Garlic lime chicken fajitas

Last night was fajitas night. All summer more or less I've alternated tacos and fajitas on Tuesday nights, as we are fans of tortillas filled with delicious things. Even Sam will eat a quesadilla, or he'll just bring me the bag of tortillas and say "Dee ahh?" By which he means, give me a tortilla and I will eat it plain as though it were a large cookie.

In the past I've used store bought seasoning packets, but one time I decided to go halfway from scratch by getting one of those recipe cards with pre-measured spices that McCormick makes. By the way, I think that's a genius marketing idea. Rather than hesitating to buy a whole container of a spice you're not sure you'll ever use again, you can try the recipe once and then buy more spices if it's a hit. Or you can just keep buying the cards, but I suspect there is a significant markup.

Looks yummy!

To start, I sliced up my onion and green pepper. Here are some pictures of that.

Onion in half

Sliced thinly lengthwise and then crosswise just the once

Top chopped off the pepper, seeds removed, and membranes pinched away as much as possible

Sliced down the membranes to make them easier to remove

Cleaned up one segment

Long thin slices

Then I mixed my marinade. Here are all the spices and liquids that went into that.

Yes, it's kind of a lot of stuff. 

Which means it's a good thing I can save by buying in bulk some of the time.

One thing I changed per our tastes was that I halved the amounts of citrus juices and added tap water to replace the missing liquid. (2 tbsp lime juice + 2 tbsp orange juice + 1/4 cup water, instead of 1/4 cup lime + 1/4 cup orange.) As-is it was a little too citrusy for Dan.

The prepared marinade!

Then I put everything in the fridge until it was time to cook. About half an hour before I expected Dan to come home, I defrosted three boneless skinless chicken breasts in the microwave. Just as it dinged that they were defrosted, I heard the garage door open. (He'd called, but my phone was charging upstairs, and I was downstairs at the time watching Guess With Jess with Sam, so I didn't hear it.) So he walked in to me cutting up chicken, which was preferable to not having started anything at all, I suppose. The recipe calls for a 30 minute marinade, but I set a timer for 20 minutes instead this time.

Thinly sliced chicken in a freezer bag

1/4 cup of marinade reserved, the rest in the baggy with the chicken

I do prefer to marinate in a plastic bag, especially with meat. You can really squish it around and get everything coated without making a big mess, which I always seem to do when I try to marinate meat in a bowl, using a spoon to distribute the marinade.

After 20 minutes, I pulled it out and cooked it in my big skillet.

Starting to cook

Cooked through and set aside

Once the chicken was all the way cooked through, it was time to pull it out while I cooked the onion and bell pepper in the remaining marinade. Once they in turn were finished, I put the chicken back in and cooked until it was all hot and steamy. 

Onion and pepper starting to cook

Just about finished

Confession time: I just about burned it all at this point. I was trying to get a quesadilla cooked for Sam (pro-tip from Dan: use a pizza cutter to slice up a quesadilla), get the table set including toppings, and warm up cheese sauces for Dan and myself. Somewhere in here Sam politely asked for a glass of milk, so of course I had to drop everything and get it for him. :) The nice part is that the onion and pepper are a little bit tastier if they caramelize a little in the pan. So it all worked out. Dan said that this was the best batch of fajitas I've made yet, so WIN.

Finished product, drenched in dairy products the way I like it

I can't really even begin to estimate the cost of this particular meal, as I had most of the ingredients on hand already, aside from the onion and pepper. I would guess that it's more expensive than spaghetti but much less expensive than a roast, especially if you get the chicken, tortillas, and veggies on sale. It still feeds both of us for less than you'd pay for one person to order fajitas from a restaurant.

Tonight will be only slightly more homemade than hamburger helper, but it's one of our favorites and it uses some fresh ingredients, so I'll still write about it. Teriyaki pork lo mein using a Knorr noodle packet, and the recipe on the back.

Fancy Homemade Macaroni and Cheese

Last night was another recipe I haven't made that many times, but it's one that I'd been meaning to try again. Out of the Frying Pan was a collaboration between a blogger (before that was even a word) I read in the early 2000s and two of her friends/colleagues. It's been abandoned and revamped a couple of times, so who knows how much longer it'll be available online. It happens to house a few of my favorite recipes, so I popped the favorites and the "maybes" into Cozi, and got started working them into our family meal plan.

So this is one of them. It's not just fancy; I would say that depending on your kids' tastes it might be kid-unfriendly due to the scallions and white wine. You could always omit those, but I do feel like the scallions give it a more interesting flavor than your basic blue-box.

Modifications/choices: I used half a package of Italian 5 cheese blend and half a package of mild cheddar. I didn't have as much ham on hand as I thought, at least not thawed, so I used one 2 oz package of Buddig sliced deli ham and diced it into small bits. I did use the scallions and some Italian-style bread crumbs.

I cooked the noodles, made the cheese sauce, and assembled it until the step where you plop it in the oven. Then I placed the casserole dish in the fridge while Sam and I went to Music Together. Then I baked it when we got back. It took about 25 minutes or longer to get hot all the way through, but it turned out just as well, I think, as it would have if I'd baked it right away.

Unfortunately because I was trying to cram in prep time between the park and our class, and because I just didn't remember, I didn't take any pictures last night. I did, however, take a picture of some leftovers I had for lunch today.

Not sure on the verdict for this recipe. I like it a lot, but Dan wasn't feeling too well (and was 'pasta'ed out) so he didn't give me a firm yes or no. Sam wasn't at all interested, but he's not that big a mac and cheese fan anyway.

Tonight is Garlic Lime Fajitas. Hopefully I'll get more pictures of the process there. I've made this particular recipe three or four times (with no seasoning packet!) so it should be good.

Slow Cooker Chicken Stroganoff

Yesterday morning, I chopped up four boneless skinless chicken breasts and plopped them in a crock pot with a packet of dry Italian dressing mix and two tablespoons of butter. I let it cook on low for about 5 and a half hours, then added a brick of Neufchâtel cheese and a can of condensed cream of chicken soup, stirred that up, and let it get all hot and melty. Meanwhile I boiled a pot of water and cooked some wide egg noodles to go with it. And that's all there is to this recipe.

Forgot to take any pictures, but Dan liked it so much he agreed to take a portion to work to reheat for lunch. Win!

Also, I am debating doing a short social media fast, maybe 48 hours of not popping onto Facebook or Twitter, or reading any of my blogs on feedly. Just to get some perspective on my time-wasting and online behavior. I haven't committed fully either way, just something I'm considering. If I do, I'll continue to post here and push links to my Facebook timeline, but I won't be engaging in comments there.

Tonight is Fancy Homemade Mac and Cheese, which I am so looking forward to. I hadn't intended to have two pasta nights in a row, but that's what happens when I shuffle meals around toward the end of the week/weekend.

Cop out! Frozen pizza FTL*

So, those who are on my Facebook already know that yesterday, Sam was my little Houdini. I got almost no time to do any cooking or cleaning, because every time I turned around he was just gone. Out the door, down the steps, through the yard, into the driveway, and very nearly into the street. I spent a good third of my day (probably more, actually) just standing around outside making him not run into traffic. Each time I tried to, you know, fold some laundry or use the bathroom, I'd suddenly stop hearing him playing inside and run, panicked, outside to find him in the middle of our driveway. Last night we made a few adjustments to our doors and deck, and hopefully I won't have such a crazy day again any time soon.

But that meant that I'd done nothing to start dinner prior to Dan getting home, and since my lovely chicken/broccoli/rice meal takes some time to cook, between marinating the meat and cooking the rice, we decided to put it off for another day. Which meant: frozen pizza to the rescue! It was finally cool enough outside that I thought we could stand to run the oven for half an hour and just open up all the windows to cool the house down afterward.

Here's to not breaking down and spending $15 on delivery pizza that cost $3 from the grocery store, because even convenience food is cheaper and healthier when you make it yourself at home.

*For my mom and anyone else who doesn't know what FTL means: "For the lose", the opposite of "For the win".

Spaghetti Puttanesca

This is one that I made once or twice for Dan and myself either when we were dating or early in our marriage. I am pretty sure I haven't made it in at least 3 or 4 years. Dan really enjoys black olives, and it's definitely got that savory/salty thing going on without the need for herbs or meat. I'd never used capers in anything before this, and to be honest, I haven't used them in anything else.

So here's the recipe. It's not really very complicated. I find that any recipe that requires me to begin by sauteing garlic and onion in a skillet makes the house smell delicious, and me happy. Because I'm using mostly canned/jarred veggies aside from the onion, there's very little pre-prep for me to do, which makes this almost as easy as plopping a jar of marinara in a saucepan. Not quite as easy, because you still have to measure a few things. I also tend to use about 1/2 a small jar of sliced olives, so I don't have to do anything with those either. This recipe is also ideal for using jarred minced garlic. If I were very ambitious, I'd can tomatoes in glass jars in the summer, to avoid some of the scary chemicals that canned tomatoes in metal cans tend to absorb, since I also use canned diced tomatoes when I make chili. That's not something that I've managed to do so far, though. Aside from the non-fresh ingredients, I find this recipe to be reasonably healthy, maybe a teensy bit high in sodium, but otherwise pretty low in fat and calories and high in nutrients with satisfying flavors. I use a good quality extra virgin olive oil for the "good fats". You could use whole grain or low carb pasta if you're worried about starchy pasta, or simply eat it with less pasta and more sauce.

Here are a few obligatory pictures of it cooking and the finished product.

Garlic and onion cooking

Added tomatoes, olives, capers, and wine

Cooked down and saucy

On a plate

Tonight I'll make one of my favorite Asian chicken dishes, Stir-Fried Chicken with Broccoli, yet another Digs recipe. Next week I'll have a little more variety as far as recipe sources. To be fair, most of the "old favorite" recipes I make are from my single/couple with no kids days, so Digs was attractive from the perspective that most recipes are scaled down for just one or two people. As time passes, I am becoming more attracted to the easily reheatable recipes for four or more, that can become leftover lunches.

Tacos and...I know what I did last summer

Writing about food, especially food I've prepared dozens of times, is coming more easily to me than writing about my life at the moment. Last night I made tacos, so it was Taco Tuesday, woot woot! Over the summer I've tended to alternate between tacos and fajitas every Tuesday. There isn't really much of anything to write about making tacos, except that this time I used some ground pork I had on hand instead of ground beef. If you've got ground turkey on hand (because let's face it, it is cheaper!) that works well because this isn't a meal that requires the meat to be particularly flavorful on its own--that's what the seasoning packet is for! Usually when I make either meal, I warm up some salsa con queso in a ramekin for Dan, and some plain cheese sauce the same way for myself. I write the date on each jar the day I open it, but a full jar normally lasts about 3-4 meals, and a month is about as long as I'm willing to let that stuff sit in the fridge before I throw it out. Dan likes black olives on his tacos, and I like sour cream. We both tend to use shredded cheese, and tortilla chips on the side to dip in our leftover cheese sauces. When I am feeling ambitious I'll add some diced tomato and/or shredded lettuce, but mostly I leave the veggies for fajita night.

This summer has been stressful, to say the least. I left my full time babysitting job by choice. Last spring, the mother of the child I did daycare for went into some sort of inpatient treatment, for what, I have no idea. But for a month, the beautiful, sweet little girl I cared for was without her breastfeeding, cosleeping mother, and living with her (albeit very kind and good with her) grandmother instead. Being in a crib at night, in turn, meant that she flat-out refused to nap in a crib for me during the day. I have no idea whether they practiced any sort of CIO sleep training, but I suspect they must have at least tried it based on her absolute terror of my crib. I went from having at least an hour of time each morning to myself when Sam was at school and she slept, to having to hold her for her entire nap.

At the same time, Sam was adjusting to school well, but getting extremely bored at home. On my days off, I'd be able to set up sensory bins and other stimulating toys that would not have been safe to use with an 18 month old running around. Days that she was here, he was increasingly destructive, coloring on walls, breaking things, just getting up to mischief in general. Field trips tended to take a lot out of me, so I wasn't doing them more than once or twice a week. As time passed, I became more and more aware that Sam would need my full attention, especially for the month of August when he'd be out of school the entire month. Once her mother was back, I gave my two weeks' notice, feeling as though I'd done the honorable thing to keep her in her normal daycare routine while her nights were uprooted. By coincidence, the week that the mother returned, I threw out my back chasing the little girl to try to fasten her diaper and had to call my mother to help take care of the kids that day. It was just too much, and I was done.

Without the extra little one, I was able to put together "theme" weeks for Sam's after-school and summer break educational stimulation. Week 1 was farm week, which I began to write about here and then didn't. I made a sensory bin with tractors and crushed oreos for dirt, with a little chocolate pudding for mud and some plastic pigs in one corner. We borrowed some little people farm sets from my parents, and took field trips to the library, farmers' market, and the farm at the MN Zoo. We made some art projects. I set up a YouTube playlist of videos and music about farms. For the first week, I was a little over-ambitious and burned out a bit.

Week two was all about transportation and vehicles. We did a little less, but still took a couple field trips and went to the library and rode the monorail at the zoo, which Sam was a little apprehensive about at first, but then really enjoyed. I wrote most of a post about a field trip to a park which housed an antique WWII airplane, but never finished it.

We did weeks loosely themed on fish/ocean animals complete with a trip to MN SeaLife Aquarium and music complete with a trip to a local park where Sam played a big outdoor xylophone. I wasn't quite cut out for the level of planning that would be needed to keep up the level of curriculum from that first week, especially as I was trying to get my house in order and my home economics going. (I did, however, set up YouTube playlists for each week, and you can watch them here! We still do!) The rest of our time was spent with trips to the park and the grocery store, the farmers' market, the zoo, the mall, and wherever we felt like going each day. By the last couple weeks of summer I was so ready for Sam to be back in school so that I'd have a little more time for me, for meal planning, for couponing, for cleaning, for getting his activities organized. And by no coincidence, time to write again. I lament not continuing to document my year of giving, but at this point, I feel like I've given the last 4 or 5 months to Sam and the little girl. Making oneself available when family and friends need you was part of the text from Isaiah, so I say it counts. Another post I started to write and didn't finish was one questioning the idea of writing about the whole project at all. Maybe I'll clean it up and post it one of these days.

Which brings us to today. Yesterday was Sam's fifth day of school, and his teachers have autism training today and tomorrow, so no school again until Friday. In the heat these last few weeks, we've taken to the play area at Burnsville Center instead of going to the park each day. Tonight I'll make Spaghetti Puttanesca and tell you all about it tomorrow.

Linguine with mushrooms in cream sauce

This is a post that I've meant to write for a very long time. I took all the pictures for it, twice, and never managed to actually write it. So I am taking the pictures a third time and writing the heck out of it.

This is a recipe I got on Digs Magazine, "a home and living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation."  The main creator, Yee-Fan Sun, wrote a book called First Digs, had twins, and abandoned the website, it seems. But the archive is still up, and I hope it stays that way. Needless to say, I've saved and printed many recipes from her site just in case. The Zucchini Pasta I made last week was from there, as are several other of my favorite pasta dishes, breads, and meats. Many of the recipes are targeted at either A) Entertaining on the cheap or B) Feeding one or two without a metric ton of leftovers.

So. Linguine with mushrooms in cream sauce is a recipe that I like, Dan likes, and Sam will at least eat the plain noodles portion. That's sort of how a lot of my pasta dishes work out for Sam. One modification I've made to the recipe is that I double the amounts of everything in the sauce. We just wanted a higher proportion of mushrooms and sauce with our noodles.

Earlier in the day I try to chop the shallot and slice the mushrooms. Shallots are one of the best kept secrets I've discovered in recent memory. They are shaped a little like garlic cloves, but their interior is more like a very delicate onion. I find that they taste a bit like a cross between the two, only a little more mellow. I chop mine similar to how I do an onion, but with smaller rows and columns. My shallot was fairly large so I didn't use two this time. It had three lobes, and normally what I get is one with two and one with one, so, same diff.

Big ol' shallot 

Three lobes

Ready to throw in the fridge until cookin' time

I threw a little saran wrap on my ramekin of shallot and tossed it in the fridge. Now it was time for the mushrooms. My least favorite part of cooking with mushrooms is cleaning them. You don't wash mushrooms with water because they absorb too much of it. Instead, you sort of brush or rub any residual growing medium off of them and call it a day. I don't have a fancy mushroom brush so I use a paper towel. My preferred mushroom for this recipe is baby bella (aka crimini with a name that makes people think they are cute). I've made it with regular white button mushrooms, but in a recipe where they are really the star ingredient and there's no color elsewhere, cooked white mushrooms take on a boring grey color that just makes the whole thing unappetizing. On the other hand, criminis, porcinis, or whatever else you want to use will probably turn a nice brown when cooked, which will in turn give the cream sauce a nice color. Anyhow, down to business with my mushrooms.

Remember, double recipe. Great with pasta...no, really?

Since the cleaning and slicing of the mushrooms can be kind of tedious, I tend to do one container from start to finish and then do the other. It also saves room on my cutting board.

Batch one, cleaned

Then I slice off most of the stem from each mushroom and discard. Too much stem can make the next step more difficult, and I just like having that fresh cut rather than a tough edge. Next, I put each mushroom through my egg slicer. Yes, I go through a lot of egg slicers this way...about one every couple years. Yes, it is worth it. You might wonder why I don't just buy the presliced mushrooms they sell at the store. To be honest, I have done so in a pinch. I really dislike doing it for several reasons: 1. They are usually more expensive. 2. They are dang near impossible to clean and I usually find bits of growing medium in with the slices. 3. They leave on too much stem for my taste, and 4. They are cut a bit thicker than I like, which makes them take longer to cook. Just not a fan.

Caps getting sliced

 Batch one, cleaned and sliced

All of the mushrooms cleaned and sliced, ready to pop in the fridge.

When it's time to start cooking, I put a large covered stockpot 2/3-3/4 full of water on the back burner of my stove on high heat. In a large skillet, I saute the shallot and garlic in oil for a few minutes, until it is softened and translucent. Then come the mushrooms. I let them cook for a good while before adding the wine. Finally, when the wine has cooked down a bit, I add the cream (I used half and half) and let that cook down and thicken. Meanwhile, I'm cooking a half box of linguine according to package instructions. When everything's just about ready I grind some sea salt over the sauce and plate it up. This is another one that could be served with a salad or bread, but it usually is enough food for all of us without it. Here are some crappy photos of the process and final result.

Shallot and garlic starting to cook

Just tossed in the mushrooms

Added the wine

Added the half-and-half

All done!

I had a coupon for the mushrooms, so this meal cost very little. $2.56 for mushrooms, $0.36 for the shallot, and about $0.33 worth of pasta, $0.85 worth of cooking wine, probably about another dollar worth of cream+oil+salt+garlic. Roughly $5 to feed two adults and a preschooler, drinks not included. Not bad!

Tonight is tacos, so I probably won't write as much about that recipe, since it's just 1. brown meat & drain 2. add seasoning packet 3. put it in tortillas. Which means I might have to write about my feelings. Oh no! :)