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Sweet and Sour Chicken

Original recipe here from Made It, Ate It, Loved It

How do you make your sweet and sour chicken?  I've seen so many different recipes and each of them tastes completely different.

Growing up, sweet and sour chicken always included pineapple and those little hard noodle looking wheat things.  I was never a big fan.

I recently made this sweet and sour chicken which was delicious but I would actually prefer it to be more sour.  What do you use to make your chicken sour?  The recipe above uses vinegar.

Please share your favorites!

Smoothie Central

   

I started this summer off by making a smoothie of some form every day after work.  While we are getting closer to fall, it's time to get in our last few summer smoothies of the year. 

Before getting into the ingredients, I use a Bella Sport single serve blender.  You can see the blender bottle in the red smoothie picture.  The blender was $15 and I am now on my third blender because the gasket keeps breaking.  I'm wondering if it would make sense to get a better blender or to just keep replacing the gaskets.  Any ideas?

I typically don't make the same smoothie more than once.  I try to use a variety of different fruits or water enhancers to keep the from getting bored.

Here's what's in my smoothies. 

• The yellow smoothie on the left includes banana, coconut milk, and orange Mio (water flavor)
• The smoothie in the middle is actually more of a slushy and is just orange Mio and ice
• The final smoothie contains bananas, raspberries, black berries, soy milk, and some chocolate syrup. 

You may have noticed that the first and last smoothie do not have ice or ice cream in them but are still frosty.  

Here's what I do:

When my bananas get brown (or start to get brown.  I just don't like the sweeter banana taste on it's own), I slice the bananas and place in individual baggies.  Then, when I get ready to make a smoothie, I take out one baggie and add the bananas to the blender as I would if I were using ice. 

This saves the need to microwave the bananas to get the peels off thus losing the frozen texture.

What are your smoothie tricks?

Quick and Easy Oven Chicken Meal

As always, I'm not one to measure or be exact.  I just throw a bunch of ingredients together and hope for the best.  This one has turned out to be one of my favorite meals.  It was extremely simple and turned out delicious!  Added bonus:  Minimal clean up!

Ingredients

Chicken Breasts

Onion

Tomatoes

Potatoes

Salt

Pepper

Parsley

Oil

Quick Steps:

1. Add your preference of oil to the bottom of your cookie sheet. 

2. Dice the Onion,  Potatoes, and Tomatoes and add to the cookie sheet

3. Half the chicken breasts and place on the cookie sheet.

4. Lightly coat the ingredients with oil and add spices. 

5.  Bake until chicken and potatoes are cooked through.  

Easy Chicken Curry

This is one of my favorite easy five ingredient meals!

Ingredients
Chicken
Rice
Coconut Milk - Canned
Five Spice Powder
Curry Powder

*Base your quantities of chicken, rice, and coconut milk on how many people you have for the meal. If you have over three large chicken breasts, I'd suggest using two cans of coconut milk, otherwise, using one would be plenty.

Quick Steps

1. Slice the chicken into your desired shape and size.  I prefer skinny strips for this meal,

2. Cook the chicken in a skillet without any spices.

3. Prepare the rice.

4. Heat the coconut milk in a shallow pot/pan until boiling.

5. Add the spices to taste.  The original recipe I used years ago called for 2 tablespoons of each which I found was not enough.  Remember, you can always add spice but you can never take it out.

6. Let the sauce mixture simmer until it cooks down a bit then add the chicken.  You can add the sauce to the chicken but I find it's easier to add the chicken to the sauce that way the I don't spill.

Bringing it all Together

7. Add rice to a plate or bowl and top with the chicken and sauce mixture.  Enjoy!


Do you have any suggestions for this meal?  I leave out ginger because it's not something I typically have in my house.

Cream Cheese Monkey Bread

I saw a recipe on Pintrest that looked amazing so I decided to give it a try.  My comments and review are at the end.

Here's the original from Pip & Ebby, I've modified a bit Cream Cheese Monkey Bread.

 Ingredients
Dinner Rolls
Cream Cheese
Butter
Cinnamon
Sugar
Brown Sugar

Quick Steps

1. Put the rolls into a pan.  I used a round pan because it would be easier to clean than a bunt pan as used in the original.

2. Use your finger to make a divot in the rolls then add some cream cheese.

3. Melt enough butter to cover.

4. Sprinkle a good amount of cinnamon, sugar, and brown sugar over the top.

 5. Bake until complete.  I know it's done because the smell begins to fill my house.

See the final cooked product at the top of the page.





Review and Comments

The picture in the original recipe looked so much better than mine!  Overall, I think I should have added MORE SUGAR!!!

1. I don't think I used enough sugar.  More sugars would have made it have more of a consistent taste.

2. There is too much bread!  When I'm eating something sweet, I don't like much of the original dough to be un-coated. Because the dinner rolls are thick, much of the inside of the bread tasted just like a typical dinner roll.

3. The cream cheese threw off the flavor a bit.  I'm a big fan of cream cheese but I think because the cream cheese was just inside a large piece of dough, it was a bit boring and bland.  A suggestion to remedy this and add flavor is to use a flavored cream cheese, Brown sugar and Maple would have been a great choice.

Home Made Fried Wontons from Scratch!

My favorite part of any Chinese meal is the Crab Cream Cheese Wontons.  One day I decided to try to make them from scratch and I determined that it's actually really simple!

As we know, I'm an abstract cook, thus I don't typically use timers or measuring devices.

Ingredients
Flour
Egg
Water
Salt
Cream Cheese
Crab meat or imitation crab meat
Worcestershire Sauce
Green onion (if desired)
Oil (I used vegetable oil because that's what I had)

Quick Steps


The Dough
1. Put a pile of flour onto your table.
2. Mix a pinch of salt into the flour.
3. Dig a well into your flour mound
4. Add an egg to the well then mix.
5. Add water and kneed little by little until the the dough forms.
6. Section the dough So and cover with a moist towel any time it is not in use.

The Filling
7. Put a package of cream cheese into a bowl
8. Add a dash of worcestershire sauce and mix.
9. If desired, mix in some green onions.
10.  Add crab meat and mix again.

Putting it All Together
11. Role out about 1/4 of your dough.
12. Cut dough into squares.
13. Add a spoonful of filling into the enter of the square
14. Use a dab of water to act as a glue and pinch the corners together
15. Repeat until all dough is used
16. Place wontons in a pot of boiling oil until golden brown then place on a paper towel until dried.

*Helpful Hint - Create an assembly line since the cooking process is very quick!

Now all that's needed is the duck sauce.  I just bought that at the store.  Easy peasy!

$1 Lunch! Red Wine Chicken with Spinach and Buttered Noodles

I'm not one for recipes and measurements because I often find that I'm missing an ingredient or unable to use an ingredient.  For five years, I cooked 100% dairy free.  I used to substitute but I quickly ran out of items to substitute, Since then, I've decided to go it on my own, no recipes, no rules; at least most of the time.

This is one of my favorite quick, easy, and cheap meals to make to bring to work for lunch.  It's just enough to keep me going though the work day and satisfy my need for delicious food.

Ingredients

Chicken (breasts or tenderloins - I used tenderloins)

Spinach

Noodles

Butter

Oil

Red Cooking Wine

Spices (you're preference)

Quick Steps

Noodles

1. I'm confident that you know how to cook noodles.  I added a bit of oil and salt to my water for flavor and to help the noodles from sticking. 

Chicken

2. Add chicken to an oven safe pan (I use a dollar store pan - Feel free to cut the chicken if you wish)

3. Cover chicken half way with red cooking wine. 

4. Sprinkle desired spices over chicken.  (I used the standard; salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder)

5. Bake in the oven until cooked (I don't use timers...I think I set the oven to 400 degrees? - typically 350 degrees for deserts and 400-450 for meats...at least that's what I use)

Spinach

6. Put a small amount of oil in a round pan that has a lid.  Add spinach and any spices (I used the same from the chicken) to the pan.  Toss the spinach then cover until wilted.  Add more spinach if necessary. 

Pulling it all Together

From here, all I did was fill my tupperware with some noodles, chicken, spinach, and some butter. (so they will be buttered noodles when I warm them up at work) 

I am still so excited about how easy and delicious these lunches were!  All of my ingredients were purchased as they went on sale and with the use of coupons so they entire set of lunches was made for $8 which is only $1 per lunch!  What a win!

**Wondering where to get tupperware for free? Go to the packaged lunch meat section of your store.  Many kinds of lunch meat come in tupperware that you can wash and reuse and if you're lucky you'll hit a sale with a coupon!