Can-Do Attitude: Pressure Canner

Who got a new toy?  This girl!

I've always said that with my garden, I can't fathom being able to throw the extra food away, but I've never really had a way to preserve it all without pickling it, and I'm not a pickle person.

Not the way Peter Piper ever wanted me to be, anyway.

But that's another story for another day.

 I wanted to try a recipe that I knew I wouldn't mind having a lot of as my inaugural run with my pressure cooker.  I went with carrots in an orange juice/brown sugar sauce since that's generally how I like to prepare my carrots.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

 As I ramble through Pinterest, I find more and more every day that I want to try.  Luckily, I have a hungry husband to help me eat up my creations, and all of the leftovers!  Unfortunately, he'll start travelling soon and it'll be meals for one with more leftovers than I know what to do with.  Maybe I'll share with my employees to make things go more quickly.  Luckily, what I made for last night's dinner was so wonderful, there were barely any leftovers, and what is left will be gone within a lunch or two!  {Whew! Talk about rambling!}
 Just the same, I came across this recipe for Sweet and Sour Chicken...  Which happens to be the only dish I'll eat at a Chinese restaurant because I love the way the sauce makes my rice pink (sometimes hot pink), and the veggies.  The chicken is neither here nor there, but I LOVE SWEET AND SOUR!

Here's my recipe, which I tweaked from the other:
Ingredients:
LOTS of Veggies!  Such as...
10 oz of sugar snap peas
2 bell peppers
2 celery stalks
10 baby carrots
1 can water chestnuts
1 can pineapple chunks
and I was going to add Manderin Oranges, but changed my mind last minute.



Plus, two pounds of teriyaki chicken breast.  I get this pre-cooked from Fresh and Easy.  The original recipe calls for you to bread and fry, but I wanted less fat, so I chose this as an easy alternative.

The sauce was ridiculously simple, too - why have I not made this before?!?!
1 C sugar - could probably cut this back more
1/2 C ketchup
3/4 C cider vinegar
1 T Worcestershire sauce (or soy sauce)
2 T garlic powder - could probably cut this back to
1 1/2 T.

I mixed up the sauce, wok-ed/fried the veggies in about 1 T of olive oil, added the chicken and poured the sauce over the top.  I waited until everything was heated through and then served it up with Jasmine rice.  If it were up to me, I'd almost double the sauce, but I LOVE S&S, so that's a personal preference.  Thomas loved the meal, and the vinegar in the sauce helped to clear his cold-riddled head long enough to enjoy the meal.  Perfect all around.  Plus, it was so simple and took very little time.  Thomas thought I should have breaded the chicken, but when he tasted it, he said it played well, so no breading/frying for this girl!

Asian Persuasion Part 2: a success!

After the great Spring Roll debate of 2011, I was a little leery to try out another Asian inspired recipe from Pampered Chef.  Blasphemy?  Blashphe-you, my friend, I was down-heartened and it took everything in Thomas' power to get me to finish up dinner in the kitchen.  Truth be told, it wasn't that bad, I just took so long to roll all of those spring rolls that I didn't want to go back and do anything else.

Luckily, I have a great partner in crime husband who was willing to stir fry the beef for me to get me started.  In fact, he is such a sucker loves me so much that he put the beef in our Ginger Wasabi sauce the night before to marinade.  He fried it up, and it was perfect!  Such a great taste, and it was ready for me to continue on with the recipe for Asian Beef Noodles (I just didn't add any extra ginger since there wasn't any fresh in the house, but there was some in the sauce).

The best part about this recipe is that it was ready within 10 minutes, start to finish.

Second best: the taste!  After our less than stellar spring rolls, this was very flavorful, and exactly what I was looking for.  (The taste would have been the best part about this, but I was spent and 10 minutes for an awesome meal was exactly what I needed.)

Third best?  The leftovers.  Not only did I have four dishes of lunches, but they really re-heat well and are a good filler for your mid-day snackage.

And finally - when (since college/your post high school experience) can you say you endorse ramen noodles for a filling meal??!  On a scale from cupcakes to Capricorns, I'd give this recipe two thumbs up!

A Walk on the Wild Side

I do not do complicated.  I like things easy-peasy, and enjoy simple successes.  While I can follow multi-step directions, I try not to when it comes to a recipe.  The more steps there are, the more ways I can mess up dinner.  I avoid things that I think won’t be successful  because there is nothing worse than feeling that you have to have a pizza for dinner after you’ve worked for the past two hours to make a not-pizza.
Regardless, I have had a lot of success with Pampered Chef recipes.  I might be feeling a little cocky, but I feel like there aren’t a lot of PC recipes that are vindictively hard, or that you have to worry at every step of the process that you’re about to mess things up.  After my Chicken Napoleon success, I’ve been feeling more on top of my game and ready for a little step up in the challenge department.  Now, that doesn’t mean that you’ll read this recipe and think it’s difficult, I’m just saying that it was intimidating to me.
Little did I know, before starting this evening, that Phyllo dough is such a pain ...




Truly.  The first roll I opened was so dry it just flaked into a million pieces.  Once I got the hang of that roll, it was done, of course.  Fortunately, the second roll unrolled much more nicely and was much easier to work with.  I moved quickly, but the Gruyere Chicken en Croute looked like this on the way in and out of the oven...

Thomas claims the meal was fabulous.  I, personally, believe that Phyllo dough is not tasty enough to warrant that much work to assemble this.  Thomas packed the extras up for lunch (this made a lot of food!), and I'm keeping the veggies for my lunches.  For a fancier dinner where I know I'll be putting in more time than I'd like in the kitchen, these aren't so bad, but for a Monday night dinner...  thumbs down on my behalf.  (I know I'm the only one who felt that way, but I'm entitled to vote my own way.)

I did also make the steamed broccoli and sweet maple carrots.  Loved the veg.  Oh, and while I was busy making these items, Thomas and the pups were making trip all over the kitchen because he was making some traditional South African biltong (aka jerky).  Luckily, we've got the system pretty much down so this rig only dominates my kitchen table for about three days.  Of course, given Desilu's height and curiousity, she may have them all down by tomorrow afternoon!

And now, while you're reading this, I'm off to New Orleans for a weekend with my Mom and family for my cousin's wedding.  I'll be back by the middle of next week, so enjoy some time away from me, and maybe I'll find a new recipe for everyone to enjoy!  (At the very least, I hope to sell some PC products to my family.  HINT HINT!)

 

Happy Six Month Birthday, Desilu!

(please don't eat papa's biltong!)