White Chicken Chili and Dark Chocolate Brownies with Peanut Butter Icing

When I wrote this post last night, weather.com said the temperature was 32 and felt like 25 in Montpelier, VA. That's freaking cold.


With football on the TV and freezing temperatures outside the only thing on our minds for dinner was chili. We happened to have most of the ingredients to make white chicken chili, which I've attempted before and was just ehh. I searched around for recipes this morning looking for one that didn't have 23+ ingredients or take more than 2 hours total (we can't find our crockpot at the moment...it's packed in our storage box in the driveway) and I finally found this one. Pretty basic ingredients and it didn't look too difficult.


I changed out a few ingredients based on what we had at home and my personal preference. We didn't have cayenne pepper so I used chili powder - I know they don't really taste the same but they're both red and it seems like it should be ok to put chili powder in any kind of chili :) I also don't like my food too spicy so instead of the jalapeños I used a few teaspoons of our fav Louisiana hot sauce. So, here are the ingredients for my version:


1 tblsp. vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped (it says crushed but I just threw them in the food processor)
3 tsps. Louisiana hot sauce
1 can diced green chiles
2 tsps. ground cumin
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. chili powder
2 cans chicken broth
3 cans Great Northern Beans
1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
3 cooked & chopped chicken breasts

I had all of the ingredients except the beans and chicken broth on hand, yay! I started out by cooking the chicken breasts. I figured if I seasoned them with the spices that were already going into the chili it would add a little more flavor so I sprinkled them with salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin and then baked them at 350 for 25 minutes.


While they were cooking I chunked up the onion and put it in the food processor to get those started. I followed the directions from there but I still haven't gotten my timing down pat. I had to take the onion/chile/spice mix off the burner so I could chop up the chicken and drain the beans. Once that was done, it was back on.

The Verdict: I wish it had been a little thicker but the taste was really good! I did end up adding a little salt and pepper at the end. We also topped it with sour cream and a little shredded cheddar, can't ever have too much cheese! I think tomorrow night we're going to try the leftovers with rice - I think almost any thicker soup tastes good over rice.


We also wanted something for dessert, I wasn't really up to baking something from scratch so I grabbed a box of Ghirardelli dark chocolate brownies at the store - I've had a few brownies in my day and I think Ghirardelli makes the best boxed brownies. I've never tried homemade brownies though...My logic here was dark chocolate is good for your heart :) I did forget icing though, if you're a new reader for some reason Ty will not eat brownies unless they have icing on them. I think it's an Ohio thing? I'd never heard of it until we met. Since I forgot icing I did a quick Google and found icing really isn't hard to make from scratch, and I found this recipe for peanut butter icing and knew that's what I was making. It was so easy and SOOOOO good:

There was no way I was letting these babies cool completely before trying them, that's why the icing doesn't look pretty - I just globbed it right one there. We may never buy icing again, so good and so easy!

And I'm Back!

Knock on wood, but I think I finally kicked this flu! I still have a little congestion in my sinuses but it's getting better every day. Also, the taste buds seem to be on the mend. It's really annoying to eat when everything tastes the same and it made me very unmotivated to put forth effort to cook.

I did get really motivated this week to go to the gym and get in a good workout today though! I've been sitting on my butt almost non-stop for two weeks because of this flu. Then Thursday I met up with Brittany at the gym and we did a tough workout she's doing for the FitBlogger Charity Contest she's competing in. Last night I got even more motivated by spending the $45 in iTunes gift cards I got for my birthday on new workout music - it's crazy how much music can change your mood! The gym was pretty packed for a Sunday afternoon but I got in a good run/walk on the treadmill - my first attempt at running since I quit my half marathon training back in September. It felt really good, the new music definitely helped!

This morning we didn't have much for breakfast so I had a leftover piece of the only thing I cooked in the past two weeks: homemade chicken, mozzarella & bacon pizza.

This was my second attempt at homemade pizza and the results were arguably better than the first! The only thing holding me back from making this again was the fact that the dough took about an hour & a half to prepare. Enter Fleishmann's Pizza Dough yeast! It was in the baking aisle right beside the regular yeast and it doesn't require rising time. I have a basic understanding of how yeast works from watching Good Eats. Have you seen any of the episodes Alton Brown has done on yeast? He uses burping sock puppets to represent the yeast...you'd know if you'd seen it :) I don't really understand what is different about this yeast versus the regular kind but it was nice to not have to wait for the dough to rise.

I made my own sauce but I was still in a DayQuil induced fog so I didn't think to write down what I put in it but it involved Hunt's tomato sauce, seasonings and Garlic Gold. Next time I'll make notes! We also had fresh mozzarella and a rotisserie chicken so I sliced the cheese and shredded the chicken to put on the pizza. And then I added bacon because, well I don't think that really needs an explanation...

One thing we learned with this round of pizza dough we found out because I wasn't paying full attention to the recipe and forgot to add the olive oil to the first batch (my chicken pizza). It was already in the oven before I realized what I'd done. I turned my mistake into a experiment because we were making a 2nd batch of dough for Ty's pepperoni & mushroom pizza. You could definitely tell a difference in the two doughs, not a huge difference but mine without the olive oil was thinner & crispier and Ty's was thicker. We actually prefer thinner crust so my oopsy turned out just fine!

There is football on tonight (in case you weren't aware) and it's FREEZING outside so I'm attempting white chicken chili for dinner. I've made it once before and it was just ok, for tonight I found a pretty easy looking recipe and I'm making a few substitutions...fingers crossed!

Flu :(

So I just realized that it has been over a week since I've posted! That's because I've had the flu and the only thing I've cooked is another round of homemade pizzas...which I'll post about this weekend, I found a new yeast to use in the dough and my usual lack of reading instructions correctly gave me the chance to experiment with the crusts. Interesting results!

I'm feeling much better today and I'm starting to be able to taste food again :) I'm looking forward to cooking this weekend! We'll maybe not looking forward, but if I don't we might starve so...yeah.

Breakfast Burritos

Since the last time I wrote about my Cali Scramble I never got around to posting pics, I thought I'd do it this morning :)


This is a great (and really hard to mess up) breakfast if you're feeding a big group but we usually make it and save the leftovers to eat for the next few days. Here are the basic ingredients:


1 package of sausage
8 eggs
1 packet of taco seasoning
shredded cheddar cheese
tomatoes (diced)
avocado (diced)

You can really throw in anything else you want, today I also added some diced yellow & orange bell peppers because we had them.

The first thing to do is brown the sausage - or whatever meat you want to use, and I think this would be great without meat too. I'm sure there is a much more delicate way to do this, but I just cut the end off the roll of sausage and squeeze it out like toothpaste.

Ok that analogy was a little gross, sorry.


I've learned that sausage cooks really fast (after burning it multiple times) so keep an eye on it! Take a spatula and just start chunking it up. It gets easier to break apart as it cooks. I'm realizing as I'm writing this that talking about meat can be sort of unpleasant, I apologize to my vegetarian friends!


Once the sausage is almost done, I add in the chopped peppers so they could soften up. Then I added the 8 eggs that I had mixed together in a bowl - you really can just crack them into the pan and mix them up but Paula Deen told me once to always crack them in a bowl first in case a piece of shell falls in. On top of the eggs I added about 3/4 of the taco seasoning packet and just started moving everything around with a spatula to get it mixed up. As the eggs started to cook I sprinkled on the cheese. I like my tomatoes to stay tomatoes and not get mushy so I usually wait until the eggs are almost done to mix those in.


The avocados weren't great so instead of mixing them in we just sprinkled some of them on top.

We made these into burritos by putting them on whole wheat tortillas because we were feeling a little crazy this morning, you can definitely eat this mix by itself or with hashbrowns too. I'm  not a fan of spicy food but the only thing that makes these better is a little Louisiana hot sauce:

It has a smoky flavor, not just a light your mouth on fire flavor. We put it on almost as many things as I now put my Garlic Gold nuggets on :)


Hope you're having a great Saturday! We woke up to a pretty good layer of snow on the ground, but I don't think it's affected the roads much. Now it's time to clean this house!

Substitutions and Firedrills

Tonight I tried another recipe from my new Southern Living cookbook: Glazed Salmon With Stir Fried Vegetables! I've made glazed salmon before with a different recipe that turned out really well. The vegetables this one called for were carrots, parsnips, red bell peppers and green onions. I was a little wary of the parsnips and Ty isn't a huge fan of carrots so I decided to throw in some broccoli too, just in case. I also wanted some type of carb and have been wanting to try cooking orzo again. Really I was just looking for another vehicle to consume more Parmesan Garlic Gold Nuggets :)

I had a few ingredient conundrums with this meal. The first happened at the grocery store, I wanted to cook the orzo in chicken stock to add a little flavor. I don't know why I've never paid attention to this before, but when I went to grab the usually chicken stock I buy I realized it is actually chicken BROTH. Actually, about 90% of the products around it were chicken broth, only 1 or 2 said they were chicken stock. I have no idea what the difference is between the two, I just know everyone on the Food Network uses stock. Are they the same? I took to Twitter to find out and @MolleeRVA sent me this link that answers exactly that. Basically they're similar but stock is usually a little thicker and more flavorful. It's also a little bit more expensive, but one of the choices was on sale and only .50 more than the broth. I think more flavor is worth .50!


The next ingredient issue is my fault, I didn't read the recipe very well. It calls for RICE wine vinegar. I bought RED wine vinegar.

I have no idea what rice wine vinegar tastes like but I figured most any vinegar should work ok so I went with  what I had. I assembled my veggies and started chopping.

What I want to know is, who the heck is calculating the prep and cooking times for these recipes, an Iron Chef? This one said prep time 15 minutes, cook time 22 minutes. All together this easily took me an hour. Not that that's bad, I wasn't in a hurry or anything, I'm just sayin'.


I then had to make a decision about my last ingredient problem:

I swear these weren't floppy when I bought them on Monday. I didn't know they'd go bad that quickly! Maybe I didn't store them right, I threw them in the veggie drawer as is? I debated just using them but instead I sliced up 1/2 a white onion to use.

They sure did look pretty :) I still wasn't sold on the parsnips...they have a really strong smell I wasn't fond of.


I made a crucial error with the orzo at this point. I dumped the container of chicken stock in a pot and brought it to a boil. The package of orzo is 1 pound and says to cook it in 4 quarts of water. I really have no concept of how much water that is and orzo is so tiny when it's dry I thought it would be fine. I thought wrong. After about 8 minutes the orzo had absorbed almost all the chicken stock and still wasn't done. I panicked a little and added a cup of water which seemed to work out ok. I would end up adding another 1/2 cup of water though because they still kept growing!


While that was going on I had also gotten the salmon in the oven and the veggies in the pan. The second wave of panic set in when I opened the oven to check on the salmon and smoke came billowing out at me. I tried to laugh it off and yelled to Ty "We're having smoked salmon tonight instead!" but really I wanted to stomp my feet and say bad words.


It turned out to just be something in the oven that was burning, not the salmon itself thankfully. Whatever it was must have been small because the smoke cleared up pretty quick.


The glaze was SUPER easy but I was still wary of my red wine versus rice wine vinegar substitution. Oh, and my last ingredient problem - for real this time - was that I had no cornstarch which was supposed to thicken up the glaze. Oh well, runny glaze is cool. Ty wouldn't know the difference :)


Even with the ingredient substitutions and false fire drill, the meal actually came together quite nicely.

The Verdict: Ty really liked this meal, he even liked the parsnips! To me it was good, but not great. It's a good basic meal that we can probably tweak a little with different veggies and even a different protein. I still don't know what it would taste like with the other vinegar but the glaze is sweet and salty, I think it would go well on chicken or pork.


We've got a lot planned this weekend, including a LOT of cleaning around the house and dinner at Legend Brewery tomorrow night. To get us energized for a day of cleaning, I'm making my Cali Scramble in the morning mmmm. We've got tortillas too so you can bet there will be breakfast burritos!

Birthday Fun!

Thank you to everyone for all the amazing birthday wishes for me and Ty! We had a nice two days but I'll admit, it's been a long time since I actually felt older on my birthday. I feel old today.


So what did I do to make myself feel better? Target shopping trip on my lunch break duh.

I REALLY needed new measuring spoons and cups. My main criteria were that I could take the spoons apart and put them back together (makes for easier washing) and that the cups be kinda pretty :) You can't tell in the picture but they're purple, my favorite color. I also got a little green berry colander (I know that's what it's called because the tag says so) which I'll also use as a strainer probably. I find myself needing a smaller strainer more often than you would think.


I also bought myself 2 new pairs of work pants - one of them is olive green - those who know me know that is CRAZY outside the box for me. In addition to being a not so good cook, I'm a horrible shopper. It's like I should've been born a guy. I have no sense of fashion so shopping is completely overwhelming for me. I can spend hours in the gadgets, knick knacks, or cosmetics sections but stick me in the women's section and I wander around aimlessly. And pout a lot.


No cooking on my birthday, Ty's mom treated us to dinner at a local BBQ place instead. mmmmm.

Birthdays, Sugar Bowl and Homemade Pizza

Today is Ty's 30th birthday!! I whipped up some pancakes and bacon, egg & cheese sandwiches this morning for the birthday boy - don't worry, he'll be doing the same tomorrow for MY birthday :) It's really fun having back to back birthdays, we truly get a birthday week every year!


Usually we go out with Ty's family on his birthday and my family on my birthday (we gotta milk it) but tonight Ohio State is playing in the Sugar Bowl which means the only thing Ty wanted to do was plant his butt on the couch - with the exception of the moments he was jumping up and down. He did have one request, to break in the awesome Christmas present I got him and make homemade pizzas. I found a simple pizza dough recipe in my new Southern Living cookbook and we'd planned to make our own sauce, which we sort of did.


I was nervous about the pizza dough, I love making (and devouring) homemade bread but my bread isn't fabulous, it's just so fresh you can't help but want to butter it up. I'm typically nervous about trying anything new in the kitchen, the most important thing I've learned since I started this cooking experiment: Always have a back-up meal. It's insurance against the many things that can go very, very wrong.


I got my ingredients together and then read through the recipe to see what I would be doing (probably the 2nd most important thing I've learned). It said to mix the yeast, water and sugar together then put the flour and salt in a food processor, slowly adding the yeasty water and olive oil until the dough forms. I love my food processor but it is way to small to put 3 cups of flour in. So I had to do this part by hand, which actually was no big deal since that's how I make bread dough but I bet if you had a bigger processor or a stand mixer it would be even easier.


I ended up making 2 batches of dough so we could make 2 pizzas but I only remembered to take pictures of one dough ball before letting it rise for an hour:

While the dough was rising, my parents and sister showed up! They brought us buffalo chicken dip, presents, cake and of course wine :) I wish I'd taken a picture of the dough after the hour, it literally doubled in size!! This was amazing to me because although my bread dough typically rises (except that one time), it never actually doubles in size like the recipe says it should.


We followed the instructions that came with Ty's pizza pan (it's cast iron so you heat it in the oven before you put the dough on it), got the dough stretched out - no fancy tossing, way too risky! - and added our toppings. We went with pepperoni and sauteed baby portobello mushrooms. The sauce was a mix of one jar of Ragu pizza sauce, 1 can Hunt's tomato sauce, and a few seasonings including Italian Herb Garlic Gold Nuggets.

That plain section is for my sister, the picky one. 


The first pizza took about 20 minutes to cook. I was a little concerned that the crust didn't brown much but it still ended up being crispy on the outside and soft on the inside even though it was a pretty thin crust. We decided to try using butter on the 2nd pizza to see if the crust would brown. We buttered the pizza pan and the top of the crust itself. It still didn't brown much but it was really delicious!

Ty used his dad's pizza cutter from when he owned a pizza shop in Ohio (The Green Derby) when Ty was little. He's a fan of the party cut:

The Verdict: Ty said he was amazed at how good this pizza was! I was so impressed at how simple making pizza dough was, and apparently you can make it ahead of time and freeze it so there is no excuse to buy pre-made dough ever again.


How do you like your pizza, traditional slices or party cut? Have you ever heard of party cut?

Back to Realty

We had such an amazing week in California

On the pier in Huntington Beach

 

Kicking off NYE with margaritas in Old Town

Pacific Beach

Late night tacos

Trying to eat a little healthy

With a side of not so healthy but oh so good.

Crystal Cove State Park

San Diego Zoo - this guy reminded us of Nico!!

But now it's back to reality for Ty and I. Luckily I have off today (apparently we're observing New Year's Day, see there are many benefits to working in non-profit!) and Ty took off until Thursday so we can get settled back in. Oh and play with these guys:

And by play, I mean snuggle - they were so lazy when we got home!


Luckily we had family who took care of the kitties while we were gone so they could stay at home. We haven't had great luck with boarding them, they always leave with less toys/bedding than they came with. 


While we were in the airport yesterday I had lots of time to get caught up on the bazillion blog posts I've missed reading over the past few days, many of which had to do with New Year's resolutions. Last year I set some hefty resolutions for myself and didn't really accomplish any of them. Looking back I realize I was trying to do too many things too quickly. I'm going to spend today really thinking about the things I want to do this year (you know, besides the whole getting married thing...that's a given). Ty and I are also going to decide on some meals to cook this week and get to the grocery store pronto.


I'm excited to start a new year! I feel like with the holidays and our trip behind us we can focus on the things we've been talking about for months now, mainly getting healthy and saving money. I'm digging into my new cookbook right now to find a birthday meal to cook for Ty tomorrow night, he's turning the big 3-0!!

My birthday is on Wednesday, it's fun having our birthdays back to back, twice the party :)


What New Year's resolutions have you set for yourself? I'm having a hard time deciding what mine should be or if I should even have any....