A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Chicken Chow Mein: Better For You Than Mom's--Sorry Mom!

Chicken Chow Mein (my Mom's) was my childhood favorite.  We each got to request our dinner and cake for our birthday and Chicken Chow Mein was always my menu. 

Now....there's a funny family story about our cake choices as kids.  My "cake" was always my Nannie's banana bread. My brother Kenneth's choice was always Angel Food Cake with NO frosting, dad's choice was pie, and at the moment it escapes me what my other siblings' (Suzanne and Carl) choices were. I'll have get them to comment to remind me.

Nothing funny, right?  Here's the punchline. Our Mom was a cake decorator.  After making cakes for every kid in town (and us getting all the mistakes and leftovers all the time), and even telling us she'd make us any kind/design we wanted no matter how involved, we were so burned out on cake we all denied our Mom the pleasure of making our birthday cakes. Were we brats, or what?  Yes!  (Laughing) What Mom on the planet has to put up with kids who cry "Please, Mom, please! Don't make us eat cake for our birthdays! Please!"  Brats. We were cake-spoiled brats!

My Mom's Chow Mein, was great and I asked for it every year. It was also healthy. Except...when I started making it as an adult I realized that for a dish with lots of vegetables there was very little color:  water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, baby corn, and bean sprouts, are all pretty boring looking.  To dress up the aesthetic and the vitamin content, I've included many more colorful vegetables in my version.

Christmas Eve Traditions: Mushroom, Goat Cheese, & Spicy Chicken Sausage Lasagna

 Newlywed bride Sarah made this incredilble looking lasagna for hubby Sebastian and put these photos up on Facebook--is this not beautiful looking and scrumptious sounding? I'm going to give this one a try as soon as I get through this work stretch. 

Although I will be working Christmas Eve, I love the tradition of other friends of ours, Janell and Jerry, who always have lasagna on Christmas Eve with just their kids and then get together with all the family members on Christmas Day. I've always loved their tradition. It feels right to have your immediate family home on Christmas Eve for a cozy meal and small family night and then let the holiday bloom out the next day in all of its family-ness.

Just in case I get next Christmas Eve off...this is what Gene and I will be eating.

 

Chicken, Rice, & Vegetable Casserole the Old-Fashioned Way (No Campbell's Soup)

 

I've grown up as part of the Campbell's soup generation.  Mom used it a lot for things like "Stroganoff" made with ground beef and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup over egg noodles, "Smothered Chicken" or "Smothered Pork Chops" with any of the "Cream of's":  Cream of Mushroom, Cream of Chicken, or Cream of Celery, "Chicken Enchiladas" or "Chicken Pot Pie" with it's mandatory Cream of Chicken soup as the base sauce/filler. I enjoyed those dishes so  I'm not going to go into a huge anti-Campbells rant here becuase it is a quick and easy fix and it does taste good in that very comforting country creamy Paula Deen way. That's not a slam.  I do like those types of casseroles and homey dinners.  What I am going to say is there is another way, a better way, a healthier and cleaner way to cook/eat that doesn't have as many chemicals and salt and, I promise!, is not labor intensive.  If you have a little flour in your pantry and milk in the fridge you can skip the "Cream of".  Have a can of chicken broth?  Even better!

 

Dexter Dinner: Aunti Miranda's Chicken Vindaloo

Auntie Miranda brought dinner to last week's Dexter Dinner and OMG it was wonderful. The even better part was that it was good for us too!  This is the perfect winter meal:  rich and soothing, deceptively simply looking but with complex flavors from the spices and pureed vegetable base. I'll be making this myself again and again.  Thanks Auntie!

I'm Not the Only Cook in the House: Thanks Gene!

While I've been out of the loop a bit with a bad back, Gene's been taking up most of the slack around the house which I really appreciate! He's been held back by intimidation of me.  I'm not saying that to embarrass him but I really never considered it until several of our friends admitted they were intimidated to cook for me too.  I don't mean to be intimidating in the kitchen and don't consider myself to be any kind of snobby food gourmande but I get it now.  For all of us who have blogs and are fairly knowledgeable about cooking, it can be intimidating to people who don't have as much experience in the kitchen. For me, it's something that always came naturally because as the oldest and a daughter in a family of five kids I was my mother's sargeant-at-arms in the kitchen for as long as I can remember so I never had to cross that more adult psychological hurdle of "Can I learn to do something that seems hard?"  I never knew cooking could be hard so I never had to face that mind game.

Gene is over the hurdle and doing a wonderful job!

 

I love this pic of the roasted chicken butt but I wanted to make sure you all saw how he did this.

Click below to see more of Gene's meals and recipes...

Quick Prep & Easy: Chicken Enchiladas

 

I love Mexican food but so often I have to distance myself from it because of the standard cheese and sour cream covered restaurant fare that pretty much reams a wrecking ball right through the middle of my diet.  I try to justify the cheese in my best Bill Cosby way "Milk product! Milk is nu-tri-tION!" but it just doesn't work that way. Although many people do think of cheese (on a diet) as "the enemy", the cheese is just an innocent bystander, sitting quietly with its nutrition, until it is wielded like a weapon by the hand mounding it on my plate.

Following the "moderation in all things" philosophy, I remade my favorite chicken enchiladas and tamed the two frenemies in this dish, along with cutting down the tortillas which taste yummy but up the carb count if not wrestled into submissions as well.  What did I do?  I cut the cheese (that bad joke was for Hal and Matt) and reduced the number or tortillas.  Instead of serving three tortillas per person with just a smidgeon of chicken filling in each, I used only 4 tortillas for the whole batch (serving 4) and stuffed each with 3/4 cup of filling.  You'd be surprised how many calories and fat those two simple chances make in the big picture. I'll be honest, even taking out that much it's still amazing to me how high the counts still are even though the recipe seems very simple, clean, and pared down.  I think this might be the kind of deception that so easily trips me, and a lot of us, up in judging recipes that SHOULD be diet-friendly that aren't necessarily "bad" for us but not encouraging of losing weight either so I still consider this a "treat" recipe.

Baked Chicken Wings with Anheuser Busch Wing Sauce

 

Nieces Jordan and Sydney came over one night last week and while Jordan (thank you, Girlie!) mowed the lawn, Sydney made baked chicken wings for dinner. Honestly, out of all the things I've cooked over the years that most people never have, one of the things I've never made that most people have is chicken wings.  We just got a not great blood report back on Gene so we're steadfastly back on the heart diet, trying to eat less refined carbs and less fat so I also was going for baked wings rather than fried.  Sort of a two-for one experiment.

   One of the interesting things I found out about Sydney is maybe a clue to how she learns. We all learn better one way or the other:  verbally or from writing. I think Jordan is more of a verbal girl but what I didn't realize until that night was that Sydney is more of a reading/writing girl.  Sydney was a couple of months premature (ruptured membranes and other complications) and spent a week on a vent in our NICU. She has residual hearing loss and learning challenges from her birth.  One of her weaknesses is short term memory loss especially when following multi-step directions.

I had the coating bowls set out in order but only three: milk, whole wheat white flour mix, egg/water, so she had to go back to the middle for another dredging of flour before laying the wings on the baking sheets.  It really threw her.  She couldn't remember the fourth step. I tried verbally cueing her "1, 2, 3, 4, and in the pan" and she remembered better but still not enough to finish all the wings without prompting.  On a hunch, I grabbed a pad of sticky notes and a magic marker and labeled the bowls "1", "2, 4", "3".  From then on she had no problems remembering the steps and finished getting the rest of the wings on the pans.

It was a beautiful "AHA!" moment!

Jordan got to be our first taste-tester but it was a chore for her in between us yelling at her to eat it so I could take pic and her complaining "But it just came out of the oven--it's hot!"  Geez, such a little thing. Doesn't she know she's supposed to be willing to burn herself for my blog?  The blog is ALL IMPORTANT!~  Hehehehe

Thanks for being our taste-tester, LoLo!  You were a good sport!

Quick & Painless Meals: Crockpot Chicken & Dressing

My new favorite meal for a busy day is to throw chicken breasts or thighs and dressing into the crockpot. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.  There's no reason that stuffing has to be baked.  Granted it doesn't look as pretty in the crockpot but it's delicious and hearty and good for you if you take the extra 10 minutes to add veggies and nuts into the dressing mix.

Brighter Chicken Chow Mein

 As a kid this was always the dinner I requested for my birthdays. I've always loved the crunch of the water chestnuts, the rich comfort of the chicken/oyster sauce base, the bite of the siracha sauce, and the seeing all the vegetables in there together.

The last time I made it, though, I noticed that other than the green onion tops garnish it doesn't ahve as much color as I would like and think it should.  It's basically all vegetables, shouldn't it be bright and colorful?

So on this go 'round, I still used my mother's recipe but I changed out a couple of the vegetables:

http://afridgefulloffood.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/12/needed-a-little-food-timeout-karens-chicken-chow-mein.html#tp

I replaced the bamboo shoots, which have never been my favorite, with 8 oz. fresh sugar snap peas.  Instead of just green bell pepper, I julienned a half each of green and red pepper. Then I chopped up few carrot coins just for fun.

Same great taste, same great wealth of veggies, just more colors and it pleases my eye now as much as it pleases my palate to munch on those peas and carrots and red pepper.
 

Weight Watchers Easy Turkey Lasagna

Photo from http://weightwatchers.com   

 While we were in St. Louis two weekends ago, my friend Dianne cooked for us a couple of times which is such a treat to me.  Like most of us, I love to cook and I especially love to cook for people as a way to show my love for them but I also like the reciprocal.  I appreciate that Dianne spent some her time cooking for us and taking such care to make sure everything was diet-friendly and wholesome.  Sunday morning she made an egg and sausage casserole that was yummy and on Friday night she made this Easy Turkey Lasagna from a Weight Watchers Five Ingredient cookbook that was very tasty and welcoming, without killing our diets. Thanks Dianne!