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.

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 :)

Recipes from October and November

Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies

• I made these on Halloween, in between groups of trick or treaters. A few times, E had to answer the door by himself because my hands were full of cookie dough. I also brought a few of these cookies to my grandpa while he was in the hospital.
• I highly recommend this recipe. We baked 2 dozen cookies that night, and I froze about 4 dozen cookie dough balls for later. Yummy!

Corn and Black Bean Quesadillas with Pepper Jack Cheese

• A couple of weeks ago, I bought a block of pepper jack cheese when it was on sale for 99 cents. We also had a lot of frozen corn, and some frozen crockpot black beans. This seemed like a good recipe for using them up.
• We made a double batch of these, because this recipe only serves 2, and we like to make at least 4 servings of a recipe so we can have leftovers for lunch.
• We both really liked these, and they were pretty easy to make.

Bacon Chicken Alfredo Pizza

• We had frozen rotisserie chicken, and quite a bit of bacon, and we didn't know what we were going to do with it. This was an easy recipe (nothing is from scratch) to make on a Monday night when we both worked during the day, and didn't feel like cooking a complicated dinner. It was good, too :)

Yam Fries

• I had an extra yam leftover after making Trinidadian Yellow Split Pea Soup (I will post the recipe soon). I made a half recipe of baked yam fries as a snack on Halloween. I thought that the color of the yam was very festive. And the fries were delicious :)

Slow Cooker Cookbook

Last week when I was planning out our meals, I saw this book sitting on our bookshelf. I don't remember buying it, and neither does E.

This week, we tried 3 recipes from it:

• Pork, Pea, and Spinach Curry Soup
• Chicken Peanut Stew (we really like a non-slow cooker version of this recipe from this cookbook)
• Cuban Black Bean Stew

None of the recipes were bad, but they were all pretty average and somewhat bland. When I saw that this cookbook had a 2.5 star review on Amazon.com, I wasn't surprised. Again, the recipes weren't terrible, but they just weren't amazing.

We do really like this cookbook, though. It was one of the first cookbooks that E and I ever used together. Chicken is E's favorite meat, and I think that he borrowed the cookbook from his sister (and forgot to return it). It looks like we can buy it for a penny on Amazon.com now - maybe we should, so we can return "our" copy to E's sister :) Anyway, we've gotten some good use out of that cookbook. These are the recipes in that book that we really like:

• Indonesian chicken satays
• Jamaican jerk chicken
• Nigerian peanut and chicken stew
• jollof rice
• stir-fried chicken with greens
• chicken kabobs
• chicken with udon noodles

I get most of our recipes online, but sometimes it's nice to use a cookbook. Sometimes I will find myself making a lot of Italian and Tex-Mex recipes, and I forget about all of the other options that are out there. A cookbook allows you to browse without having to type anything into a search engine, so you might find yourself inspired to make something that you weren't originally planning on making.

Slow Cooker Pepper Steak, Chicken and Corn Pie with Cornbread Topping

It's been a while since I've reviewed recipes. Both of these recipes were delicious.

Slow Cooker Pepper Steak

• I followed the recipe, and it was really good.
• It was a little salty, even though I used lite/low-sodium soy sauce.
• I served it with rice.

Chicken and Corn Pie with Cornbread Topping

• This was a delicious recipe.
• I made this enchilada sauce up the day before. I used a little over half of it in this dish.
• I used frozen rotisserie chicken that we shredded before freezing it. The recipe called for 3 cups of chicken, but we only had 2 cups. It didn't seem to make a difference.
• I couldn't find a 6 oz. package of Mexican cornbread mix. I found a 7.4 oz. package of sweet corn cake mix. I used the whole package, and I don't think that it mattered.
• I also used 1/2 cup of shredded monterrey jack cheese and 1/2 cup of shredded cheddar cheese that I already had in my fridge instead of a Mexican cheese blend.
• Despite all of my substitutions/variations, this recipe was great. Very filling. We had it for dinner after we went for a run in some very windy and cold weather (the last time we went running outside, in fact). It was a great way to end our run.