Food Successes

Well, as of last post I was headed off to make Chicken Pot Pie for dinner...it was a success and super easy.  I cut off some of the prep/cooking time by using some pre-baked chicken from the evening before so all I needed to do was dice it up and throw it in the skillet with the onion let it brown up a bit before adding Thyme and chicken broth mixture with some half and half and bit of corn starch to thicken it up a bit.  The thyme gave it such a delicious flavor--normally I'm not a huge fan of the spice.  Once everything was cooked a little I added about a cup of frozen peas and carrots (it not only added to the flavor, but to the color of the food as welll--without those peas and carrots it would have been a very bland and boring color.)  I then spooned it into a 9" pie plate, added 4 sheets of whole wheat phyllo dough and brushed the top with a bit of olive oil and threw it into a 400 degree oven.  Fifteen minutes later I pulled out a beautifully, lightly browned chicken pot pie!  Mike and I ate half of it for dinner that night and he had another quarter of it for lunch the next day!

Yesterday I tried another new recipe!  I am trying to cook healthier meals for us, but also ones that will fill my husbands always flat stomach!  At one point early in our marriage---around 4-5 months in--we were going to the gym about two days a week; Mike was trying to gain more weight and bulk up a bit.  If he were to eat as many calories as he would need to gain the weight, he would eat us out of the house.  Not to mention he doesn't have the emotional attachement to food that I do.  So he told me late last year that he'd get bored of eating before consuming the number of calories he'd actually need to eat for the weight gain he wanted!  One word....jealous...in more ways than one!  Anyway, this isn't about my husband's fast metabolism or his lack of emotional attachment to food but new recipes!  So, my new recipe yesterday was an Apple Butternut Squash Soup.  In my opinion it tasted better tonight than it did last night--perhaps it got thicker or the flavores got to mingle with one another all last night and all day today.  Either way it was delicious!  This too was quite an easy recipe and ready to eat within 45 minutes of starting to prepare it.  The hardest part was to peel, de-seed and chop the butternut squash into inch size chunks.  I browned a small onion in a tablespoon of olive oil for about 5 minutes before I added the squash and cooked it with the lid on for 10 minutes.  After stirring several times I added 3 cups of low-sodium chicken broth and let it simmer for about 20 minutes until the squash was soft.  Next I removed the squash chunks with a slotted spoon, put it into a blender with 1/3 cup of unsweetend apple cided and pureed it.  Once it was relatively smooth I added 1 1/3 cups of the broth to the blender to puree it until it was completly smooth, then transferred it back to the sauce pan to heat it until hot.  A couple lessons I learned when cooking this recipe was to puree it in 2 batches---my blender was completely full (thankfully the lid still fit, but just barely) and you really want to use a bigger sauce pan.  My 3 quart was very full--no room for extras!  If I had a four quart that would have been perfect, but I think my 6 quart would have been a little overboard.  I took a gamble and came out with a win in the end! 

I served this delicious soup with some homemade bread made in my breadmaker that Mike gave me for Christmas!  I haven't bought a loaf of bread since I started using it middle of last month after my birthday.  Thanks to my sister and her husband I've had the boxed bread mixes so all I've had to do so far is scan the barcode on the box, dump everything into the mixer and press start!  I love it!  I only have one more pre-mixed package to use and then I will try my hand at measuring all the ingrediants and actually set the machine to the proper baking requirements!  I have loved the scan, dump and start method! 

Oh, what new recipes can I make this week....