Do you want to try the best chicken salad ever? And, one that is super easy to make? Of course you do, even if you don’t realize it yet. I decided to make this for lunch a few of the days this week. I used to think I didn’t like celery – now I realize you just mix it in with other things so you don’t taste it. Now, I’m not really sure if you’re supposed to chop the grapes up like I did, but I actually really like it this way. It had the right amount of crunch with the perfect consistency. This will now be a staple lunch for me during the week. Per the recipe it’s a “skinny” version. Whatever it is, it takes delicious! (Sorry I don’t have a picture of it mixed together, or on one of my delicious sandwiches. I’ll add one once I make some more!)

Ingredients:

• 3 cups shredded cooked chicken
• 1 cup celery, chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup chopped grapes
• 1/4 cup finely chopped green onion
• 3/4 cup reduced-fat miracle whip
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp onion powder

1. In a large bowl, mix chicken, celery, chopped grapes, and green onion.
2.  In a small bowl, mix together miracle whip, salt, black pepper, and onion powder.
3.  Cover chicken mixture with dressing and stir until well mixed.
4. Cover and chill chicken salad until ready to serve.

On Sunday, around lunchtime, I put our dinner into the crock pot to cook while we shopped. When we got home, exhausted, we had this tasty meal to enjoy. Does life get any better than that?

What is the weird black stuff you get on cilantro? No worries, I picked it out.

This recipe is super, duper simple and ridiculously tasty. The prep time was maybe 10 minutes. Maybe. And that was probably because I talking or dancing or something while I was cooking. Not because it takes very long. You literally chop up the cilantro and jalapenos. One thing that wasn’t super clear on the recipe was if you should use 4-6 chicken breasts or 4-6 chicken breast halves (meaning 2 or 3 breasts). To be safe I put in 3 chicken breasts, but I decided to put a crazy spin on it and cut them into quarters. (GASP!) Now, I don’t know if our consistency was correct or how it was meant to eat, but we like to make things up as we go. We decided to cook some rice to put with it, along with some tortillas and plain greek yogurt that we like to pretend is sour cream (and tastes absolutely no different, I swear!). The dish was amazing and the perfect amount of spice to make your lips feel botoxed, but still be able to eat it. And the best part? Leftovers!

Ingredients:

• One 24-ounce jar medium or mild salsa
• Juice from one lime
• 1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
• One 1.25-oz. package taco seasoning
• 2 jalapeno peppers, finely chopped (optional)
• 3 boneless chicken breasts cut into bite-sized pieces (completely defrosted) 

1. Mix together in the slow cooker and coat chicken with the salsa mixture.

2. Cover and cook on Low for 6 hours.

Step 1 – Put it all in the crock pot

Step 2 – Eat it!!

Tonight was my night off from cooking, so my knight in shining armor made dinner! Whoo-hoo!! Because of Lent we’ve been incorporating a lot more seafood into our diet on Fridays. Since he’s from the east coast and loves seafood he’s been ecstatic. I on the other hand had a difficult time with it, mostly for lunch. Peanut butter sandwiches weren’t quite enough and I didn’t want tuna fish with all the mayo, etc. However, it offered up an opportunity for me to try different kinds of fish and found there were a few I liked – especially bass and escolar. 

I realize Lent is over and it’s not Friday, but since we found a good fish market in town we bought some more fish last week that we wanted to incorporate into our weekly meals. He specifically had a recipe for tilapia that he wanted to try. We’d also come across a bunch of healthy sweet potato recipes and had some baked sweet potato latkes on Sunday night with steak. The recipe was very hearty, so he didn’t cook it all and saved it for dinner tonight.

The latkes took a considerable amount of effort on his part Sunday night to grate. The good news is he has some strong biceps that were up to the challenge. Now, I didn’t necessarily love the latkes. They weren’t bad, don’t get me wrong, they were just a little too sweet for me as a side dish and I found it overpowering with the meat both nights.

The tilapia on the other hand was magnificent! He actually added some Cajun seasoning to it that gave it a touch of a kick. He said the only thing he’d change next time would be less salt. Since I know nothing about cooking seafood, I’m not really sure why. But, I trust him; he has an uncanny ability to taste something and be able to tell exactly what it needs more or less of. I just trust what the recipe tells me.

Lemon Garlic Tilapia

Ingredients:

• 4 tilapia fillets
•  3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
•  1 tablespoon butter, melted
•  1 clove garlic, finely chopped
•  1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes
•  Pepper to taste
• Cajun seasoning to taste

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Spray a baking dish with non-stick cooking spray.
2. Rinse tilapia fillets under cool water, and pat dry with paper towels.
3. Place fillets in baking dish. Pour lemon juice over fillets, then drizzle butter on top. Sprinkle with garlic, parsley, and pepper.
4. Bake in preheated oven until the fish is white and flakes when pulled apart with a fork, about 30 minutes.

Baked Sweet Potato Latkes

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds grated sweet potatoes
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1. Preheat the oven to 400ºF. Coat two baking sheets with cooking spray.
2. In a large bowl, combine all ingredients. Drop by quarter-cupfuls onto the baking sheets. Flatten with a spatula.
3. Bake for 25 minutes. Flip and bake for an additional 10 minutes.

I decided last night that I wanted to try to make some sweet potato and kale chicken patties (Again, another recipe name that lists all the ingredients. I’d prefer to call them Sweet Baby Jesus Cakes) that I found on Pinterest and I think I’m in love. I will warn you, the recipe requires a lot of chopping. Thankfully we have a Pamper Chef chopper that neither of us could live without. However, I did learn the hard way that it doesn’t chop meat very well. Ok, so I was being super lazy! But, it was worth a shot, right? I did sacrifice my wrist for the chopper to not get melted. I may have been talking on the phone while I was cooking (and I’m sure my friend loved hearing the sound of me continually chopping). Well, when I was putting stuff into the frying pan that I’d just chopped I dropped the chopper. Knowing how beloved it is in our household, when I saw it was leaning again the pan I grabbed it. Well, in grabbing it I burned a crescent moon onto my hand. It’s basically a tattoo. Isn’t that the cool place to get tattoos now anyhow?

My war wound. Notice the weird mole I have on my hand. I have a matching one on the other hand as well. I’m marked.

As I was reading the instructions, literally as I was making it, I realized it was supposed to refrigerate for 4 hours or overnight. Whoops. To be honest, I didn’t really notice that not refrigerating it caused any troubles. I believe the recipe is a paleo recipe (I’m sure with a little research I could find out, but I”m being lazy) because it has you use coconut oil and coconut flour. Well, I’m not healthy enough to stock those sort of things, so I used cooking spray and regular flour. I will say that next time I’ll use olive oil instead of cooking spray, though, as it burned them a bit.

Another airhead moment I had was not realizing that you’re supposed to cook them, not bake them. For some reason when I read “large non-stick pan” I immediately thought of a cooking sheet and proceeded to put them on the sheet. Again, as I started reading the directions, I realized that it didn’t give a temperature to cook it at. Maybe a good sign that it doesn’t need to be baked. So, I greased up a frying pan and cooked them.

Like I said, they were super delicious. I wish we would have had some sort of topping for it. I think next time we’re going to make some remoulade sauce to put on it. And, I will admit we had a bit of an argument after dinner about who got to take the leftover patties to work for lunch today. Naturally I won. And he did dishes. Double win. (Plus, they tasted great for my lunch today.)

Ingredients:

• 2 green onion, finely chopped
• 1/2 medium sweet potato, peeled and cut into tiny little cubes
• 2 1/2 cups kale, finely chopped (leaves only)
• 1 pound skinless boneless chicken breasts, cut into chunks
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, finely chopped
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons flour

1. Heat a large skillet over medium high heat with 1 teaspoon olive oil or avocado oil (or bacon grease) add green onions and cook until tender, about 3 to 5 minutes.
2. Add sweet potatoes and cook for 4 to 5 more minutes, until barely tender.  Add kale and cook until wilted, about 2 to 3 minutes.  Set aside.
3. Add chicken to a food processor and process on pulse until ground.  Transfer meat to a large mixing bowl.  Add salt, garlic, paprika, Dijon mustard, rosemary, egg, flour, and sweet potato mix.  Mix together with hands until well combined.
4. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or even better overnight.
5. Divide your chicken mixture into 6 to 7 even patties.
6. Coat a large non-stick frying pan with olive oil to just coat the bottom (not a lot).  Add patties and cook until golden crust forms, about 5 to 6 minutes, then flip to the other side and cook until golden and cooked through.

Mixing the chopped sweet potatoes, kale, and green onions

Don’t they even look amazing?

Last night I decided to try a recipe for Rice Broccoli Chicken Cheese Bake. (Essentially the name of the recipe is just listing all the food that’s in it.) I got the inspiration from a recipe on Pinterest and decided it sounded healthy and maybe kind of good since I’m starting to appreciate broccoli more. I should have known from the beginning it was bad news. I checked on the lady’s website and learned that she didn’t relist any of the measurements of the ingredients for it. Of course not. Why would you do that? And, I’m by the books, so I need to know the exact ounce and teaspoon for every item. Thankfully she’d posted a picture of where she took the recipe from. I was able to zoom in on it from my computer to read what it said.

Multi-tasking

So, the first thing to know about me is that I like to multi-task. To the extreme. I read the recipe and saw all sorts of steps and decided I could just combine them and do them at the same time. Also, it called for Uncle Ben’s instant rice, which we didn’t have, so I decided to improvise. After arguing with my knight about how many boxes of Rice -A-Roni to add to equal the 17.6 ounces of Uncle Ben’s (he won…and was right), I started to make the 25 minute rice. While that was cooking, I decided to cook the chicken. Then boil the broccoli. It seemed to actually work well, except that the chicken was kind of cooled off by the time it was all finished. One thing I do wish I would have done differently was cut the broccoli and chicken into smaller pieces. I like to have my broccoli as small as possible to try to forget it’s there.

Before broiling

One of the mistakes I made was I missed the part about putting the broccoli, mustard, and cheese into the gravy-ish mix. So, I added it to the top. It ended up being a good thing I made that mistake because I followed it up with another mistake. So, the recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of mustard. I added dry mustard. Not wet mustard. When I realized that 3 tablespoons is literally an entire container of dry mustard…that I just poured into the dish. I somehow had a recollection that dry mustard isn’t the same as wet mustard and that it was a lot. I took the broccoli that was covered in mustard and stuck it under some running water to rinse it off. Whoops. I then reread the instructions and put the broccoli and scooped up the cheese to put into the mix. I then followed the instructions and broiled the casserole in the oven.

It actually tasted really good…until I ate a bite of broccoli that I hadn’t rinsed very well. I decided at that point one serving was enough for me. Good thing my knight loves mustard. And really, a cup and half a cheese isn’t that healthy. But, if there’s something green in there it’s automatically healthy. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Ingredients:

• 2 (8.8 ounce) packages Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice
• 1 ½ pounds chicken tenderloins
• Salt and pepper
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 onion chopped
• ¼ cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
• ½ cup heavy cream
• 1 ½ pounds broccoli, florets chopped, stems peeled and sliced thin crosswise
• 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
• 1 ½ cups grated Parmesan cheese

1. Adjust oven rack 5 inches from heating element and heat broiler. Cut slits in rice packets and microwave until hot, about 90 seconds. Remove rice from packets and spread evenly over bottom of broiler-safe baking dish.
2. Pat chicken dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in large skillet over medium-high heat. Cook chicken until light golden brown and cooked through, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer to baking dish, arranging in single layer over rice.
3. Add remaining butter and onion to empty skillet and cook until onion begins to brown, about 5 minutes. Stir in flour and cook until thoroughly incorporated, about 1 minute. Whisk in broth and cream and simmer until thickened, 3 to 5 minutes. Meanwhile, boil the broccoli, about 5 minutes. Drain broccoli.
4. Stir mustard, 1 cup cheese, and broccoli into sauce in skillet. Season with salt and pepper, then pour broccoli sauce mixture over chicken and rice in baking dish. Sprinkle remaining cheese over top and broil until cheese is browned, 2 to 4 minutes. Serve.

The finished product