Feliz Cinco de Mayo (over a week late)

Hello my lovelies!!!! I hope you are having a fabulous weekend. I'm a bit late in posting my mexican favorites, but better late than never, right?

As I said before, I am love love loving Hungry Girl's recipes. Hubs' favorite is by far the taquitos. Don't worry, they are super east and low in WW points too! #winning

So here is the Hungry Girl Recipe for exploding chicken taquitos:

You will need:
One 9.75 can of fat free chunk white chicken, drained and flaked
1/2 cup salsa
1/2 cup shredded fat free shredded cheddar cheese
1/4 teaspoon of dry taco mix
8 6-inch tortillas

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 375 degrees
• combine chicken and salsa, cover and refrigerate for 15 mins
• remove chicken from fridge and drain any excess liquid. add cheese and taco seasoning
• spray a baking sheet with nonstick spray
• dampen two paper towels and place tortillas between them, microwave for 1 minute
• take one tortilla from the stack, spray both sides lightly with nonstick spray. Lay flay and spoon about 2 heaping tablespoons of filling onto the tortilla and spread evenly. 
• roll tortilla up tightly and secure with a toothpick
• repeat with all of the remaining tortillas
• bake for 14-16 minutes until crispy
• serve as they are or add red enchilada sauce, additional salsa, or sour cream

Makes 4 2-taquito servings. Only 197 calories per serving, 2.5g fat, 594mg sodium, 22.5 carbs, 3g fiber, 20.5g protein (using Hungry Girl's nutritional info, I calculated this to be 5 pts per serving)

Of course to go with taquitos, you need margaritas. My current fav cocktail is the Skinny Girl Margaritas with an extra shot of tequila. Just pour over rocks and serve!!! YUMMMMMMM and guilt free!!!!! I had three of these and it was a total of 9 points, not too shabby for a cocktail!

He loves my cooking so much he bought me flowers

True story. I came home from work last Friday and there was a bouquet sitting on the counter. Then I started to look around and he had cleaned the whole condo too!!! What a man. The note with the flowers said he's enjoyed my new found love for cooking so much that he wanted to say Thank You. I'll take that any day!!!

So I have been cooking a lot more recently. I borrowed The Hungry Girl 1-2-3 Cookbook from a friend and starting making up every recipe I could. They are all super low in points, SUPER easy to make, and delicious to boot!!!! I loved them so much that I sprung for her 300 under 300 Cookbook as well. Our three favorite recipes so far have been her Yumbo Gumbo, Exploding Chicken Taquitos, and Slow-Cooking BBQ Chicken. Like the bad little blogger I am, I haven't taken any pictures. As soon as it's done cooking, I'm ready to dig in!

One of my favorite parts of her cookbooks is that once you stock up on some basics, you can make almost anything. You get the spices for a couple recipes and then you can mix and match for most of the others. She has a lot of chicken recipes, so as long as I take a quick look at the beginning of the week, I can grab all of the supplemental ingredients in one stop at the grocery store.

Let's start with the first recipe that made us say "Holy cow, this is amazeballs". We had it just with a salad and a vegetable, but this would be amazing as pulled chicken bbq sandwiches and would be a definite crowd pleaser. I made this one night when my mom came over for dinner and was nervous about serving crock pot bbq chicken, but this blew our socks off. (I have made a much simpler version of just pouring bbq sauce over chicken in the crock pot, but this is SO much better and I'll never go back.)



slow-cookin' bbq chicken (From The Hungry Girl 1-2-3 Cookbook)
1 serving (1/2 Cup) = 3 PointsPlus*

Ingredients: 1 cup canned tomato sauce, 1/2 cup ketchup, 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons of both brown sugar and cider vinegar, 2 teaspoons garlic powder, 1 1/2 lbs raw boneless skinless lean chicken breasts, halved, optional: crushed red pepper

Directions: Mix all ingredients except chicken in a crock pot. Stir until well mixed. Add chicken and coat well. Cover and cook on high for 3-4 hours or low for 7-8 hours. About 10-15 mins before serving, shred chicken with two forks and stir into sauce.

Next up....Taquitos!!!!!!!

*PointsPlus calculated by me based on nutritional information provided by Hungry Girl.
**This is not a sponsored post, Hungry Girl has no idea who I am, just sharing some amazing recipes that I've enjoyed.

Dinner of the Month - Salsa Pork Chops

Lately we've been on a pretty steady rotation of meals. Maybe lack of creativity, or just being lazy, we're stuck on the same 7 or 8 recipes. Our current favorite that is made at least every two weeks is Salsa Pork Chops.

I don't have a link to the recipe, it came from my mom! It was included in a book of recipes put together at my bridal shower of everyone's favorites. She included all of her go to dishes when we were growing up and menus for the holiday dinners that she always followed. (This also gets me points towards my 101 in 1001 goals!!!)

In an effort to move away from eating only chicken and beef, I tried this one with pork chops. It's super easy folks. SUPER easy. It cooks all day in the crockpot, so it's just about 5-10 mins in the morning to throw everything together.

I don't have any pictures because really, it doesn't look super appetizing. It's just a big hot mess, but MAN is it delicious. 

Salsa Pork Chops (4-6 servings)
4 boneless pork chops
1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can corn, drained
1 small can of chopped green chilis
1 jar of red medium heat, vegetable salsa
1 chopped onion

Throw it all together in the crockpot and cook on low for 8-9 hours or on high for 6 hours. The pork will shred up really easily and will be perfect.

We either eat it with brown rice or pull out some whole wheat tortillas and cheese and make pork tacos.

There are enough leftovers for at least another dinner, often two. It is even better two days later as leftovers.

Just FYI, I entered everything into Weight Watchers and got a PointsPlus value of 10 per serving.

#67 - aka What? I can cook?

When creating my 101 in 1001 I threw on Prepare a fancy five course meal. Why? I don't know. I was hoping I would become a culinary genius. I just started obsessively watching The Food Network a month or so ago. When watching a Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, Steak Edition I was determined that even I could cook a steak. With a few extra moments this week I started contemplating what 5 courses I could plan around trying out cooking a filet. I started putting together a menu and a shopping list.

I had Friday afternoon off, so I started prepping food right away. First item of business, dessert of course! I would be baking Caramel-Apple Bread Pudding.

Up next was prep for the salad course. I made a Waldorf Salad, so I had lots of fruits and veggies to chop up. The dressing was super easy, so I just saved that until we got to the salad course to whip that up and add in.

and Wilbur figured out where to stand to catch the falling fruit from the counter...

Once Tony got home it was time to get him cleaned up and start putting out some food!!!

First course: Appetizers - Made a quick Spinach and Herb dip from Tastefully Simple and served on toasted french bread. Also put out some shrimp cocktail cause I love it so much!!!

Second course: Soup - Tomato and Basil. Used Progresso Chunky Tomato and added fresh basil on top. Definitely my easy out, but I love that soup and the basil was delish!(Sorry no pic)

Third course: Salad - Waldorf Salad. This could have been an awesome salad, if I had read the instructions for the dressing correctly. In my haste to whip it up mid meal I put in an entire teaspoon of Ginger instead of a 1/4 teaspoon. HUGE mistake and after a couple bites we threw the whole thing out. Sad, but I will try again next time!

Fourth course - Entree` - Filet Mignon with Sweet Potato Fries. Let me say, this was amazing! I managed to mess this one up too though, but will try to redeem myself tonight. I used EVOO instead of vegetable oil and when using a cast iron skillet, it gets WAY too hot for the EVOO. Vegetable oil can take much higher temps and will probably set off the smoke alarm fewer times. Despite the smoke filled house, the steaks were AMAZING, better than some I've had in restaurants. The sweet potato fries were amazing despite not quite being as crisp as I had wanted, but I rushed those out of the oven to make room for filets. I could have REALLY used a double oven for this meal and will certainly value that feature in our future home!

Fifth course - Dessert!!! Caramel-Apple Bread Pudding. YUM YUM YUM. It smelled like apple pie and was amazing. We had to let our big dinner settle for a while, but once we got to dessert it was well worth the wait!!!

Overall, it was really fun planning the menu and making everything. It was a fun stay in date night for hubs and I. I definitely would feel comfortable cooking for more people in the future and having a fancy dinner party at our house. Now if only we had a big enough house....

Burnt is expected for the first year, right?

Crock-Pot - 1
Kim - 0

Dinner is supposed to be burnt for newlyweds, right? Never have been much of a cook. Due to budget restraints, we can't eat out every meal like we used to. Plain grilled chicken and broccoli can get boring after a while. In an effort to change things up a bit I decided to pull out cookbooks we've collected over the past year or two. I pulled out the recipe suggestions that came with our Crock-Pot and decided the Swiss Chicken Casserole seemed easy enough. Quick prep in the morning, set the Crock-Pot and 8 hours later, ding! Dinner, right? Not so fast.

Somehow I manage to burn every meal attempted in the Crock-Pot. We had an old hand-me-down crockpot for several years. The on/off switch was plugging it into the wall. When it was time to register we immediately wanted to upgrade the Crock-Pot. Apparently I can't handle the fancy version. Everything burns. Hubs is a champ though, he manages to choke down whatever I put in front of him and claim to be "dinner".

Time to pull out the cookbooks and try another recipe! I will win this battle. Any good slow cooker recipes that even I can't screw up????? Must involve minimal prep, I'm lazy.

Adventures in Cooking

So I started out slow in the kitchen with baking. I love baking, exact measurements, exact timing, if you can follow a recipe, you can bake. Cooking, however, was a different story. I think it scared me to try an entree or meal that wasn't chicken and vegetables or anything that required any prep work.

I discovered Sandra Lee and her Semi Homemade cookbooks. Her recipes include 70% pre-made ingredients, 30% fresh. This is right up my alley. So we checked out her Weeknight Wonders cookbook from the library and picked out a couple things to try. It came time to take the book back and we hadn't tried anything yet. I quick scribbled down the recipe for one of the front runners we wanted to try and dashed to return the book.

We decided to try the Ham Meatloaf with a Pineapple glaze. Since ham and pineapple is just about my favorite pizza ever, can't go wrong combining them in another recipe, right? I am happy to report it was super easy to make and turned out amazing. The sweetness from the pineapple threw me off at first, but a couple bites in and it was confirmed to be delicious! Sorry no pictures, we gobbled it down as soon as it came out of the oven!


Ham Meatloaf with Pineapple Glaze, from Sandra Lee Weeknight Wonders
Ingredients:
For the Glaze:
1/2 cup crushed pineapple
1/4 cup brown sugar
2tsp stone ground mustard
1 tablespoon horseradish
1/4 cup cider vinegar

For the Ham loaf:
1 lb of smoked ham, chopped
1 lb lean ground pork
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 small yellow onion, minced
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 cup crushed Ritz
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup milk

1. Preheat oven to 325, spray 9x5 loaf pan with non stick cooking spray.
2. In a small bowl stir together pineapple, brown sugar, mustard, horseradish, and vinegar. Spread half of the glaze in the bottom of the loaf pan. Set the other half aside.
3. Place ham in food processor. Pulse briefly scraping the bowl, do not over process or it will turn to paste. Transfer ham to mixing bowl, add in ground pork, garlic, onion, salt, pepper, egg, and milk. Stir until combined.
4. Press the ham mixture into the loaf pan. The glaze will rise up the sides. With a sharp knife make slashes on the top in several places. Bake for one hour. Brush on remaining glaze and bake for another 30 minutes.

We served with some mashed potatoes and veggies. The leftovers reheated very well for another delicious meal!!!

Have you tried any new an delish recipes recently?