On a blogging hiatus

In case you haven't noticed by the infrequency of my posts, I am on a blogging hiatus right now. I started a different blog for my law practice, and I think that will be where I will do a majority of my blogging for a while. The subject matter of that blog is quite different from this blog :)

I started this blog to keep track of the different recipes that we tried when we tightened our grocery budget from $120/week to $80/week. We didn't always meet our $80/week goal, but we came close. I know that meal-planning really made a difference for us.

We aren't trying out a lot of new recipes right now, mostly because it takes time to look for new recipes, and we are both lacking time right now. I will definitely update this blog when I try out a new recipe, though... it just might be a while :)

We tried out a new cookbook...

We used one of our Christmas gifts, a Barnes and Noble gift card, to purchase "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook" by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann. Here is a link to it.

We are not in love with this cookbook. The recipes are good (not amazing), but most of them require a lot of prep work, and the results are just average. We got this cookbook because we were hoping to find some healthy crockpot recipes that we could make somewhat quickly since I am busy with my new business, part-time job, and my extra-curricular activities, and E is busy with work, working overtime, and school. Instead, the required prep work makes me dread making a lot of the recipes in this cookbook. Also, the recipes generally don't have someone with an 8-hour (or longer) workday in mind, and the cooking times are a little difficult to work with. I like the idea behind this cookbook, though.

Lasagna Rolls

I made Giada's Lasagna Rolls two months ago, but I'm finally getting around to blogging about them today. I followed the recipe almost exactly, except I doubled the bechamel sauce, and I think that it was a good choice to do that. I also used store bought marinara sauce; I can't remember which brand I used, though. This was a great recipe, and it was fun to make the lasagna rolls. We ended up with quite a few leftovers, but there were no complaints about that :)

Crockpot Recipe Reviews

To Die for Crock Pot Roast

• I love pot roast. It's one of my favorite comfort foods. This is a very simple recipe, but it calls for some high-sodium gravy and salad dressing mixes. In order to cut down on the sodium, I used half of each packet, and the roast was still good.
• We added a bag of baby carrots and 5 peeled and quartered potatoes at the end. I let just the roast, seasonings, and water cook on low for 5 hours. Then I took out the roast, and added the potatoes and carrots to the bottom of the crockpot, and put the roast on top of it. I cooked that on high for 2 more hours.
• Also, since we have a larger crockpot, I added 1.5 cups of water, instead of just 1/2 cup.
• I think we used a 3 or 4 pound chuck roast, and we had a lot of leftovers. We don't mind having a lot of leftovers (we froze some) because we both love pot roast.

Crockpot Potato Soup

• We didn't change anything about this recipe's ingredients, and we both thought it was really good. This was another easy to make recipe.
• You can buy lower-sodium bouillon, if you want to reduce the salt in this recipe. I also didn't add a whole teaspoon of salt. I added a teaspoon of black pepper, though, and I thought it flavored the soup nicely.
• Finally, instead of using a slotted spoon and a traditional blender in step 3, an immersion blender makes things a lot easier. Transferring hot soup ingredients from a crockpot, to a blender, and then back into the crockpot is a lot of effort... and if you're me, a lot could go wrong during that process. Immersion blenders are the best :)

Crock Pot Chicken with Black Beans and Cream Cheese

• In this post (towards the bottom of it), I referred to trying out a Crockpot Salsa Chicken recipe. Both of us thought that the recipe in that post was WAY too salty.
• I came across this recipe and decided to try it out. The cream cheese probably does not make it low-fat, but I think that it would still be good without the cream cheese.
• We used frozen corn instead of canned corn.
• I also liked that the recipe suggested using frozen chicken breasts; we always have frozen chicken breasts in our freezer... and we don't always remember to thaw them.
• The night before we made this, I made a batch of rice, and put it in the fridge.
• Instead of cooking it on high for 4-5 hours, I cooked it on low while I was at work (about 8 hours, including commuting time), and then added the cream cheese when I got home, and turned the crockpot up to high. After 30 minutes, the cream cheese was softened, but we still had to stir it so it would be a little more evenly distributed.
• Then we heated up the rice in the microwave and served this on top of rice. We both really liked it, and we had plenty of leftovers.

Happy New Year!

It's been a little over a month since I've posted anything. It was a busy month, though. We got a lot of snow, and had a lot of bad weather here. E and I also took a cruise, and got home a week before Christmas. The day before Christmas Eve, when I was driving home from work, I was rear-ended. I ended up having whiplash, and am still dealing with some pain and appointments from that. I feel very lucky, though, because no one was seriously injured.

As for Christmas itself, due to the weather, our celebrating plans had to change. E and I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together, but alone (except for RatDog of course). It was actually really nice. We got to go to the candlelight service on Christmas Eve. Then, on Christmas Day we made food, reorganized our house, and went to see Avatar 3-D. When we came home, we ate the food that we had made earlier that day, and played board games. It was a lot of fun.

I'm not going to comment much about a certain Christmas party that took place after Christmas, because this is a public blog... but let's just say that the party that we hosted on the Sunday after Christmas was not what we had hoped, due to the attitudes of 2 people in particular. Although some people don't want to have a positive attitude towards life, my goal is to ALWAYS keep a positive attitude. Unfortunately, I don't always live up to this goal. Negative and crabby people aren't very fun to be around, though, in my opinion. Luckily, the night after our not-so-fun post-Christmas event, we hosted a dinner party for a couple of E's friends from college and their wives/girlfriends, and that was a lot of fun.

E and I both got new running shoes for Christmas. We have been doing all of our running in those new shoes on a treadmill at the gym, because we are not courageous enough to run in this weather. One positive part about working out at the gym: the sauna. The sauna sure feels nice compared to the weather outside :)

I hope that everyone had a great holiday season, and that you are having a great 2010!

Beef Stroganoff and Black Bean & Corn Creamchiladas

Beef Stroganoff

• Yum! E loved this, and RatDog took his dinnertime begging to a new level when I made this.
• I didn't bother making the house seasoning, because I didn't want to have to store it. Instead, I just mixed up a little bit of salt, garlic powder and black pepper. Easy enough. Don't make the mistake that one commenter made; they used ALL of the house seasoning in this recipe, and ended up with a WAY over-salted (1 cup of salt) dish.
• We served the beef stroganoff over mashed potatoes instead of egg noodles, because after Thanksgiving a big bag of potatoes was on sale at Target for 50 cents. What a deal :)
• I also used low-sodium cream of mushroom soup.

Black Bean and Corn Creamchiladas

• This was an easy-to-prep recipe; it was great to make after work.
• I really liked the sharp flavor of the low-fat cream cheese. E didn't love it as much as I did, but he does not love cheese the way that I do.
• I forgot to cover it before baking it, so the tortillas got a little crispy and (lightly) browned. It was still good.
• I didn't love the taste of the roma tomatoes on the top. Next time I might just top them with pre-made (and probably less healthy) salsa.

Trying some recipes out for Christmas

E and I will be hosting Christmas for his family this year. We experimented with a couple of recipes to see if either one would work for Christmas dinner. It's going to be a tough decision :)

Turkey Lasagna

• E loves lasagna, and I love goat cheese, so this recipe was pretty much perfect for us.
• I followed the recipe almost exactly, except that I used dried parsley and basil instead of fresh, because I wanted to freeze half of the lasagna, and I don't think that fresh herbs always freeze that well. I've noticed that sometimes frozen basil in a tomato sauce gets a slight metallic flavor.

Crockpot Pulled Pork

• I followed the recipe exactly. I served it with extra barbecue sauce and thought it was delicious.
• Basically it's comfort food at its finest :)

We are leaning towards serving the crockpot pulled pork at our Christmas celebration because it definitely was less work than the turkey lasagna was, and it might be more kid-friendly than turkey lasagna. Also, we want to make things as simple as possible, because the holidays can be a lot of work :)