Breakfast burritos

A few months back I started getting our fruits and veggies from Bountiful Baskets.  It's a food co-op, and I LOVE it!  It's making me get a lot more creative in my cooking, and I'm making things fresh from scratch, rather than buying premade.  One thing I've been trying to do is double up on the menu planning.  One of my favorite ways to do this is to bake a bunch of potatoes, and have baked potatoes one night for dinner and also have some left over the next night's dinner.  So the next night, I slice up the potatoes, fry them, scramble some eggs with onion and green bell pepper, and put them on a corn tortilla (or flour, for those who eat it) with cheese, and top it with my homemade creamy cilantro lime dressing.  Oh my YUMMY!  It's become one of our favorites, and my little girls and I had it for lunch today. I will NEVER buy frozen hashbrowns or potatoes o'brien again.

My husband was gone this last week, so I was going for fast and easy dinners.  One afternoon I put a couple of chicken breasts in the crockpot with about half a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's (personal favorite for crockpot bbq), and after a few hours on high I shredded it, and we ate it over a bed of pasta with some Costco organic corn.  Yum!  The next night we had the baked potatoes, and then for lunch for DAYS after that I was eating a baked potato covered in melted cheese and topped with the leftover crockpot bbq chicken.  I was actually very sad today when I got the last baked potato out of the fridge, and realized I had finished off the chicken the day before.

One of the best things about these meals is that they are easy to adapt for those of us who eat gluten free, and my son who is also dairy free.

I'm always looking for ways to double up on meal prep, so if you have any good ideas, send them my way!  

Sorry there's no pictures of our yumminess, but it was gone so fast, it would have been a picture of an empty plate!  Here's a picture of my cute kids instead.  :)

Chicken strips

For my first official post, I decided to share one of Josh's favorite things; he calls them chicken bites, but basically they're chicken nuggets, or chicken fingers.  He is constantly asking me to make these.  A little background on Josh first, and to make a VERY long story short, I'll just say that at a year we had him tested for food allergies, and he is allergic to wheat, milk, and peanuts.  He can't eat wheat at all (he breaks out in hives) so we won't even ever know for sure that he has celiac, but we've been told to just treat him like he does.  So he's been eating gluten free his whole life.  I'm getting much better at cooking gf foods for him now, and it helps that there is just so many  more options now than there was even 6 years ago when we started this journey.  It used to be a lot trickier because we had to cook gf, milk free, AND egg free, but thankfully he outgrew the egg allergy.

So here is Josh's favorite meal:

I found these bread crumbs at our local Grocery Outlet for a SUPER good deal (I'm now kicking myself for only buying one bag).  I basically follow the instructions on the side of the bag, but cut it in half.  I whisk an egg, dip in strips of chicken breast, then dip it in the bread crumbs.  To season the bread crumbs I sprinkled in some sea salt, ground some pepper into it, and then mixed in some oregano.  Once the chicken is nicely coated with the bread, I put it into an 8x8 pan coated with olive oil.  Stick it in the oven and when it's cooked for about ten minutes, I turn them over and let them finish cooking.  This makes sure that both sides are nice and crispy.

Here's the bag of gf bread crumbs.

We got some yummy corn from a farm down the road, so I cooked that up, and he was a happy, happy boy.  If I had REALLY been on top of it, I would have added a nice salad with romaine and baby spinach, BUUUT I wasn't.  At this point, with soccer games and practices and dance class, we're lucky to get dinner on the table by 7 pm.

I made us some yummy chicken too.  Here's the link to the recipe I used.  

Oh, and don't you like our fancy china?  ;)