the finished jam!
It is an East Indian cooking sauce that you just add chicken to, let simmer and serve with rice or potatoes. I've had this sauce kicking around for awhile so I thought, hey, let's give it a go! We like the Tikka Masala sauce and the description of this one was that it is a subtle blend of cream and coconut with hints of Garlic, ginger and coriander. We like all those ingredients so I felt confident that it would be good. So I diced my chicken, seared it for a few minutes, threw some rice and broccoli on to steam, then added the sauce and let it simmer away while I played on the computer for another 20 minutes. Then I served it on rice with the side of broccoli. This is what it looked like:
It looks a bit greasy and that is my fault because I was too lazy to drain off the excess oil from the chicken. Anyhow, the review is in and....we LOVED it!!! It was delicious. A very mild full flavored dish that was soooo easy to make. We will be having this again!!! You can find alot of cool recipes and uses for their sauces and mixes on their site here: Patak's Randy and I really like to try new foods and this is such an easy way to do it! No sitting in a restaurant trying to guess what stuff is and then trying not to offend anyone if you don't like it, not to mention saving money on it too! These sauces cost about $5-6 depending on where you buy them. It seems to me that I bought this one as part of a pack of two sauces from Costco for around $7.00. This made enough for supper tonight and another meal tomorrow! So give them a try if you haven't!
I thought I would share this picture of my baby bump with you. I saw some awesome maternity pictures online and am getting some ideas together to do a photo shoot in a month or so. So I was playing around the other day and got this one! I love it, even though you don't really get the perspective of my bump from it. I will be using this pose with a couple of tweaks when I do the real shoot! I really like the idea of it!!!
So the funny story of a runaway....I'm doing laundry today...as well as slaving over the stove...what the heck?!?!!? Anyhow, I have to of course lug it down the hall to the laundry room. So I take another load down a while ago and come back and start working on some other stuff. I had to go out to the front entry to grab something from Randy's coat and I noticed that the front door was wide open. I freaked out and yelled at Randy to help me find Tigger...did he get out??? I didn't even think about the "WHY" is the door open...duh! Anyhow, I look out the hall and sure enough there is Tigger, half way down the hall, sniffing at the neighbours doors! So I hollered at him to get back in the house, scared he would run past me and down the stairs because the stupid fire door doesn't close fully. I finally calmed down enough to talk him close enough so I could grab him and haul him in the house. What a stinker!!! I didn't think he had the balls to do that!!! So of course now, he wants out the front door every time I go out! He got a swift kick in the butt last trip, I'm hoping that he learns fast that he can't go out there...he is a chicken in most circumstances but he's had to adapt to so many different places to live that new places interest him, instead of scare him. Meanwhile, as I'm chasing the cat what is Randy doing? Playing WOW, totally ignoring me! Thanks honey! Don't worry, I've got it!
So he will be cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming as well as cooking breakfast tomorrow morning. Not sure if he knows that yet but he will learn real fast...
I also received a gift in the mail from Nestle Baby last week. I signed up on their website to join their club and this is what they sent me! It's a cooler backpack and inside is a baby bottle, a container of formula, a re-freezable ice pack, a changing pad and a book of tips and coupons. It's very nice and I can definitely see us using this! Here are pics of it! Thanks to Chantel for letting me know about this! You've gotta love freebies!
Other news going on right now is that I am a Great Auntie again this week! My niece Jessica had a baby girl, Paige Taylor, on Feb 20 weighing 6lbs 14 ounces and 19 inches long. She is adorable! Here are a couple of pics of her!
So that brings us up to speed! I've been tagged twice in the last couple of weeks so I need to get those posts done...I'll work on them later today and early tomorrow. We have no real plans today, going to a movie tonight I think, easy rotisserie chicken supper. Got the house cleaned top to bottom today, and I mean top to bottom! We are having Terry and Wavey over for dinner tomorrow night so I thought I should spruce the place up a bit. We aren't used to having company, LOL! I'm making a nice supper of Cheese fondue to start, followed by Ceasar Salad and Chicken Parmesan. Then I have strawberries, pineapple and bananas to dip into a chocolate fondue later in the evening. Plus I'm making chip dip for later in the evening too. Whenever we go to their house they put out a nice spread for us so I want to return the favor to them. It should be a nice supper and an enjoyable evening.
Hope everyone else has a great weekend! Counting down the days to get to GP now! Should be less then 35 days left!!! I can't wait!
Here is the final result. You will note that although I did not have cranberry sauce for my meal, I get points for including cranberries through my choice of beverage.
Of course I had to have the pumpkin pie dessert too! Yup, I whipped up some pumpkin pie tarts. (I didn't have a pie shell in the freezer, I just had tarts) Again I get points for creativity and of course plating given that I have chosen to serve my tarts with French Vanilla Ice Cream as opposed to the traditional whipped cream.
This, well this is just proof that I actually did make the tarts myself...
And this is the pie that I currently have in the oven baking. After making 18 tarts I still had enough pumpkin pie mix for a whole pie! So I broke down and made pie crust! Don't worry, I'll eat it, the tarts were just a teaser...
Finally this is why I am thankful today. I am thankful that I was able to get up on time for work today and have time to enjoy my breakfast overlooking this beautiful sky. I am thankful that this beautiful sky is overhead of everyone I love, and the brightness and beauty of the sunrise this morning was representative to me of all the people I love smiling towards me. I am thankful for the blessing that Randy and I will receive in about 7 months... an addition to our family. I'm pregnant!!!!! We are so thankful and excited that we are going to be given the chance to be parents. I hope that you have time today to reflect on what you are thankful for, Thank you Mary for reminding me to take the time today!
