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Chicken Soup and a Food Processor for the soul

11 Jan
clip art box of tissues

We should take stock in tissues!

Those of you who know me and have known me for a while, know that my family seems to always be sick. We get hit with colds, sinus infections, ear infections, ear drum infections, the dreaded stomach bug (at least four times a year), and so on and so forth. This year, like years before, we started at end of November, went through all of December and into January, starting with Alex being sick before Thanksgiving all the way through Caroline being sick with a bad cold still today. I’m usually right there with them. It lasts through about, I don’t know…April?

Last week was Elizabeth’s turn again. She started with her cold while we were away for Christmas vacation, even though she was still on antibiotics from her sinus infection, and by the end of last week she had hit the wall, as they say, and I let her take a sick day on Thursday.

Almost any time they’re home sick with a cough and a sneeze, no matter who it is, they always ask me for chicken soup for lunch to soothe their noses and throats. They want me to make it “from scratch” which for me is not quite accurate since I keep chicken broth in my pantry at all times for requests such as this one. And, they’re always very honest with me regarding my soup, reminding me how good Daddy’s soup is (which usually IS from scratch) and that mine is almost as good, but not. In fact, last year when Elizabeth was sick and she told me about Daddy’s soup being the best, she actually thanked me for even trying to compete.

This time though, when Elizabeth asked for soup, I was actually excited! The reason is that I..okay WE… got a new Cuisinart food processor from my mom and dad for Christmas this year!

Cuisinart Food Processor

A Christmas gift from my parents that I was dying to use!

Now I could say, “How could they have known how badly I wanted a food processor?” but really, I told them when they asked for a wish list for Christmas this year. I really, really wanted one. We’d had one for a long time and then it broke and we never replaced it. I used to be “that mom” who made all my own baby foods for my kids and we used that thing to death. But I have especially missed it when I have made my chicken soups for my sick kids.

Therefore, last week when Liz put in her request, I jumped at the chance to open up my new gift. I must say, it was stunning.

Cuisinart 7 cup food processor

Look how beautiful it looks with the fresh veggies inside!

I was a little bit nervous to have such a nice food processor in my possession, “the mother of all food processors,” as my cousin Val said on Christmas Day. I didn’t want to break anything so I read the directions VERY carefully and so far, it’s all still in tact! (We’ve been known to break a few things on the very first day we’ve owned them.)

I must say, the food processor chopped my veggies so nicely and SO quickly! In my soups I usually put in celery, carrots and an onion. Last week, it turns out we were out of onions so it was just carrots and celery and then of course…chicken. For the chicken I pulled about six chicken tenders out of my freezer, thawed them cooked them, cut them up really small and put them into the soup.

Now here’s a funny story for you: take a look at this photo of my ingredients from Aldi’s:

Aldi's chicken broth and pasta

If you look closely maybe you'll see what I missed!

When I made the soup last week I went down to my pantry and grabbed a box of elbow pasta and three boxes of broth and started cooking. Do you see on the box where it says that it’s a TWO POUND box of pasta?? Nope. Neither did I. Turns out, two pounds is A LOT of pasta!! And, it makes A LOT of soup. But, that’s good, because it keeps well leftover for a few days and all of my kids like it. It also makes for a good lunch in their thermoses, which they like to take to school for a hot lunch when they can. Makes life easier for Don in the morning, that’s for sure.

pot of chicken soup

It was when I poured the pasta in that I thought to myself, "Hmmm that's a lot of pasta!"

All in all, my first experience with the Cuisinart Food Processor was great and I can’t wait to use it again!

I loved that in addition to the detailed instructions provided, there was (gasp!) a recipe booklet!! Lots of recipes for food processing! I cannot wait! In the meantime, I’ll be using it to keep on making soup for my babies to help them through another season of sicknesses and stomach bugs, knowing that my soup is not *quite* as good as Daddy’s!

I can't wait to use my new food processor again!

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Resolutions and Recipes: Rice Pudding

10 Jan

Yesterday I posted the recipe for Flounder with Lemon and Dill -sort of. If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll see what I mean. Anyway…the recipe is served on a bed of white rice, which we often have left over. If we have at least 1 1/2 cups of it left over, that’s enough to make Rice Pudding, which is one of my favorite wintertime desserts.

Rice Pudding with Whipped Cream

I happen to love Rice Pudding!

Rice Pudding, like tapioca, bread pudding, grape nut pudding and the like, are the type of dessert that you either love them or hate them. I happen to love puddings of all types, including this one.

The recipe is simple and like most puddings, the hardest thing is standing there stirring the pudding until it thickens. I read a book while I stir. We’ve had this recipe a while, but I’m not sure where we got it from. I have it written on a little piece of notebook paper, so I apologize in advance for not giving credit to someone, somewhere.

Stir the pudding until it's thick and creamy.

Stir the pudding until it's thick and creamy.

RICE PUDDING

Combine 1 1/2 cups of cooked rice with 1 1/2 cups of milk, 1/3 cup white sugar and 1/4 tsp. salt.

Cook over medium heat until thick and creamy, about 15-20 minutes.

Stir in 1/2 cup of milk, one beaten egg and 2/3 cup of raisins.

Cook 2 minutes more, stirring constantly.

Remove from heat and stir in one tablespoon butter and 1/2 tsp. vanilla.

Serve warm with whipped cream.

I don’t like whipped cream so I eat it without, but the rest of my family enjoys it with whipped cream on top.

  You can serve it in bowls, mugs, or we often use these ice cream sundae glasses, with tall iced-tea spoons, which is fun.

The next time you make white rice for a side dish, throw in enough for extras so that you can try out this yummy recipe! It warms your soul on a cold night!

ENJOY!

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Resolutions and Recipes: Flounder with Lemon and Dill–or not

9 Jan
Flounder with Lemon and Dill (Tilapia)

We are lucky, all our kids like fish.

The title of this post is a bit misleading, and I’ll tell you why. The recipe that I wanted to feature is one I grew up loving: Flounder with Lemon and Dill. It was one of our regular Friday night dinners. The only thing is I didn’t have Flounder this time, I had Tilapia, so you have to change the name to Tilapia with Lemon and Dill. Except we were out of Dill, so the green is parsley flakes instead. So now the new name of this recipe could actually be Tilapia with Lemon and Parsley, but I’m going to share the real recipe with you anyway because it’s basically the same method as we used to make tonight’s dinner.

This is an easy recipe and for us it’s inexpensive because we buy our Tilapia or Flounder flash frozen and individually packed in a family pack at Aldi’s for about $4.99 a pack, and keep it on hand until we need it. The white rice we buy in bulk and the broccoli is either fresh or frozen (tonight was frozen) depending what we have on hand. Altogether the meal that doesn’t cost more than $6 or $7, which is great for a seafood dish. I am thankful that our kids all like fish. This is one of three different ways we typically make it (poached like this, pan fried or baked-stuffed,) and no matter which of the three ways we choose, the bag of fish works well.

Flounder with Lemon and Dill

Whether flounder or tilapia, this is a delcious dish.

FLOUNDER WITH LEMON AND DILL

INGREDIENTS

3 Tablespoons Margarine or Butter

3/4 tsp. Dill

1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice

1/4 cup white wine

1/4 tsp. salt

1 pound flounder

DIRECTIONS

In a frying pan over medium low heat combine butter, dill, lemon juice, wine and salt until butter is melted.

Add flounder last and simmer until fish is cooked through.

Serve on a bed of white rice.

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Resolutions and Recipes: Overnight French Toast

8 Jan
Overnight French Toast

This is the version o overnight french toast that we make most often.

Those of you who know me, know that French Toast is one of my all-time favorite breakfasts. I like thick, thin, cinnamon, stuffed…..you name it, if it’s french toasted, I generally love it.

A few years back on Mother’s Day, my cousin Kim brought an Overnight French Toast to the brunch that was just amazing. I had to have the recipe. Ever since then we have used it almost any time we have a brunch here. Most recently we had it last Monday as our “last hurrah” breakfast before going back to school.

The recipe is quick and easy, and inexpensive to make which are my top qualifiers for a good recipe. We often host a birthday brunch for our family birthday parties since it’s a less expensive option than dinner, and this is a recipe that we use each time.

In the future I’ll also be sharing a couple of other Overnight French Toast recipes that I’ve had and are delicious as well. Today’s recipe I have shared on Facebook before, but the other two I have not shared before, so be on the lookout!

OVERNIGHT FRENCH TOAST

Mix and put on bottom of 9×13 pan:
1 1/2 sticks melted butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar

Layered and ready to go into the fridge overnight.

Layer Pepperidge Farm Big Bread or Texas style French Toast Bread 2 layers deep and fill in the spaces. (I get my Texas style bread either at PriceRite or Walmart. The one at Walmart is made by Wonder.)

Mix 6 eggs and 2 cups milk and pour on top.

Into the fridge it goes.

Leave overnight in fridge.

Bake at 375 for 35-40 minutes.

Top with maple syrup (generously) and broil for about 10 minutes until lightly browned and slightly crispy.

When we serve ours we usually cut the pieces in half since each half is two slices high.

Enjoy!

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Resolutions and Recipes: Chicken Marsala

5 Jan
chicken marsala

Tonight's dinner!

Chicken Marsala is one of my favorite meals. Don makes a great one. Each time I had a baby, the night before we went to the hospital (or in Alex’s case the night before the first of four times we thought we were going to the hospital) he asked me what I’d like for my “last meal” and it was Chicken Marsala every time.

Chicken Marsala is also one of those cheap meals that we keep in our rotation of meals. We don’t make it every pay period by any means, but maybe once every month or two. Did I mention it’s one of my favorite meals?

Here’s what we spent on tonight’s meal at PriceRite and Aldi’s:

Mushrooms: $1.99

Whole wheat spaghetti at Aldi’s: $1.09

Bag of frozen chicken tenders at Aldi’s: $5.99 but we only used six of the tenders, not the whole bag, which is usually about 18 tenders, so we used about $1.99 worth of tenders.

TOTAL: $5.00 plus we had a salad so add another dollar or so.

For our Marsala wine, we use Holland House Cooking Wine that I keep on hand all the time (I keep both Marsala and Sherry cooking wines on hand.) We used about 1/4 cup tonight.

Here’s the thing about Don though: he’d make a great video blogger chef or a great webinar blogger chef because he cooks without a recipe. He’s a fantastic cook but it’s almost always out of his head.

So tonight, we did our best to get his recipe out of his head and onto a piece of paper (rather, onto a paper napkin) so that I could pass it along.

Here it is:

Step one: cook the chicken.

Take 6 chicken tenders (or however many you think you need) thawed and cubed, and cook them. You can bake them, fry them or saute them. He fried them tonight, which in my opinion is the best, but not the healthiest way (shocker.) Tonight before frying them, he rolled them in flour first and added a little salt and pepper too.

Technically they don’t even need to be cooked all the way through because they’re going to go back into the pan in a little while.

Take them out and set them aside. He puts them in a dish that has paper toweling on it, to catch the grease.

In the same frying pan, saute the mushrooms in either butter or olive oil. We buy fresh, whole mushrooms and either slice them as we did tonight, or cube them, depending on what we’re cooking.

Put the chicken back in and saute together.

Next, de-glaze the pan by adding in the 1/4 cup of Marsala and 1 cup of chicken stock.

While the pasta is cooking, add the Marsala Wine and the Chicken Stock.

You can be cooking your pasta at the same time.

Cook chicken, mushrooms, marsala and chicken stock together until it boils.

Cook the chicken, mushrooms, Marsala and chicken stock together for a minute or so until it comes to a boil.

Season with salt, pepper, garlic and basil.

At this point Don likes to thicken up the sauce to just how he likes it. In his words, “I take pats of butter and roll them in flour and add in enough pats of butter and flour until it’s the way I like it.”

He said you can also make a rue of butter and flour if you would like, or you can just add the flour to thicken.

Once the pasta is done, we toss it all into a serving bowl with the chicken and Marsala on top. He sprinkles parsley on top for looks.

We used to always make a bed of rice for under the chicken, and sometimes we still do, but when we lived in New Jersey, one of our favorite Italian restaurants served it over pasta, and ever since then, that’s an option for us as well. That’s the way the kids like it best. Using the wheat pasta makes it a bit healthier too.

Enjoy!

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Resolutions and Recipes: A tip I can share, and a recipe I can’t

4 Jan

Our gravy recipe is top secret!

When I was growing up, the day my mother “made the gravy” which some of you call sauce, was a huge deal. It was an all-day affair and included the cooking of both the meats (pork chops and meatballs) and the sauce. The house would smell incredibly good all day long and we knew that at the end of the day (literally, not figuratively) there’d be macaroni and meatballs for dinner.

The recipe was top secret. No one knew it and it was a combination of recipes from both grandmothers, according to my mom. When she was cooking the gravy you had to stay out of the way and not touch anything, not even the wooden spoon that sat in the pan all day. That spoon was part of the reason the gravy tasted as good as it did.

The gravy recipe yielded more than enough gravy for just one meal, and my mom would divide up the extras into “Newport Creamery” ice cream containers and freeze them that way for future meals. (Those of you in New England know what Newport Creamery is!) Then, on a busy night, instead of having to cook an entire meal from scratch, one of us could just take out a container of gravy and transfer it into a microwave bowl for reheating. Boil some pasta, make a salad, and there’s dinner.

My dad used to joke that he couldn’t “trade her in for a newer model” because my mom would take with her the secret to making the gravy and without that, he would never survive. That and a whole bunch of other things, but really that’s a whole other post. 🙂

When I got married and it was the day of my bridal shower (August 6, 1995) I received a small wrapped box from my mom; it hardly weighed anything at all. But, what was inside was worth its weight in gold, and more. It was….the recipe for the gravy, along with a card which read, “From me to you, one of the secrets to a good marriage. Love, Mom.”

The recipe and the card, in the original box, truly is one of the secrets to a good marriage.

Clearly, I can’t share the recipe with you. It’s top secret. I keep it in the original box, with her card and the box is labeled down the side because I store it like a cookbook with all my other cookbooks, and also because when I was working as a Stampin’ Up! demonstrator one day, I got a cell-phone call from my husband (who usually had to make the gravy since I worked weekends.) I whispered into my phone, “What’s wrong??” because he never called me when I was working. “I can’t find the recipe for the gravy,” he said. Hence the red Sharpie title down the side of the box.

For several years I made the gravy myself, but I did let him in on the secret when I started my Stampin’ Up! job so that we didn’t miss out eating it just because I was working. What I can share with you though is this: Making your own gravy and meatballs is a huge money-saver and so much more delicious than not.

See the wooden spoon? Very important.

The total cost of our gravy according to yesterday’s PriceRite receipt is as follows:

Crushed Tomatoes: $2.97 total for the three cans needed

Tomato Paste: $1.56 total for the four cans needed

Grd. Beef for meatballs: $12.72

Pork Chops for the sauce: $8.57

Total: $25.82

We store ours in ziploc bags in our freezer, marked with the date.

That amount of money gave us EIGHT meals. Our pasta is 88 cents per box so you need to add that into each meal as well, plus the cost of your salad that night if you make one.

So for about $5 per meal (that includes the salad and the pasta,) you get an AMAZING dinner that feeds five of us, and I mean amazing. There is nothing like a homemade macaroni and meatball dinner. That’s one dollar per person, per meal. Can you beat it?

homemade meatballs

The kids rolled these, they get more and more uniform each time they do it. Although we did get the question, "Can we make these any shape we want?" No...

There is the opportunity for the kids to help out if you’d like, when rolling the meatballs. The recipe makes for a ton of meatballs so once again, having the extra sets of hands does make a difference and their pride in being able to say, “We rolled all the meatballs,” as you take your first bite, is priceless. Some day our girls will each have the recipe as well, so it’s good to give them this experience early on.

You can make it in the crockpot or on the stove. We had a lot of meatballs this time, on purpose, so it took up two stovetop pots.

So there you have it, the recipe I can’t share with you but the tip for saving money and eating well that I can. I hope that at least that part of it helps you in your meal planning and budgeting!

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Spaghetti WHAT??

14 Oct

Very rarely do I get a meal where all three kids give it a thumbs up. This one got three thumbs up!

I love a good meal as much as the next person. Food is right up there on my list of favorite things. However, last year when I started seeing articles about, recipes for and photos of the newest food rage brought on by the iCarly TV show, I thought, “No way. I’d never eat that.” Well, last night, I did.

Last night we had Spaghetti Tacos for dinner. You know what? I liked them! I even had seconds. All the kids had seconds. It was the craziest thing, but it was good!

It all started last week when my brother-in-law Dave, announced on Facebook that they’d had Spaghetti Tacos for dinner. When I asked him more about it, he said they were good, and super easy to make. You just needed spaghetti, meatballs, sauce and cheese, plus taco shells.

Coincidentally I already had leftover spaghetti in the fridge. I had a bag of meatballs in the freezer, although not homemade, they’d do for this trial of a new recipe. I grabbed some taco shells at the store on my way home last night and we were set. I actually had to get both hard and soft tacos because my youngest daughter doesn’t love the hard ones. My husband cooked up the leftover spaghetti with extra sauce and the meatballs on the stove in a frying pan, questioning me the entire time about what it was that we were making, and why. He made a big Ceasar Salad to go with it, and we sat down to eat.

Elizabeth sat down and announced, "My two favorite meals: tacos and spaghetti, all in one!" and took a big bite.

Believe it or not, the Spaghetti Tacos were a big hit! All of my kids had two, I think Elizabeth actually had three. I had two. Alex liked hers in the soft taco shells, and Elizabeth had two hard and one soft, pronouncing all of them delicious.

The only naysayer was my husband Don, who refused to try any at all. He had a chicken Ceasar Salad with the leftover chicken from another night.

All in all, I’d say Spaghetti Tacos were fast, easy, delicious and a great way to use up a leftover pasta dinner.

According to Alex, soft tacos work just as well and taste just as good!

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Old Fashioned Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

30 Sep

Best.Banana.Bread.Ever.

As I begin moving all my chocolate chip recipes over from my Facebook Page to here, I thought I’d move this one over first. This recipe is by far the best banana bread recipe I’ve ever had and it was given to me by my cousin Tina. The secret is the cinnamon and sugar that she sprinkles on the tops of the breads before baking.

I love the smell that fills my house when I make this bread and I think of Tina and how she’s so much more than a cousin to me, she’s a wonderful friend as well. That’s why I chose this recipe to be the first chocolate chip recipe that I posted on my new blog. This one is dedicated to Tina and to good friends.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 eggs, beaten

2 cups flour

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

2T milk

1 1/2 c. mashed bananas (I use two.)

I add in chocolate chips, of course, about 2/3 cup or so.

Directions:

Mix all ingredients and pour into greased glass loaf pan.

Bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes.

Lower to 300 degrees and bake for an additional 45 minutes.

 

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