Creamy Chicken Spaghetti Casserole - Try this!

Well, this is a first for me. I made this last night and i'm blogging about it today. I deserve a pat on the back - or two :D

I made this wonderful casserole last night for dinner and I must say, I'm a fan. If I could paint my face and put on a big foam hand for this one, I would. But that would be silly and I think big foam hands are kind of tacky. Sorry for all you big foam hand lovers out there. It's time to take it off, and started cooking.

This recipe does take a LONG time. Even by PW standards she has 45 minutes for prep time and 30 minutes for cooking time. So, in real, normal people time you should at least plan to add an extra 20 minutes to it.

She calls for a whole fryer chicken cut up. They didn't have any of those at the store and there was no way i was going to buy a whole chicken and cut it up myself. That would've added another hour to the prep time... well, actually, the recipe just would not have been made. I can't cut up a whole chicken and do everything that comes with cutting whole chickens. That's disgusting. So, I resorted to my favorite chicken part - thighs. Again, i think dark meat gives it a better flavor than white meat anyway.

You need to boil the chicken in a pot of water. She says 20 to 30 minutes. I put the water and the chicken in the pot and when it came to a boil I let it sit in there for about 30 to 35 minutes. Mainly because I thought that would be a good time to sit on my butt and browse the internet for a bit. But you can be good and get to chopping those olives and mushrooms and measuring out the liquid ingredients.

When the chicken is done, remove it from the pot with tongs and set it aside. DO NOT touch the chicken at this point. Remember, it just came out of a pot of boiling water! I know YOU know that, but someone else might not. Then you boil the pasta in that same chicken water. I was a little apprehensive at first, but trusted PW. I don't think it added much additional flavor, but it was nice not having another pot and waiting for it to boil. Make sure you cook your pasta AL DENTE. It will cook extra in the oven later so make sure you don't turn it to mush when you are boiling it. I also used regular spaghetti and not thin spaghetti like the recipe calls for. Thin = mush. I don't like mush.

On to the sauce... When you melt the butter and add the flour, you need to whisk your little heart out and make sure the butter does not burn. Then you add in the chicken broth. I *think* she just uses the chicken/spaghetti water, but I did not do that. First of all, i think it's gross. Second of all, i think the chicken broth that I buy at the store is a heck of a lot tastier than what was in that pot.

Back to the whisking.... continue to whisk in that milk and then when everything is added cook it on low medium for a few minutes. At this point, do not go out and check your mail, go to the bathroom or do anything else that will distract your attention from your pot of sauce. You need to WATCH it so it doesn't bubble too much and burn or evaporate. Trust me. Go check your mail when the chicken is boiling instead.

I think this is the first recipe that Ree hasn't made me chop up parsley. Thank you, Ree. Thank you! But she did make me shred chicken. I would much rather chop parsley than shred chicken, but this was sooooo worth it so I kicked and screamed for about a minute but then dug in my forks and began to shred.

When your sauce is done, you dump all of the good stuff into it. The chicken, the mushrooms, olives and mix it all up. Then you add in the pasta and put it into a casserole dish to bake. Sprinkle it with more parmesan cheese and throw it in the oven at 350. I let it bake for about 30 to 35 minutes until the top was a nice golden brown and crispy.

Dig in and enjoy! This is really one of my favorite recipes and I'm sure i will make it again and again.

Portobello-Prosciutto Burgers - Eh.

I have been soooooo dreading writing this blog post and that's probably why it's taken me two weeks to do it! This is the first recipe that I felt was just so-so. Don't get me wrong, it was GOOD but it wasn't mind-blowing good... and i really wanted it to be mind-blowing good. I mean c'mon what's better than prosciutto? In my opinion, nothing.

On to the recipe... PW calls for TWO portobello mushrooms per sandwich. If you've never seen a portobello, they are usually the size of your head. Well maybe not the size of YOUR head, but I have a pretty small head. If they aren't the size of your freakishly small head, then they are at least the size of your hand. Now take your hands and put them on top of each other, now put them inside of a bun. Do you really want to eat a sandwich with that much mushroom on it? No, you really don't. I'm a big fan of mushrooms and this was even too much mushroom for me. I would recommend cutting it down to one shroom per sandwich. You'll be glad you did.

PW recommends marinating the mushrooms in red wine. But it's totally optional. I tried it because she's usually always right (except when she tells you to put Apple Cider in Chicken and Dumplings... then she's wrong. VERY, very wrong). Okay, let's try this at home. If you make the recipe according to her specifications it calls for 8 portobello mushrooms. And she says to marinate these 8 small-head-sized mushrooms in 1 cup of red wine. Seriously try it. Okay, did you? good. You probably noticed that 1 cup of red wine is not enough to marinate 8 freakishly large mushrooms in. First of all, 8 of these won't fit in a normal sized bowl. Even if they did fit in a normal sized bowl when you pour in 1 cup of wine the only ones that are getting marinated are the ones at the very bottom of the bowl. So, it really doesn't work. Personally I would lay them out in a pan and drizzle them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Then i would flip them over and do it on the other side too. Let them sit like that for 30 minutes to one hour and I have a feeling it will be a trillion times better than the one cup of red wine.

You need to grill the mushrooms either on an outside grill or on one of those grill pans that you put on the stove. It was cold so I didn't want to go outside and grill (read: I have no idea how to light the thing) and I don't have one of those fancy grill pans.

Mental note: buy a fancy grill pan.

So I stuck them on a panini maker. I thought my reasoning was good.... it LOOKS like a grill and it gets hot like a grill so it must work like a grill. Wrong. It took FOREVER to cook those suckers.

So when they were finally done, I followed the rest of the recipe as it was written. Please, please, please don't skimp on the mayo/basil dressing that's in this recipe. That really did make the whole sandwich. Halfway through eating it, I pulled off one of the mushrooms because like i said before it was too much.

Next time I make these (if there is a next time) I will definitely try marinating them with the olive oil/balsamic combo. I don't even like balsamic vinegar, but I have a feeling it will be MUCH better than the red wine.

Stay warm and happy cooking :)

Ginger Steak Salad - YUMMERS!

After this past weekend of junk food and Chipotle, I was craving some veggies so I dug through the Pioneer Woman's recipes and found this little gem. If you are craving greens and are craving some steak, this is the perfect salad for you! Or if you aren't craving either, you should still try it. Branch out and live a little.

I just went back to the recipe to see how many servings she says this makes. She says it serves 1. ONE?! That MUST be a typo. Alicia and I had it last night and we have PLENTY left over to have two more servings. So, I would say it serves at least four. The recipe calls for 8oz of salad greens, but I only used 6oz so it may even serve more if you use the total amount.

I love Thai Steak salads and this recipe reminded me of one. Thai salads usually include cucumbers, red onions and cilantro so I went ahead and added those ingredients to the salad. I also doubled the salad dressing recipe. If it ends up being too much for you, you can always keep it in the fridge and use it on a plain salad. It would be just as delicious.

As for the steak, I like my steaks medium-rare with a strong emphasis on the rare. I bought a nice Rib-Eye that was about 1lb in weight. It was a thick cut steak so it took about 2.5 minutes on each side in a REALLY hot skillet. I would flip it over every 1.5 minutes though because the brown sugar in the marinade will burn quickly. Speaking of the marinade - PW suggests that you marinate it for 30 minutes to 2 hours. Mine marinated for around 45 minutes and it was perfect.

As I was making this recipe, I realized that I not only hate chopping parsley but I also hate chopping ginger. I found this little tutorial for you though in case you want to reference it... it may make it easier for you, but if you are like me you will still loathe the task. I do LOVE chopping garlic though. Go figure.

I made this recipe pretty much exactly as Ree wrote it, except for the little changes I mentioned above. This is a GREAT salad that will satisfy any appetite!

Happy Cooking!

Beef with Snow Peas - Hell Yeah!

I made this last Saturday night and am just now posting about it. I'm the worst kind of procrastinator... I have been crowned the queen of procrastination. Right now I'm writing this because what I should be doing is organizing and cleaning, but that sounds hideously boring so I shall write about glorious beef and snow peas instead.

This is one of the Pioneer Woman's most favorite recipes and I have to say it is one of my favorites too! For this recipe I already had the Soy Sauce, Cooking Sherry, Brown sugar, cornstarch, crushed red pepper and rice on hand. Shhhhhh.. don't tell anyone, but I made this recipe a couple of months ago and LOVED it. So I remade it so I could 1, blog about it and 2, eat it again!

I had to purchase the snow peas, beef, ginger and green onion.. so my total per serving only came out to 2.20! Woo hoo! PW says this makes 8 servings and she's probably right about that.

A note about the rice. The recipe calls for Jasmine or other long-grained rice. Save yourself some time and effort and buy this rice. Most of the time when you use Jasmine or Basmati rice, you have to rinse it, and rinse it, and rinse it, and rinse it some more until the water runs clear so you don't get sticky, icky rice. But, the Mahatma brand Jasmine rice is so easy to cook and it is delicious and fluffy and you will want to eat the whole pot! If you made the Pasta with Bacon and Mushrooms you should have some chicken broth left over. If you do, use 1/2 chicken broth and 1/2 water for the liquid. Also, if you add a tablespoon or two of butter (depending on how much rice you are making) and some salt you won't be disappointed. It really brings out the wonderful flavor of the rice.

Okay, enough about the rice. Let's get to the beef. For this recipe you need a Flank Steak. Flank steak is VERY tender when sliced VERY thin. It's not so tender when you don't slice it thin. So please for the love of all that is good and holy slice the flank steak thinly. You need a SHARP knife to do this and not a serrated knife. Please do NOT use a serrated knife. You will destroy the meat and you will hate this recipe. Cut the meat against the grain and it'll be a very easy task.

Ree calls for peanut oil or sesame oil to brown the beef and the snow peas. I actually used about a TBSP of sesame oil and two TBSP of olive oil. I love, love, love sesame oil and i think it gives the dish a nice flavor.

Speaking of the oil, please take note that when she says the pan needs to be VERY hot, it needs to be VERY hot. If it's not you won't sear in the flavor and your beef and snow peas will be very, very sad. So since you have oil in a VERY hot pan it will spit and dance around in there. Please don't let kids near the stove when cooking this.

The other thing that I modified was the soy sauce. I used a 1/4 c of full sodium soy sauce and a 1/4 c of low sodium soy sauce. I did this so i wouldn't have to add salt at the end. You should NOT have to add any salt at all to this recipe if you make it this way.

Everything else I did according to Ree's recipe and it was very easy to follow and really, really delicious. If you make this, I expect an invite for dinner :)

Pasta with Bacon and Mushrooms

I was looking for a recipe to cook on Friday night and stumbled upon this one from Ree's extensive collection. Pasta, Okay. Mushrooms, Yum. Bacon, YES please. So I headed to the store to get my ingredients for this one and for the one that I cooked on Saturday night... look for that post soon.

This recipe has pretty simple ingredients and for my calculations I already had the Olive Oil and the Garlic. Ree says that this recipe serves 4. So according to her calculations this recipe cost 4.70 per person. Please keep in mind that i'm not figuring out how much one cup of parmesean calculates to, I'm just adding up what I bought divided by the number of people it serves. I figure that if you have to buy everything anyway you should know how much it will really cost. The good news is that this recipe definitely serves more than 4. I don't know how they grow them out there on the pioneer front, but we have already had 4 healthy servings and we have at least two more. Soooo according to 6 servings, it will be 3.13/serving. If you have a little bird appetite you might even be able to get 8 servings out of this so then it's only 2.35. Just depends on how hungry you are.

So, I get home with the ingredients and head to work on the recipe. This time I calculated how long it took me to do the recipe versus how long she says it takes to cook. According to her it takes 25 minutes total. That's prep time + cooking time. For me it took 45 minutes total. See, I told you she has super powers.

Let's start with the prep. The first thing you need to do is get everything chopped and diced and ready to go. So, we'll start with the most important part. The BACON. This recipe calls for 3 pieces of bacon... um, okay. I made it 8 pieces of bacon. I mean, who doesn't like bacon? If you don't like bacon, then you aren't going to like this blog. So slice up your 3 to 8 pieces in 1/2" pieces and set aside. Grab your mushrooms and clean them off. I was always told that mushrooms like cats hate water (yes, i did just successfully pull off a cat/mushroom analogy. Jealous? you should be.). I never, ever rinse them under the faucet. I always dampen a paper towel and just wipe off the dirt. But in doing some research there is much controversy over the proper way to wash a mushroom. Who knew. Some people say don't do it, others say it's fine as long as you don't soak them. So you chose whatever way you feel more comfortable. Once they are clean, grab a sharp knife and thinly slice them. Set those aside too.

Grab your parsley and take off a bunch of it. I used a handful. Wash it and pat it dry with a paper towel. Then put it on your cutting board and say a prayer to your higher power for the strength to chop it. I HATE chopping parsley. With a passion, I hate it. I've found that if you bunch it all up in your fingers and then chop, it makes it easier. Keep chopping until it is finely minced. Give thanks that it is over and you shall never have to do it again. Well, at least for that day.

Now you are ready to start cooking! If you follow the recipe, it is all pretty simple to do. If you are using a non-stick pan it is going to be really, really hard for you to brown the mushrooms. The non-stick surface doesn't really brown things very well. Turn the heat on your stove on HIGH. I did medium high for about 5 minutes and then really, really high for another 5 minutes. That seemed to work well. If you have a cast-iron skillet, then i would just follow the directions that she has, since that is what she uses.

Ree recommends that you use thin spaghetti or angel hair. Thin spaghetti and angel hair really absorb the sauce... so unless you plan on eating it all in one night or you plan to make some sort of sticky pasta sculpture out of it, you should opt for something that won't absorb as much. Maybe penne or farfalle. I would also recommend doubling the liquid in the recipe. So double cream, half and half and chicken broth. She says that for the chicken broth you can use white wine instead if you want. I actually used half chicken broth and half white wine. I think the white wine gives it a nice flavor. She recommends that if the sauce is absorbing too much to add some of the water from the pasta. Yuck. That just gives you, well, watery sauce. If after you double the liquids it is still too thick, add more chicken broth. You'll be glad that you did.

Now, here's a quiz for you. Ree forgets one critical part in the preparation instructions. Go back and reread them.

Do you know what it is?

No?

Okay, I'll tell you.... In my opinion, she left out the most important part. She tells you to cook the bacon and then set it aside, but she never tells you to add it back in! The shame. The shame. How could she forget the BACON?! I made an executive decision and added it in right after I turned off the heat on the sauce.

If you don't eat all of the pasta in one night, when you reheat the sauce add a little chicken broth to thin it out. You may need to add some extra Parmesan as well. Your call.

Well, that's all for today. Happy parsley chopping to you and yours.

Chicken Tortilla Soup - YUM

I made the Pioneer Woman's Chicken Tortilla Soup last night. It was a cold, cold day in Texas (yes, they do happen) and soup sounded like just what I needed. Ree just posted the recipe on her site, so I took it as a sign from above that it was meant to be... and it was.

I would copy and paste the recipe here, but I'm afraid that there might be some copyright issues, and I don't want Ree mad at me. I've heard she has quite a temper. She is a redhead after all. Okay so I haven't heard that, but it makes for a better, more interesting post.

Okay, enough with the rambling. Let's get down to business. As I said before, it was a brisk day in Dallas so I bundled up and headed to Kroger to purchase my ingredients. So needless to say, these prices are based on Kroger prices in Dallas. Depending on where you shop you may spend more or less. Also, there were a few items that I already had on hand - the Olive Oil, garlic powder, garlic, and salt (I would have to forfeit my Italian card if i didn't have these ingredients in my home). With the ingredients that I purchased it worked out to about $4.58/serving. According to PW this recipe makes 8 servings. We have already had 5 servings of it and judging by the Tupperware containers taking over the fridge, we probably have at least another 5 servings to go.

Now down to the recipe. I used three chicken breasts instead of two. I'm such a rebel. What would PW think of me? I like my soup a little chunky and extra chicken won't hurt a thing.

PW says you need 1 cup of diced onion - that's about 1/2 of a regular sized onion. She also says that you need 1/4c of each green bell pepper and red bell pepper. That's like 1/4 of the pepper. I don't know about you but if I only use 1/4 of a pepper, I will put the unused 3/4 back in the fridge and I won't see it again until it has become somewhat of a science experiment. So to save the red pepper and onion from this horrible fate, I just used the whole thing. Yes, the whole thing. That's way more pepper and onion than the recipe calls for but channel your inner James Dean and you'll be glad you did. As for the green pepper, well that got stuck in the fridge because i'm not particularly fond of green pepper and i didn't want to overwhelm the soup with that green pepper flavor. I'm sure it will haunt me from beyond the grave, but I'm okay with that.

The recipe calls for 32oz of Chicken Stock. I used around 40oz because I had some left in the fridge from another recipe. As for everything else, I did as I was told.

If you follow her recipe you really can't mess anything up. This recipe is really pretty easy and there wasn't anything that was difficult to follow. Plus she always puts up really pretty pictures so if you ever get confused by anything you have a visual aid to help you. Lots and lots of visual aids. I really don't know how she has time to make up a recipe, cook the recipe, take pictures of every step of the recipe, and then BLOG about it. She must have super powers. I want super powers.

Feel free to make the recipe your own as I did, but please, please, please don't skimp on the toppings! They are the most important part. So ladle that soup in a bowl, put on a dollop of sour cream, add some cheese, red onion and lots of cilantro and Voila you have a little taste of heaven. When you're done, go ahead and lick the bowl. You know you want to. Don't worry I won't judge.

Introduction

I just wanted to put a first post in here to break the blog ice.

I discovered the pioneer woman Ree Drummond (every time I say her last name, I can't help but sing the theme song to Different Strokes) last year when a friend of mine made a delicious mac and cheese dish for our not-so-consistent supper club. It was like heaven in my mouth and I knew that it was going straight to my thighs. One can always tell a good recipe by the speed in which it attaches itself to random body parts.

One of my new years resolutions is to cook more at home and thought that this would be the perfect way to do it. So in the spirit of Julia and Julia, I will be picking one to five pioneer woman recipes to cook per week. Okay let's be realistic - it will probably be like one recipe every two weeks but i'm going to try really hard to be consistent with them.

I will post my experiences with the recipes. I am not a chef, but I'm not a novice either so I will try to give a realistic account of how easy/hard the recipes are. I will try to break it down by cost too so you know how much it will be per serving and, finally, I will let you know if I like it or not... I mean that is the most important part, right?

I have already made several of her recipes and I have loved each and every one with the exception of two. I will be attempting to make those two recipes again in case it was user error. Keep reading the blog to find out how it goes :)

In closing, I will leave you with a little ear worm - it is a gift from me to you. You're welcome.

Now, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum,
What might be right for you, may not be right for some.... and continue :)