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.  :)

Spaghetti, revisited

I made spaghetti for dinner about a week back, and since I had a little more time (and no jarred sauce), I decided to just make my own.  I don't follow a recipe, just add what I like.  Of course, years of making it has helped me know what I do and don't like.  So here's my version of homemade spaghetti sauce.

The first step is browning the meat.  I use 1 pound of 93/7 ground beef.  I also like to use local meat.  It's a little bit more expensive, but the taste is so much better!  While it's browning I add in half of a diced green bell pepper.  You would also add onion while it's browning, but I had mine already softened.  With the lean ground beef, I don't even have to drain it, so one extra step is cut out.  If it's any more fat than 93/7, I do drain it.

 During the summer we always get huge amounts of tomatoes, and this summer I roasted a whole bunch with onions, and froze them in quart size bags.  One quart size bag holds just enough tomatoes and onions to fit in the Magic Bullet, and is also just the right amount for my sauce.  If you don't have any frozen, I think two cans of tomatoes would probably work just fine.

 After I puree the tomatoes and onions in the Magic Bullet I dump it into the pot with the beef.  If it's looking too thick, I'll add a little bit of water.  I do like thick sauces, but hubby likes them a little thinner.  Do you know how hard it is to take pictures of things in stainless steel pans?  SO reflective!

 While that's starting to simmer I add my seasonings.  These three things are what I typically use.  Sea salt, pepper, and italian seasoning, all from Costco.  I add 1-2 tsp of the italian seasoning, and salt and pepper to taste.

About 10 minutes (not any longer) before I'm ready to serve, I add in half of a small yellow squash.  That way it's cooked, but not soggy.  I would add in more, since it's my favorite, but hubby doesn't like it, so I go easy on it.  He did actually eat it this time, but only because there wasn't much in there.  Here's my yummy gluten free meal.  Did I mention I'm eating gf again?  Well, I am.  My stomach was rebelling, and I'm feeling so much better now.  Mmm...corn pasta (our favorite), homemade sauce, and homemade garlic bread, using Udi's sandwich bread.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for....

Oh, man, I've been so neglectful of this poor blog.  But what can I say other than from Thanksgiving on we were jam packed busy!  So, hopefully now that kids are back in school, and life is slowing down a little bit (very little) I can do better about posting here.

Here's another fun time-saver I did for Natalie's birthday party.  I saw this idea on Pinterest, but can't find it for the life of me.  Maybe I didn't pin it?  Anyway, earlier in the day I pulled out the ice cream and pre-scooped it into paper baking cups.  The pink ones had strawberry cheesecake ice cream, and the blue had plain vanilla.  It seriously saved so much time, and I could hand each kid the ice cream flavor of their choice. Doing this again for sure!

Speaking of birthdays...

My little Miss, who turned 5, requested that for one of her party favors we make play dough for her friends.  She loves play dough and will spend hours molding and making up stories.  I am pretty picky with home made play dough;  I don't like it to feel course, or sticky, or have it leave a salty residue on your hands.  I know, tall order.  I finally found a recipe I love, and was telling my lovely friend, Deanne, about it when she said, "That sounds like the one I use, only I do this instead."  So, I am sharing what we came up with.  

Here is the recipe:

1 Cup Flour

1/2 cup salt

2 tbsp oil

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 cup water

1 packet of  Kool-Aid

Put them all into a saucepan and heat on med-low heat.  Stir until it has formed a nice firm ball.  Remove from heat, and spread out on something to cool.  I used tinfoil, but wax paper, or even a cookie sheet would work too.  After I let one side cool, I flip it over and let the other side cool as well.  It speeds up the process, and also makes sure one side doesn't dry out while the other side gets soggy from condensation.  The play dough will be whatever color Kool-Aid you choose, AND it smells good enough to eat!  I was a little worried that some of the kids would actually try eating it, but then I figured even if they did, there's nothing in it that can harm them, it just won't taste very good!  Oh, and one other thing, I'm not sure if it matters to the texture, but I use finely ground sea salt.  I would be curious to see if it still has a really smooth texture when used with regular table salt, so if you try it, let me know!

 I was going to go get some containers at Walmart, but I lucked out and when we were at the Dollar Tree, I found these cute little containers.  They come in a pack of 10 for, duh, $1!  They are perfect!

Chocolaty heaven...

I found this super yummy recipe, and decided to make it for a friend's baby shower I was throwing.  My (at the time) four year old helped me, and we'll just say it might be the yummiest dessert I have ever made.  Seriously, everyone was asking for the recipe.  Well, that little four year old just turned five, and when I asked her what she wanted me to make for her family party dessert, this is what she requested.  

Brownie on the bottom followed by a layer of cream cheese, cool whip, and powdered sugar.

 Followed by a layer of chocolate and vanilla pudding mixed together.

 Topped off with a layer of straight cool whip.  Don't let that fool you into thinking it's not as good as real whipped cream.  I'm a fan of making things from scratch, but there are just times when I go for easy, and you can't even tell that you're eating cool whip.

 And to finish it, some chocolate shavings.  The only thing I will do differently next time I make it is add Heath bar bits on top instead of chocolate shavings.  It just needs some crunch to it.

Here is the recipe.  Enjoy!

An easy dinner *updated*

One of my favorite go-to dinners for those crazy days spent running kids around, is spaghetti with garlic bread.  I get two pots of water boiling, and start making the garlic bread.  Our favorite garlic bread is sour dough with a spread of butter, sprinkled with sea salt and garlic powder.  Sometimes I get fancy and add some Parmesan  cheese.  Then I just stick it under the broiler until it's golden brown.  Mmmm....it's so good! It's also easy to make gf and dairy free.  Gluten free bread doesn't keep very long, so I usually make it, slice it, and freeze it the same day.  For garlic bread I take a few pieces out of the freezer, spread on some dairy free "butter", and then sprinkle the salt and garlic powder.
The best tasting gluten free pasta we have found is corn pasta.  It cooks well, and is easily stored and warmed the next day if there are leftovers.  Many other pastas either over cook easily and are nasty or they are nasty rewarmed.  Then I just heat up our favorite sauce, Francesca Rinaldi Sweet and Tasty Tomato, and we have dinner on the table in under 30 minutes.  Perfect for those crazy soccer days.

*I just discovered a way to make it easier!  I bought a round loaf that was unsliced originally, but walking down the bread aisle the other day I discovered presliced oval loafs.  Duh!*

Sometimes I forget that not everyone knows how to safely cook gluten free.  So here's some tips for cooking pasta.  The most important thing to remember is that you want to avoid cross contamination with food containing gluten.  So with pasta, you have to use a separate pot, and spoon, and when I drain it, I drain the gf pasta first, and then the regular.  Always make sure everything is clean, and that you don't accidentally use something for your gf food that you've used with your gluten food.

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?  ;)