Wordless Wednesday

pure deliciousness from Kristin

Chicken Salad

My husband likes food but we are both really going to try and be healthier in the next year. We were at Costco and he said something about how he was craving some Chicken Salad, so I bought the Costco 6 pack (Kirkland brand). Here's my recipe, I usually just do it, but I actually measured it out for you all :)

This makes enough for probably 4 decent sized servings:

1/2 Granny Smith Apple (cored and finely diced, skin on)
2 stalks celery (finely diced)
1/4 cup brown onion (finely diced)
1 teaspoon dried mustard
1 teaspoon sea salt (use only 1/2 teaspoon of iodized salt)
1/4 teaspoon fresh cracked pepper (or more to taste)
1 tablespoon Honey
2 (12.5 oz cans) Canned Chicken Breast packed in water
1/4 cup of mayo or miracle whip
1 tablespoon Apple cider vinegar

Add the apple, celery, mustard, salt and pepper and mix together.


Then add the honey, mayo and chicken and vinegar. Shred the chicken with a fork, and mix well. This takes a few minutes. This is not a super mayo rich recipe, but neither the husband nor I like mayo too much. It tastes better the next day after the flavors have melded together. I like to eat this as an open faced sandwich, I like the taste of the chicken salad without too much bread.

Cost Breakdown:
Chicken: $3.66 ($10.99 for a six pack)
Apple: $.50
Celery:$.50
Onion: $.50
Mayo: $.50
Everything else: $.50
Total: $6.16
Price/Serving: $1.54

Nutrition breakdown for the whole thing:
Mayo: 193 Calories; 19G Fat, 0 Fiber, 2G Protein
Chicken: 420 Calories; 7G Fat; 0 Fiber; 91G Protein
Apple/Celery and onion: 98 Calories; 0 Fat; 5G Fiber; 0 Protein
Honey: 85 Calories; 0 Fat; 0 Fiber; o Protein
Vinegar, mustard and salt, and pepper have virtually zero of anything
Total: 796 Calories; 26G Fat; 5G Fiber; 93G Protein
Total/Serving: 199 Calories; 6.5G Fat; 1.25G Fiber; 23.25G Protein

Happy New Year - Resolutions

For me, it's been a very craptastic year. I really don't want to get into why. I know I'm not alone in all the things that have gone wrong this year. A few great things happened this year too and I'm still fortunate to have a great family and an amazing group of friends who have kept me as sane as possible.

I have two New Years resolutions:

1. Be as happy as I can be. I am over being and feeling beat down. This is a new year and I'm moving on.
2. Blog more. This should be the easier of the two but we'll see.

I have so many ideas and I find myself feeling that I need to focus more on one area of my foodie blog. Do I do restaurant reviews, do I do my budget friendly things, I also need to loose weight so do I focus on being a foodie on diet? These are the things that make me go hmmmm.

Chilaquiles

Chilaquiles are so good. It's like Mexican Lasagna in a way. You just layer sauce of your choice, tortillas, and really anything else you can think of. Its common to have them for breakfast and add eggs to them. We eat them for dinner. I can make them ahead of time and put them in the fridge and then put them in the oven and set the timer to have them done when I get home.

I use a basic red sauce. I buy the sauce from the store and then add to it. I start with Mexican Chocolate. It's delicious. It's like half semi-sweet, half unsweetened chocolate but with other "stuff" added. I don't know exactly what's in there but I know there are some cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. You should buy it and save it. Use it for hot chocolate. It's so good. I melt the chocolate in the bottom of a heavy pan (I use my Le Creuset pot) with a little butter.

Then I add in the Las Palmas Mild or Medium Enchilada sauce and bring it to a simmer for however long it takes me to crisp the tortillas.Crisping the tortillas is where the controversy starts. Some people use tortilla chips. My husband doesn't like that. He says it makes the chips just soggy. K. Some people just cut up strips of tortillas, which is fine if I'm in a hurry. I try to crisp the corn tortillas in a hot pan before layering them in the dish. I start off with a layer of sauce in the bottom of the caserole dish, then I just toss in the tortillas. I don't cut them into strips. I then add another layer of sauce, a layer of cheese and repeat until I'm out of cheese :) Sometimes I add in some green onions and chopped black olives. It just depends what I have on hand.

We top it with sour creme and if my husband had his way I'd make rice with it but I'm going through one of my rice oversions again (sorry dude).

Ok, so it's not a "pretty meal" and no, these aren't the plates I use. This is my daughters plate but the beans looked less offensive on this, than on my white plate :)

Cost Breakdown:
Red Sauce: $2.49 (19 ounce can)
Chocolate: $1.00 (a box is about $5 and there are 6 chocolate rounds in a box)
Tortillas: $1.00 (I buy a bag of 30 and use half a bag)
Cheese: $2.99 (Ralphs usually has a special for $2.99/half pound you just sometimes have to walk all over the store between the deli and the dairy dept.)
Beans: $1.00 (I use Rosarita non-fat green chili and lime)
T0tal: $7.48 for 6 servings


Nutrition breakdown:
Fat: 21g (I have to estimate that there are 2 (1oz) servings of cheese so 18 of the fat grams are from cheese)
Calories: 445 (220 in the cheese, 110 in the tortillas, 100 in the beans, 15 in the sauce)
Fiber: 11g (7 in beans, 3 in tortillas, 1 in the sauce)

It's been a while

I've had so much junk going on this summer!!! I'm glad my daughter started school again today and I can get back to a routine, including blogging!

Part of the junk going on is that I'm poorer than ever, but being a foodie, I can't give up good food and cooking. But, I can do it on a budget. So, tonight I made a pork brisket grillers. I saw them at costco. I've never had them but I thought I'd give it a try.

They come in a four pack that looks like this. My four pack was $13.45 (3.36/package) Although, since I had never had them before I had no idea what was going to be inside. I opened it, put on a little bit of rub. I make my own rub, but grillmates is fine. I cooked it up on the grill and this is what it looked like. I was shocked how much food was in there!!!


Each of these is about 6-7 inches at it's largest point. It's similar or a little bigger than a decent size boneless skinless chicken breast. It is plenty for my family (2 adults and a 4 year old) with left overs for 2 servings (so enough for 3-4 adults or 1 teenager).


I made it with rice-a-roni which is 4 for $5 at my grocery store so $1.25/box. I did use 2 boxes. My husband LOVES rice.

Cost breakdown:
Pork: $3.36
Rice: $1.25
Total: $4.61

So even if there are only 3 servings in a package that is $1.54 serving!!!

Even better the nutritional value/serving (per the packages):
3.5 grams of fat (2 in the pork and 1.5 in the rice)
420 calories (110 in the pork and 310 in the rice)
There is a lot of sodium in the rice, but other than that, it's all pretty good! Now if I could only get the husband to eat veggies!

Ice Cream

I love ice cream but, not as much as my mom. My mom LOVES ice cream, so since I'm poor, I decided I'd make her ice cream for Mother's Day. I used an Alton Brown Recipe. I'm not gonna lie, I don't know what the heck Vanilla Sugar is, and I'm sure I could google it, but whatever. I used regular sugar and I love vanilla so I probably added about another tablespoon of Mexican vanilla. I swear that I think the secret to vanilla is Mexican vanilla. I don't know why it's better. I don't think its processed or artificial. So next time you go to Mexico, do yourself a favor and stock up on vanilla. I let the liquid ice cream mixture chill in the fridge overnight and then I put it in the freezer the next morning for about 30 minutes. Only then did I put it in the Ice Cream attachment to my mixer. It turned out great.

I also had gone strawberry picking with Stella 2 days before this so I folded in some fresh strawberry puree. Sooooo, good. My mom liked it too. Next time I need more strawberrys. The ice cream itself was delicious! My favorite thing in my kitchen is my lime green Kitchen Aid mixer!

Quiche X 2

I've never made quiche so when my mom asked me to make some for Mother's Day, I said sure. You can't turn down your mom on Mother's Day, right? My husband however HATES quiche. Ok, so how am I going to make both mom and hubby happy?

So after searching the internet and foodnetwork.com I found a recipe to make hubby happy from Paula Dean (aka, everything is made with straight butter and heavy cream). Low and behold, girlfriend didn't disappoint. She had a hash brown crust quiche instead of a traditional crust that got rave reviews. I substituted half and half for 2% milk. The cooking time on the hash browns was longer (I had to bake it for about 50 minutes instead of the 25 she said) but otherwise I followed the recipe. My suggestion is to do all the prep work the day before (grate cheese, cut onions, cut ham, bake hash browns) then assemble the morning of your brunch. The combining of ingredients is the easy part...it's all the prep that takes forever. I thought it was good, but my husband actually liked it! Yay.

I also wanted to do something with a traditional crust, but with less traditional breakfast ingredients. So I found this Emeril recipe. I don't trust the Emeril. I have made many recipes of his and I swear a cook time or an ingredient always seems to be missing. I bought pre-made Marie Calendar pie crust from the frozen foods isle. Again, prep work is everything. Caramelizing onions are like low riders, they need to cook low and slow. These onions are not even close to being done. It probably took about 30-40 minutes to do it right.


Next step is to sautee the mushrooms. You want to do this so that the mushrooms don't release all their juice inside the quiche. That would make the crust all mushy and disgusting.

I used the Gruyere cheese, it was soooooooooooo good. So savory. I will make this again!

The key to quiche is patience, and a little of this: