Chicken Stroganoff Pot Pie

One of the best things I ever bought for my kitchen is my slow cooker.  Unfortunately, I don't use it nearly as often as I'd like since it requires me to plan out what I want for dinner more than an hour ahead and most of my decisions great and small tend to be made randomly and on very short notice.  Today seemed like a good slow cooker day, though, since I flipped through my Betty Crocker cookbook early enough to decide what I wanted and get the ingredients from the store and actually have it cooked at a normal dinner time.

For the chicken stroganoff pot pie, you'll need 1 envelope of chicken gravy mix; 1 10.5 oz can of chicken broth; 1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts; 1 16 oz bag frozen stew vegetables (carrots, onions, potatoes, and celery), thawed; 1 4.5 oz jar sliced mushrooms; 1/2 C sour cream; 1 Tbsp flour; 1 1/2 C Bisquick; 4 green onions, chopped; 1/2 C milk.  The cookbook recipe also calls for 1 C frozen peas, thawed, but I left them out.  Who likes peas?  Not me!

I like that Farm Fresh very clearly labels them "stew vegetables" so there's no confusion.

Cut up the chicken so it's in nice little bite-sized pieces, about an inch long or thereabouts.

Mmmmm....salmonella....

In your slow cooker, whisk together the gravy mix and the chicken broth.  Then add in the chicken, stew vegetables, and mushrooms. 

Put on the cover, set your cooker to "low" and sit there watching it for the next 4-5 hours.  Or go do something else, like your taxes, cleaning your apartment, catching up on Downton Abbey, and/or saving the Capitol Wasteland from super mutants and the Enclave.  Whatever floats your boat.  When the time's up, mix the sour cream and flour together and then stir into the chicken mix.

Put the cover back on and turn up the cooker to "high".  This time it's only going to cook for 20 minutes.  In the meantime, chop up your green onions and, in a medium bowl, combine them with your Bisquick (and the, ugh, peas if you're so inclined).  Stir in the milk.  Once the 20 minutes is up, drop spoonfuls of the dough on top of the chicken.

No peas here!

Put the cover back on and continue to cook on "high" for another 45-50 minutes, or until you can put a toothpick in your dumplings and it comes out clean.  And that's it!  You've got yourself a nice hearty dinner full of (non-pea) vegetables, so it counts as "healthy" in my book.  It also warms up pretty well, so if you're a lonely shell of a human being like myself who only has themselves to cook for, you've got plenty of leftovers!  Awesome!

I've been smelling this cook all day and let me tell you, it was worth the wait!

Crab-Stuffed Flounder

I am currently on vacation in southwestern Florida, so I'm not cooking dinner for myself this week.  However, since I'm visiting my parents, Mom is cooking dinner for me!  (Actually, I'm going to be making porkchops for us for dinner later this week, but you've already seen that recipe).  She was kind enough to cook some delicious crab-stuffed flounder fillets for me and Dad. 

For this recipe, you'll need: 2-2 1/2 lbs flounder fillets (the recipe calls for fresh, but the frozen ones seem to work just fine), 1/4 C chopped shallot (I now know that that is!), 1/4 C melted butter, 7 oz can crab meat (drained), 1/2 C crushed saltine crackers, 2 tsp Old Bay seasoning, 1/2 tsp salt, dash of pepper, cheddar cheese sauce (3 Tbsp butter, 3 tsp flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 1/2 C milk, 1 C grated cheddar cheese).

The thing on top of the crab meat is a shallot!

 Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and grease a 2 quart casserole dish.  In a bowl, combine the shallot, butter, Old Bay, salt, pepper, crab meat, and crackers.

Take your flounder fillets, put a little bit of the crab mixture in the middle, and roll them up, securing with a toothpick if you need to.

 Do this with all of your fillets and put them in your dish.

Bake them, uncovered, for 25 minutes.  While they're in the oven, make your cheddar sauce.  In a saucepan, melt 3 Tbsp of butter and stir in 3 tsp of flour and 1/4 tsp salt.  Stir that until it's smooth and add in 1 1/2 C milk, stirring until it's thickened.  Add in 1 C grated cheddar cheese and stir it until it's all melted.  After the 25 minutes are up on the fish, take them out of the oven, pour the cheese sauce over them, and put them back in the oven for 5 more minutes.

And they're done!  And if you're trying to figure out what to serve with the fish, I recommend rice and roasted asparagus.

Yum!

Quick Chili

Sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything all that fancy for dinner.  You'd be perfectly happy just making a peanut butter sandwich, but you decided that this year you'd try and make something at least once a week and the second weekend in January seems a little early to drop that idea.  So this week, we're going with an old standby: quick chili.  This won't appeal to chili purists, but for people who don't feel like putting more than fifteen minutes into dinner, this is pretty great.

You'll need a pound of ground beef, a can of dark red kidney beans, a jar of pasta sauce, some chili powder, and some red pepper flakes.  You can put whatever else you want in, too, but these are all the ingredients I usually bother with.

All you need for a lazy person's dinner!

First off, brown the ground beef in a large skillet.  You can still have some red left, just get it mostly done.

This'll do.

Now, dump in the beans (don't bother draining them, just dump in the can) and the pasta sauce.  I use an entire 14-oz. jar, but put in more or less to your taste (I remember one time my Grammie complaining to Mom that she always put too much tomato in her chili.  Of course, it was the exact same way Mom always made it and she never seemed to have a problem with it before.  Oh Grammie, I miss your crazy ways.)  Mix them in really well and have the heat around medium.

Finally, mix in some chili powder and red pepper flakes.  I'd start with around 2 Tbsp of chili powder and 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes and go from there.  Once everything is nice and hot and mixed well, you're done!  This is something that also works really well for leftovers and, I think, actually tastes better the next day.

Dinner!  And lunch!  And dinner again!

Pork Chops and Apples

I don't really do a lot of cooking.  Sure, I do plenty of baking, but that's not really the same thing.  In an effort to improve my repertoire, I've decided I'm going to try cooking something (that doesn't come out of a box) for dinner at least once a week.  After flipping through the cookbook How to Cook Everything: The Basics by Mark Bittman (a really great cookbook; you should check it out), I decided to try my hand at pork chops with apples.

For this recipe you need four pork chops (about an inch thick and with the bone in them--they're tastier than boneless), 2 Tbsp of olive oil, salt and pepper, 1/2 C beer (you can also use dry white wine, but I don't like dry wines, hence the beer instead), 2 Tbsp chopped green onion (the book says shallot, but I think they're the same thing), 3 apples peeled, cored, and sliced, 1 onion sliced, 1/2 C chicken broth, 1 Tbsp lemon juice, and 1 Tbsp butter.

All this!  Plus chicken broth, which I forgot about.

Before you do anything else, you might want to go ahead and slice up your apples, onion, and green onion.  You don't want to still be doing this when it's time to add them to the pan.  Also, 2 tablespoons of green onion wound up being around two green onions, so you can just chop up two of those and not worry about having to measure it.

All ready to go!

In a large skillet, heat up the oil over medium heat.  Once the oil is hot, turn the heat up to high and add your pork chops.  Sprinkle some salt and pepper on them.

Use a really big pan.

Let them cook for about two minutes, or until they start to brown up and you can turn them over easily.  Flip them over, put some more salt and pepper on them, and cook that side until it's browned.  Now it's time to turn the heat down to medium and add the beer or wine and the green onion.

Let that cook until most of the beer has evaporated, turning the pork chops once or twice.  Take the pork chops out of the pan and onto a plate and add the apples and onion to the pan.  The cookbook says that you're supposed to stir them until the apples start to stick (1-2 minutes), but my apples never did stick, so just go with two minutes or so. 

Stir in the chicken broth and put the pork chops back in the pan.  Bring the whole thing to a boil, reduce the heat so it simmers, and cover.  Cook for another 5-10 minutes (or so), turning the pork chops a couple times, until the pork chops are cooked through and the apples and onion are soft.  Stir in the lemon juice and butter.  And you're done!

This ended up being fairly easy to make and wound up being pretty tasty.  Hopefully the leftovers will be just as good!