"Non"-chiladas

When my mom first gave me this recipe, I thought, "Eh, I don't like enchiladas so much." But then I read the recipe, and although it was called enchiladas, they are so not traditional enchiladas. There is no enchilada sauce, which is what I really don't like. In fact, it's a strange combination of things you may not expect in Mexican food. So we've since had a lot of fun thinking up new names for this recipe. I decided to go with Non-chiladas, but we also tossed around Enchilitos (enchiladas + burritos) and more (if you've got a good one, let me know!). Don't let the ingredients gross you out...my family LOVES this recipe. In fact, my 5 year old ate three servings tonight!

Non-chiladas
8 soft taco size flour tortillas or 6 burrito size flour tortillas
1 can cream of chicken soup
1/2 c sour cream (Daisy Light is by far the superior sour cream out there!)
1 c Pace medium picante salsa
2 tsp chili powder
1 lb ground beef, cooked
2 3/4 c shredded cojack or Mexican blend cheese
toppings

Mix together soup, sour cream, salsa, and chili powder.
Stir 1 1/2 c of the mixture in a separate bowl with the cooked ground beef and 3/4 c of the cheese. Divide the beef mixture among the tortillas.

Roll up the tortillas and place them seam side down in a 9x13 baking dish.

Spread the remaining sauce over the top making sure to cover all exposed tortillas so they don't harden in the oven. Cover the top with the rest of the shredded cheese.

Cover the dish and bake at 350 degrees for about 30-40 minutes or until heated through and cheese is melted.

Spinach Ricotta Manicotti

This is one of my absolute favorite dinners. A go-to recipe. An easy recipe. A recipe that I know my kids will eat, my husband will eat, and no one will complain. I found it on a box of noodles a long time ago while browsing at the store, and bought the noodles simply to try the recipe. It is SO good. It's actually intended to make in jumbo shells, which I did here, but I often use manicotti noodles, so in our house we call it Spinach Ricotta Manicotti.

16 jumbo shells or 12 manicotti noodles, prepared as directed on package

1 lb frozen chopped spinach (or you could use fresh)

1 Tbsp chopped onion

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 beaten egg

2/3 c Ricotta cheese

1/2 c grated parmesan

1/8 tsp nutmeg

1 recipe of tomato sauce (if not making homemade sauce, I think Prego is the next best thing!)

Thaw the spinach in a pan with a little water. When thawed, drain well, squeezing to remove the excess water. Cook onion in olive oil in a skilled until tender. Add spinach and heat through.

In a bowl, combine cheeses, egg, and nutemg. Stir in the spinach and onion mixture. Pour 1/3 of your sauce in a 9x13 baking dish. Stuff the cooked shells or manicotti with the filling and lay out in the sauce. Cover with the rest of the sauce, being sure to cover the exposed noodles so they don't get hard while baking.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.

Honey Soy Pork Tenderloin

This is a pork tenderloin. I had never cooked one until today. In fact, I don't think I had ever seen one until I bought this at Trader Joe's a couple days ago. And really, it doesn't look very great.
But it was!!! And it was so easy. The husband and I practically tripped over each other trying to get seconds. So here's what I did.
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Unwrap the pork tenderloin and place it in a roasting pan. When roasting, you always want to place the roast with the fattest side up, so all the juice and flavors from the fat layer permeate the rest of the meat. Salt and pepper the top of the tenderloin. Put it in the oven for 20 minutes.
While the tenderloin is cooking its first 20 minutes, whip up a little sauce. I used 1 Tbsp soy sauce, 2 tsp honey, and 1/2 to 1 tsp Grey Poupon Country Dijon mustard.

After the first 20 minutes, brush the sauce on the tenderloin and return to the oven. It will take another 15-30 minutes to fully cook, depending on the weight of your meat. Keep brushing the sauce on periodically when you check the meat until the sauce is gone and/or the meat is fully cooked.

Remove from oven and slice!

I actually made this this afternoon since I had a prior engagement this evening (more on that later), and it was excellent when it came out of the oven and just as good reheated this evening.

Oh, and my pork really wasn't pink inside...it just looks it for some reason in this picture. It was, in fact, very moist and juicy and full of flavor.

**Just to pat myself on the back a little bit - those Trail Mix Muffins I made a few days ago won this week's Paula Deen Get Cookin' challenge! Wo-hoo! Go here to check out Paula Deen's site, her weekly contests, and of course my muffins :)

Honey Parmesan Chicken Poppers

I changed up a recipe that I love tonight, just to try something new, and loved it even more! I made honey parmesan chicken poppers, and they were excellent, and a great kid-friendly dinner.

Honey Parmesan Chicken Poppers
1 lb chicken, cubed
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/4 c plain bread crumbs
1/4 c grated parmesan cheese
2 Tbsp honey
1/2 - 1 tsp minced garlic

First heat 1 Tbsp oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Saute the bread crumbs in the oil until lightly browned. Remove to a medium bowl and mix with the parmesan cheese. Add the second Tbsp oil to the skillet, heat, and add the chicken, honey, and garlic. Cook 6-8 minutes, or until chicken is cooked thoroughly.
Mix the chicken into the bowl with the bread crumbs and parmesan.

Perfect as a healthy chicken nugget to serve your kids!

(The original recipe calls for dijon mustard instead of the honey, which is amazing, but my kids won't eat it that way. Try out both and let me know what you think!)

Fifty Dollar Food Week - Dinner #3

Today was the husband's birthday, so I dug through the freezer to see what I could come up with. I pulled out some short ribs yesterday to let them thaw and began developing a recipe to use with what I had on hand. I decided to call it Beef Short Ribs di Chianti, and it turned out to be really good!
So here are the ribs. I actually used two packages this size, as there isn't a whole lot of meat once you cut off the fat and bone.
First thing to do was sprinkle the ribs with salt and pepper and sear them on all sides quickly in about 2 Tbsp oil over med-high heat. Take them out of the pot and put them in a bowl. Then they look like this.

Cut up some onion and carrot.

Mix the onion and carrot into the oil and drippings in the pot where you seared the ribs. Cook and stir frequently for about 8 minutes, until the veggies start to get soft. Add garlic, flour (2 Tbsp), basil, and thyme, and stir for one minute. Stir in 2 cups of Chianti red wine and two cups of beef broth; stir and bring to a boil over high heat. Add a can of diced tomatoes with the juice and a bay leaf.

Pour the sauce over the ribs in a 9x13 pan (all my sauce didn't fit in the pan - just make sure the ribs are covered). Cover the pan with foil tightly and put it in an oven at 325 degrees for about 2 hours. Turn heat up to 350 and cook for another 15 minutes or so.

I also made some more of the same soft boiled potatoes with butter, salt, garlic powder, basil, and thme, and these noodles courtesy of Pasta Roni, which are a huge hit in our house every time I make them.

It was all VERY good...I highly recommend this rib recipe!

Fifty Dollar Food Week - Dinner #2

So, on the menu tonight was Rock Cornish Game Hens, herb garlic potatoes, and farmer's market fresh corn on the cob. If you've never made game hens, they're really very good! You can stuff them like you would a turkey, but I usually don't. I only buy them when they are on sale, though, since they go on sale so often, so I had a few left in my freezer. Two hens feed my family of four.

The first thing I did this afternoon was pull out my basil. I like to buy fresh basil at the farmer's market, or at the grocery store if it's off-season. It's really very inexpensive. The best way to store fresh basil for any length of time is simply in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. When you need some, all you have to do is pull it out, break off a few leaves, and then chop them up.
Next, I took my thawed game hens, ran them under cold water to rinse the leftover juice and whatever else off the outside and the inside, and then patted them dry with a paper towel.

Kind of looks like a little headless chicken baby, doesn't it!?

I mixed my chopped basil with some olive oil and lemon pepper and brushed it on the hens.

Ooh, look!! Twins ;)

I shucked some corn on the cob, peeled some potatoes, and left those to wait until about 20 minutes before the hens were done.

To cook the hens:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Put the hens on a rack in a baking or roasting pan and place in the oven breast side up.

Two hens usually take around 1 hr 15 mins. When you have 15 minutes left on the timer, crank the heat up to 400 and the skin will brown and crisp nicely.

I soft boiled the potatoes tonight, melted a little butter over the tops, and then seasoned them with some sea salt, thyme, garlic powder, and basil. They were VERY good! Nothing beats a good Idaho potato.

As I said before, I happen to have a lot of meat in the freezer right now. There's no way I could be making these dishes on $50 a week if I had to purchase all the meat too. I do try to stock up when freeze-able things are on sale, like the game hens, chicken, and sometimes even salmon or other fish. As soon as the meat from our cow runs out, I will be back to buying beef at the grocery store for a little while, and that will drain my budget quickly.

Fifty Dollar Food Week - Dinner #1

So yesterday was supposed to be the first Eating Through the Pantry day. And it was. But I have nothing to say about it. We literally ate mac and cheese and whatever else we could grab all day. Today, however, I did my weekly shopping and cooked and it's all working really well so far.

First, the shopping. The girls and I went to Fred Meyer with list in hand, and I came in under budget! I spent $47.90 on food for the week. Wo-hoo!

Today, I had an actual dinner planned. Stir-fry is always easy, and I can almost always find stuff to put in it. Yesterday, I took out about 2 pounds of the little beef we have left from the cow we bought this year and put it in a marinade in a Ziploc bag. I usually use homemade marinades, but this time I had a bottle of Soyaki marinade from Trader Joe's sitting in the pantry that I wanted to try, so I used that. Tonight, I pulled out what I wanted to put in the stir-fry: mini green peppers, sweet peppers, onion, and carrots.
Slice it all up and put it in a bowl, and then pour some of the marinade on it to allow there to be enough sauce when it cooks.

Drain your meat. Don't rinse it, but you don't want to cook it in the marinade it has been sitting in overnight (that's why you put more on the veggies).

Put the meat in a bowl with the veggies.

Get water boiling for rice, or whatever you will serve the stir-fry with. This time I used orzo since I didn't have enough rice left for all of us, and I didn't realize it until after I got home from the store. (Click here to find out more about orzo...I love it.)

Heat some olive oil in your skillet, and once it's hot, pour in the veggies and meat. Cook just until the meat is seared and the veggies start to release their juices (about 6 minutes, give or take depending on how much you are cooking and how big your skillet is).

Serve over rice, orzo, classic noodles, etc. YUM.

After I ate dinner tonight, I realized the Soyaki marinade is very very similar to a pepper steak marinade I make, so if you don't live by a Trader Joe's and want the recipe, let me know!

And just a sneak peak...we're making some fun treats tomorrow that involve these:

I'll be sure to show you when they're done!