April 19, 2013

My first question...how is your weather? Perhaps I can live vicariously through you if your weather is better than mine; I bet it is!  We've had so much rain, it has been unbelievable, but the worst part of the precipitation has been when it has turned to snow!  Come on...it is April 19th!!!  Now I suppose I shouldn't complain about the weather.  They say out here if you just wait about 15 minutes, it will change, but lately it has been rainy day after rainy day, with snow mixed in.  I guess it will be true this year - April showers will bring May flowers!

This week I have two keeper recipes for you.  Apricot chicken, and zoodles!!!  First, the zoodles.  Zoodles have been all over Pinterest and gluten-free blogs, and I stumbled across them 3 times last week so I decided it was fate; I had to try them.  This isn't really a recipe, but more of a cooking idea.  You need to julienne the zucchini to get this to work.  One of the sites that I saw zoodles on talked about the special peeler they used to make the zoodles.  I love to cook, and have been testing the "paleo" waters, so I did buy a handy little gadget, and it has been great.  Zoodles are so fun and easy that I made them two days in a row!  Once for dinner as an option for under stir fry instead of rice, and the next day for lunch to go with some leftover tomato sauce I had on hand.  I think what really makes these awesome is that they are actually "twirl-able!"  How fun to twirl up some veggies like pasta?  My kids and husband enjoyed them, and we actually ran out of the zoodles the night we had stir fry and had rice leftover at the end of dinner.  Clearly not everyone will want to try these, but I heartily endorse them!  And bonus...who doesn't love to say zoodles?

As for the apricot chicken, I got this recipe from one of my sisters.  I think she got if from a friend who brought her dinner upon the birth of her first son!  I've had the recipe for ages, and finally made it for dinner one night while Ryan was out of town.  The kids loved it!  "Blog-worthy" they told me.  (I love to hear that when I cook!)  It is so easy with just 4 ingredients and then it cooks in the oven for less than an hour.  Make some rice (or perhaps zoodles) and you've got a great main course.  I think this tastes a little like orange chicken, or sweet and sour chicken.  I don't like fresh or dried apricots, so I was skeptical the first time I tried it, but it really is delicious!  If you try it, let me know!

Not sure what we have on tap for next week - I am going to try to cook mainly with what is in the freezer and pantry so we'll see if any new dishes make it to the dinner table.  I do have my eye on home-made graham crackers, and if you know our little Boo-Boo, he loves graham crackers!  It would be awesome if I could make them for him from scratch!  I'll let you know if that works out!

Happy cooking!

New Recipes
Apricot Chicken
Zoodles

Apricot Chicken

Ingredients
* 1 lb chicken, cut up
* small bottle Italian salad dressing
* small jar apricot fruit preserves
* 1 envelope onion soup mix

Directions
1. Mix the preserves, dressing and soup mix in a bowl.  Add the chicken and mix to combine.
2. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.
3. Serve over rice, if desired.

Notes
I toyed with changing the name but I was given some good advice - simple and straightforward.  My concern is that if you see are turned off by the sound of apricot preserves in your dinner you might not give this a chance!  But I suggest you do give this easy dinner a try...my kids loved it!

Zoodles (more of an idea than a recipe)

Ingredients
* zucchini
* salt

Directions
There are many different suggestions as to how to make these, but here is what I did:  julienne the zucchini and sprinkle it with salt in a colander (to draw out some of the moisture).  I left the zucchini with the salt while I brought some water up to boil.  Then blanch the zucchini for one minute.  Drain (but don't rinse or you'll cool off the zucchini).  Serve however you'd like!

Notes
I've tried these with tomato sauce and with chicken stir fry...both have been fabulous!  I will definitely be making these often.  I mean come on - how fun is it to twirl your veggies around your fork?!?!

There are many posts out there on how to prepare your zoodles, but here are three good ones I came across!
Primalist Zoodles
Zenbelly Zoodles 
Nom Nom Paleo

April 12, 2013

I suppose we should just cut to the chase....no keeper recipes this week.  To be honest, we only tried one new dish, and although it had promise, and good flavor, the sauce just needs some tweaking.  Buffalo chicken mac & cheese was a hit at the dinner table, but I think it could use some improvement.  Rather than share the version we made on Thursday, I will try it again in the coming weeks and hope to have a fabulous recipe for you!

Do any of you have a great buffalo chicken mac & cheese you'd care to share?  Drop me an email at monkeysinthekitchen@gmail.com

Happy Cooking!

April 5, 2013

Another really busy week with little time to cook...but we were on a pumpkin muffin spree!  I think we baked pumpkin muffins 4 times this week...sometimes mini, sometimes standard sized.  We made them from a mix, and then we took out some pumpkin from the freezer and baked Grammie's favorite completely homemade pumpkin muffins (including the processed fresh pumpkin!).  They were absolutely delicious.  And honestly, the hardest part is actually assembling all the ingredients and measuring everything, which was done in no time at all.  So, if you have the ingredients on hand (and yes, canned processed pumpkin will absolutely work!), throw these together, and you won't be disappointed!

Hannah requested taco burgers this week, which sounded good to everyone (thanks again, Melissa, for turning us onto this recipe a few years ago!).  I had everything needed to cook these except we were out of taco seasoning.  Not feeling like running to the store I did a quick search and found a recipe on Allrecipes that had almost 3000 reviews!!!  Something rated 5 stars with that many reviews was definitely worth trying.  It worked great for our taco burgers.  We are looking forward to trying it out in traditional tacos sometime this week or next.

Happy Cooking!!!

New Recipes
Grammie's Favorite Low-fat Pumpkin Muffins
DIY Taco seasoning

Grammie's Favorite Lowfat Pumpkin Muffins

Ingredients
* 1 cup brown sugar
* 2 large egg whites
* 1 cup pumpkin
* 1/4 cup canola oil
* 1/3 cup low-fat plain or vanilla yogurt
* 1 tsp vanilla
* 1 cup AP flour
* 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
* 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
* 1 tsp cinnamon
* 1/2 tsp nutmeg
* 1/2 tsp baking soda
* 1/2 tsp salt

Directions
1. Mix the wet ingredients (brown sugar through vanilla).
2. In a second bowl, mix the dry ingredients (AP flour through salt).
3. Mix the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients.
4. Put batter into prepared pan of your choice.  For a loaf pan, bake 45-50 minutes.  For mini muffins, bake 14 minutes.  For standard muffins, bake 23 minutes.  Be sure to check for doneness before removing from the oven.
5. Let cool in the pan for 5-8 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Notes
Liam made these with Grammie to bring to preschool this week - and his young classmates couldn't get enough!  Many of them wanted a third mini-muffin!  These also might be great if you mixed in some chopped walnuts or pecans.

DIY Taco Seasoning

Ingredients
* 1 tbsp chili powder
* 1/4 tsp garlic powder
* 1/4 tsp onion powder
* 1/4 tsp  dried oregano
* 1/2 tsp paprika
* 1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
* 1 tsp salt
* 1 tsp black pepper
* 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes, optional

Directions
Mix all the ingredients together!  3 tbsp of this mix would take the place of one store bought package.

Notes
We ran out of taco seasoning when we were going to make taco burgers this week.  So, since we had such good luck with making our own fajita seasoning, I decided to make the taco seasoning.  I found this recipe on Allrecipes and it worked really well!  I did leave out the crushed red pepper flakes, but if we were using it for traditional tacos I would likely add it if we had it on hand.