Say What?

I have a confession: I'm not exactly a very spontaneous person. And I'm a bit of a worrier about the unknown. Not in a major way, but I certainly like to know what to expect in most situations. As much as I often like predictability, or the ability to at least be prepared, I'm not a huge fan of it when it comes to dinner.

My reaction every Sunday. I'm pretty 

sure I perfected the eye roll as a child, just like this girl. 
My mom was probably less than thrilled.

Every Sunday morning, we make a menu plan for our crock-pot meal, and then two or three more dinners to get us through the first part of the week. Every Sunday morning, I ask my husband "What do you want for dinner this week?" and every Sunday morning, I hear the same one-word answer: "Steak". Sometimes I get the occasional two-word response of "Steak...duh". Sigh. I'm pretty sure if he was given the opportunity to eat steak and potatoes almost every night, he'd take it (not every night though...some would have to be left open for sausage and peppers). But, I continue to ask every week. I think they say that's the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?

Well, imagine my surprise when the most recent response to my question was "How about we make those buffalo chicken lettuce wraps?". You can bet I quickly said yes - I was excited to hear a different response and looking forward to making a recipe we had made previously and really liked. It's from one of my favorite food blogs, Skinnytaste, which specializes in recipes that are a bit lighter and healthier but are still full of flavor. We've found a lot of favorite recipes on the site, including this one for Crock Pot Buffalo Chicken Lettuce Wraps.

I used the same ingredients, but made a slight change to the directions - I added the hot sauce to the crock-pot while the chicken was cooking, rather than after shredding it. I think it helped the chicken absorb the flavor a bit more, but made the hot sauce a little less...hot, which I preferred.

Ingredients:

• 1 pkg of chicken breasts (about 1.5 - 2 pounds)
• 4c low-sodium chicken broth
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1/2 of a small white onion, diced
• 3 celery stalks
• 1/2c Frank's Red Hot sauce
• Head of iceberg lettuce
• 2 carrots 
• Optional:
• Crumbled low-fat blue cheese
• Low-fat blue cheese dressing

Place the chicken in the crock-pot. Cover with chicken broth, hot sauce, diced onions, garlic and one celery stalk. Cover and cook on high for 4 hours.

 Remove the chicken from the crock-pot and shred. Discard the broth except for about 1/2 a cup. Place the chicken back in the crock-pot and cook for and cook for an additional 30 minutes. If you'd like, add a couple additional teaspoons of hot sauce.

While the shredded chicken is cooking, cut the carrots and remaining two celery sticks into small, thin slices.

When the chicken is done, place a little bit in each leaf of lettuce and top with carrots, celery, blue cheese and blue cheese dressing as desired. Enjoy (with lots of napkins)!

With blue cheese dressing

or with crumbled blue cheese

This dish is really something that could work either as a dinner or as a snack. It's kind of like deconstructed chicken wings with a healthier twist. Perfect for football and definitely husband approved!

Faux Pho

 "It smells like Mekong in here!"

In my eyes, this was a pretty good compliment and a fantastic accomplishment to hear from my husband when I got home from work, especially with minimal effort. To put it in context, Mekong is a local Vietnamese restaurant and is one of our favorite places to eat. It's become something of a Richmond institution and is actually better known for their beer than their food. Don't get me wrong though, their food is delicious - we've never been dissatisfied after a visit or after getting take out. Except for the one time I didn't check the bag when I picked up the take-out and didn't realize they had forgotten our crispy spring rolls until I got home. An amateur mistake. I think my husband almost shed a tear when that happened. It's still a bit of a sore subject.

Located in a small strip mall between a Latino market and a dance studio, Mekong is the kind of place you'd be likely to drive by without noticing, but it is absolutely worth a visit. It was just voted the Best Beer Bar in America by CraftBeer.com for the second year in a row. Both their beer and food menus are extensive and you really can't go wrong. Alright, you're probably thinking "What is this, a restaurant review?"...no, no it's not. So back to the reason for my tangent.

I was not this happy at the end of the game.

I recently came across a recipe for Korean-style short rib soup, which seemed awfully similar to pho, and we decided to give it a try for dinner this past Thursday (we again found ourselves out of town last weekend, celebrating our 1 year anniversary at the Ravens-Packers game, thus a mid-week crock-pot meal). As much as I enjoy having dinner ready whenever I'm ready to eat it on Sundays, I think I might enjoy having dinner ready when I get home from work even more. It can just be a little trickier to plan, but walking in the door and having our house smell like Mekong was well worth it.

The prep work for this soup was minimal, so I was able to get home at lunch time, throw everything together in the crock-pot, and be on my way back to work. The crock-pot part of this soup is really just the broth and meat, the rest comes later and you can pretty much make it however you want. We tweaked the recipe from Food Network just slightly:

Ingredients:

• 3-4lbs beef short ribs
• 4c low sodium chicken broth
• 1/3c soy sauce
• 1/4c sugar
• 1-2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 2 tablespoons red Thai garlic chili paste
• 2 tablespoons sesame oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 12oz package of rice sticks (these are easy to find in the supermarket Asian foods aisle)

For garnish:

• 1 carrot
• 1/2 cucumber
• cilantro
• lime wedges

Directions:

Place the short ribs in the crock-pot (leave the bones in for now)

Whisk the chicken broth, soy sauce, sugar, ground ginger, chili paste, sesame oil and garlic together in a large bowl. Pour the mixture over the ribs. Cover and cook on high for 6 hours.

About 30 minutes before serving, put the rice sticks in a large bowl and cover with hot water. Let soak for 30 minutes before transferring to serving bowls. At that point, the rice sticks should look like this:

Meanwhile, slice the carrot, cucumber and lime.

Transfer ribs to a cutting board to trim the fat and remove the meat from the bone. Skim any fat from the top of the broth in the crock-pot before adding the meat back to it.

Cover the rice sticks with the broth and meat from the crock-pot. Garnish as desired with carrot, cucumber, cilantro, lime and Sriracha or additional chili paste (if you're into that kind of spice).

Enjoy!



As you know, I'm not a fan of spice (I just can't handle it), but the amount of chili paste that goes in the broth adds a really good, unique flavor and is not too spicy. Of course if you want to add more to your bowl, you could make it pretty spicy. I didn't really know what to expect from this meal and it turned out to be SO. GOOD. We had just enough leftover for a third bowl.

Hers and his

We rarely have soup as our main dinner dish, but this soup was hearty enough to be the large part of our meal (and I just didn't want to stop eating it). We had it with a few pieces of warm, crusty bread (Billy Bread, a Richmond favorite) - perfect for a chilly October evening. I highly recommend giving this one a try!

A Fall Dinner for Summer Weather

This past weekend was H-O-T hot, especially as October weekends typically go. I'm talking 90+ degrees without a breeze. Lucky for us, we decided to remove our window AC units last weekend. Wait, no...that's not right. It didn't exactly turn out to be one of the smartest decisions we've ever made.

Why did we remove our AC units? Well, the husband doesn't hold a lot of weight in what meteorologists say (something about it not being a "real" science like chemistry), especially when it pertains to the 10 day forecast ("how could they possibly know that far out what the weather's going to be like??"). I'm not sure we even actually checked the forecast, just assumed that we wouldn't possibly need air conditioning in October since we hadn't used it in almost a month. Regardless, it turned out to be quite unseasonably warm inside and out. Meteorology: 1, Chemistry: 0 (sorry, honey).

Lookin' good, Mister Rogers.
Note: I once tried to explain that my love of cardigans was caused
by my childhood love for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. 

You know how a lot of women tend to be cold all the time? They're in a fleece when it's 70 degrees and keep a blanket or cardigan on their office chair just in case? I am most certainly not one of those women. I'm the one in a tank top when others are in a sweater. I happen to love all three of those keep-you-warm essentials (especially blankets and cardigans...definitely cardigans) but I just always seem to be warm. The other day I even blamed how uncomfortably warm I was on the lamp in our living room (it's giving off too much heat!). But really, it's just my nature, I can't deny it. Lucky for me (actually lucky this time), our crock-pot plan meant that I didn't need to use the oven and increase the temperature in the house any further. I'm pretty sure I was close to melting to begin with, so I was very happy to avoid that.

Partly because of this, and partly because the husband had been wanting to make chili for the past six weeks, we decided on a lighter version of chili than a traditional red meat and beans chili. I think of traditional chili as a classic comfort food reserved for chilly weather (chili...chilly...get it?). With one of our favorite warm-weather meals in mind (tacos), I decided to do some experimenting, and I must say I was pleased with the result.

Turkey Taco Chili

Ingredients:

• 1 1/3 lbs ground turkey
• 1 15oz can black beans
• 1 15oz can corn kernels
• 1 packet low-sodium taco seasoning
• 2 8oz cans tomato sauce
• 1 c water
• 12 oz Newman's Own mild salsa

Optional for serving:

• Red pepper flakes
• Frank's Hot Sauce
• Fresh jalapeno
• Low-fat shredded mild cheddar cheese
• Tostitos multi-grain scoops

Directions:

1. Brown the ground turkey in a skillet on the stove, just until it is no longer pink.
2. While the turkey is browning, drain the can of corn. Drain and rinse the black beans.
3. In the crock pot, combine all ingredients (except those for serving)

Slow cooking in progress

4. Cook on low for 5-6 hours
5. Personalize as desired to serve - enjoy!

Hers and his, obviously.
I love cheese!

Hodgepodge Jambalaya

Whenever I think about jambalaya, that catchy jingle for Zatarain's gets stuck in my head. I can say with fairly strong certainty that I've never had Zatarain's jambalaya, but I'm sure I've seen their commercials more than a few times. I sincerely hope that the jambalaya we made for our Sunday night dinner was nothing like Zatarain's however (unless you think jambalaya mix out of the box is awesome, in which case, I'll allow the comparison).

The husband really wanted to wait until one of our teams was playing New Orleans to make jambalaya because it seemed fitting, which I totally get. However, upon further investigation, I realized that this wasn't going to happen at all this season. To avoid the potential wait until next season or beyond, we decided to go ahead and make it this past Sunday. New Orleans was playing on Monday, which I figure counts as close enough, especially considering we had enough leftovers to last all week. The jambalaya just so happened to be perfectly timed because we were able to incorporate leftovers from Saturday's dinner.

We had my brother-in-law, sister-in-law and nephew over for dinner on Saturday. The nephew recently turned four - we weren't really sure if he'd eat chicken or his old standby and favorite, pb&j. We made enough chicken just in case, but ended up having a good amount of leftovers. Turns out he doesn't eat chicken breasts but does sing Blurred Lines (or at least try). It's awesome and I'm completely fine with that as a trade off. Unfortunately I don't have a video of this, but I think this picture sums it up pretty well.

Not only did we have leftover chicken, but we actually had leftover jumbo lump crab meat that I didn't use when I made crab dip as an appetizer on Saturday. It wasn't a large amount, but enough to include in the jambalaya as an extra flavor. If my mother is reading this, she's probably gasping at the fact that I had leftover crab meat (at least it was jumbo lump!). I opted not to load up the crab dip that I made, as would likely be tradition for a Baltimore native (sorry mom), but it ended up contributing to a really good dinner.

This jambalaya turned out to be protein-packed, with chicken, crab, sausage and shrimp. I think that's one of the great things about jambalaya, you can almost make it however you want. Here's how we made this super easy dish.

Ingredients (it's a long list, but it's really simple, you'll see):

• 3 - 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into pieces
• 1 lb sausage, cut into 1-inch slices (we used andouille sausage)
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 3 celery stalks
• 1 large green bell pepper
• 2-14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes (we used Hunt's with celery, onions, and green peppers)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1 tbsp Cajun seasoning
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 lb shrimp, peeled & deveined (we got shrimp already seasoned with an Old Bay mix)
• 1/4 lb lump crab meat
• 2 cups long grain rice

Veggies, chicken, sausage and spices - pre-cooking

Directions:

1. Chop the onion, celery, green pepper and garlic
2. Combine chicken and next 10 ingredients (everything except the shrimp, crab and rice) in the crock pot
3. Cook on low for 5 hours
4. Cook rice on stove according to package directions
5. Add shrimp, crab and rice to crock pot and cook for an additional 30 minutes

We served this with cornbread (Jiffy, of course) - the slightly sweet flavor was a perfect complement to the Cajun seasoning of the jambalaya. This recipe also makes a ton! It completely filled the crock pot. We had so many leftovers we sent my friend Kelly, who came over for dinner, home with a small Tupperware container that seemed to weigh about 5 pounds. After that, we then had a giant container leftover for ourselves (which the husband has been slowly chipping away at for lunch).

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get a picture of the full meal after it was cooked before we dug in to eating...again, so my apologies. I'll do better next time, promise!

Thinking about the word "jambalaya", my mind wandered a bit...jam...jimmy jam...you just got jammed! I couldn't help but think of that catchphrase from the sporadically present yet always irritating Councilman Jamm on Parks & Rec, so I'll leave you with that until next time. Happy weekend everyone! 

Note: I love Parks & Rec. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out.