Crock Pot Enchilades

I made this recipe for potluck last Sunday. I was out of town all day Saturday, so I knew I needed something I could make ahead easily. I browned the meat and added the soups and seasonings, and then put the crock in the fridge Friday night. Sunday morning, I put the crock in the "pot" and heated it for about 4 hours and it turned out great.

Ingredients

1 1/2 pounds of hamburger meat
1/2 large onion, chopped
1 can of cheese soup (any flavor)
1 can of golden mushroom soup
1 can of cream of mushroom soup
1 can of red enchilada sauce (mild or hot)
1 tsp. of ground cumin
1 four ounce can of chopped green chilies
12 corn tortillas

Brown hamburger meat and onions. Drain and put into a Crockpot you have sprayed with cooking spray. Add the rest of the ingredients except for the tortillas. Cook for four hours on low. One hour before you serve it, tear up the tortillas and add to the soup mixture in the crock pot. Cook an additional hour and serve.

Waffle Iron

This is for Jill or anyone else who might be wondering what kind of waffle iron I use to make my French Toast Waffles. The waffle iron I am using now is a $14 Belgian Waffle maker I picked up at Kroger on a whim. It makes the thick, and yet seemingly trendy, Belgian Waffle (my husband and I don't like these because they don't get crispy enough for our taste), but it works great to make the French Toast Waffles. My in-laws have one of those big $80 kind of Belgian waffle makers, and they have made this recipe successfully with that. My husband and I REALLY don't like the waffles made with these ... not that I won't eat them, mind you, I just don't like them as much as the classic, crispy waffles.

I want one of those old, classic waffle makers that my mom used to makes us waffles with. I've been too cheap to buy one of the classic ones, though ... they are usually about $50. Maybe I'll add that to my Christmas wish list this year. I see the one linked above is on sale for $30. I don't know how well the classic waffle maker would work on the waffles made with bread slices. It may work beautifully, I just don't know.

Anyway, there is the scoop on my waffle iron that I use to make French Toast Waffles.

Let me know if you've tried this recipe and how it turned out for you! :o)

Easy & Fast Chicken & Dumplings

Since cold weather has arrived in Texas, here is a super easy recipe I've adapted for my family. You can have this yummy, comfort food ready for your family in 30 minutes or less. This is my 5 year old's favorite dish, and he asks for it often.

Ingredients

2 large cans of chicken breasts (you can cook your own chicken breast and cut it up, but I like using the canned because it is so easy)

2 cans of 98% fat free cream of chicken soup

2 teaspoons of chicken base (or chicken bouillon)

2 cups of water

1/2 teaspoon of black ground pepper

2 cups of Bisquick mix

2/3 cup of milk

1/2 tsp. of thyme

In a large pot, put the chicken (and the broth included), the two cans of soup, the pepper, the chicken base or bouillon) and water. Stir and bring that to a boil. In the meantime, mix the Bisquick, milk and thyme together. Once the soup mixture has come to a boil, make little balls of dough (a little larger than a marble) and drop them one by one into the soup mixture. Stir as necessary. This will make a lot of dumplings but they are our favorite part (especially my 5 year old's). Once you have dropped all of the dumplings, stir good, cover and turn the fire down to simmer. Let simmer ten minutes, stir again and serve. Be careful serving this to little ones right out of the pot ... it is SUPER hot and especially the dumplings (even if the soup part is cool enough to eat, the dumplings usually stay hot in the middle for quite a while ... I usually cut up the dumplings and serve just a shallow serving to my littlest ones ... it cools off quicker that way).

Santa Fe Pinto Beans

Here is my version of a recipe I got off of a can of Bush's Pinto Beans. It was a nice change for a side dish. The boys wouldn't even try it, but my hubby and I really liked it.

Ingredients

1/2 C. frozen chopped bell pepper
1 C. of frozen chopped onion
2 cloves of minced garlic
1 T. of olive oil or canola oil
1 T. of chicken base or bouillon
1/4 c. of water
1/2 tsp. of cumin
2 cans (16 oz.) of pinto beans (drained and rinsed) - the original recipe called for one can of pinto beans and one can of black beans. Since I only had pinto, that's what I used, but you could use one of each.
1 can of rotel tomatoes, undrained
1 and 1/2 C. of frozen corn

In a large skillet, saute the green pepper, onion, and garlic in the oil. Stir in the chicken base, water and cumin. Bring to a boil and add the beans, tomato and corn. Reduce heat and simmer until heated through.

To see what else is cooking on Wednesday, check out What's Cooking Wednesday.

Double Quick, Super Easy Dinner Rolls

This is basically what I think some call a spoon roll recipe. I could be wrong, and I don't even remember where I found this recipe. It is really good and SO easy. People are so impressed when you serve HOMEMADE bread, but this is such an easy recipe. Most bread recipes that you have to knead I end up making like a brick. You don't have to knead these, so I'm safe there. :o) Start making them an hour or so before you want to serve them.

Ingredients

2 1/4 C. of all purpose flour (split into 1 and 1/4 cups and then save the other 1 cup for later in the recipe)
3 T. of sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 T. of quick active dry yeast
1 C. of very warm water
2 T. shortening
1 egg

Mix 1 and 1/2 cups of flour with sugar, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Add warm water and shortening and mix until the shortening is mostly melted. Add egg to the mixture and mix until smooth. Stir in remaining flour until smooth. Scrape the batter from the side of the blow. Cover and let rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes or until doubled in size. Spray 12 regular sized muffin cups with cooking spray. Be sure to get not only the inside of the muffin cups, but the top of the tin, too (these rise pretty high). Stir down the batter by beating about 25 strokes. Spoon into muffin cups. Let rise for 20 or 30 minutes or until batter rounds over the tops of the cups. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Bake rolls for 15 to 20 minutes or until golden brown. Your guests or family will be so impressed with fresh, homemade rolls that taste like you spent half the day working on them! A yummy crowd pleaser!

Marsala Ranch Chicken

If this looks mysteriously like the Creamy Italian Chicken that I posted last week, there's a reason. The five year old asked for it for dinner. Since you never know what a preschooler is going to like from day to day, I jumped at the chance to make something he wanted. I normally have the ingredients to make the CIC because it is one of their favorites. Well, when I went to make it right at the last possible minute, I didn't have the dry Italian dressing mix, so I improvised and came up with this. The five year old liked it as did my hubby and baby (the three year old doesn't want to eat anything but candy and bread these days ... although he did eat an apple today and even requested more).

Back to the recipe, this may be a recipe of someone's, but I've never looked for it or seen it. Here's my "what I had on hand" version of Creamy Italian Chicken that I have named Marsala Ranch Chicken.

INGREDIENTS

4 Chicken Breast Halves
1 can of 98% FF cream of chicken soup
1 package of dry ranch dressing mix
1/2 tsp. of garlic powder
1/4 cup of marsala cooking wine (a white wine would work, too ... don't know what Marsala wine is classified as, but I had Marsala cooking wine in the pantry so that is what I used)
1 package of low fat cream cheese

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix the soup, cream cheese, garlic powder, ranch dressing mix and wine together. Spray a small casserole dish, place the chicken in the bottom and pour the soup/dressing mix over the chicken. Bake for about 30 to 45 minutes.

I served this over whole wheat pasta spirals with a broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots vegetable mix (from the frozen food section) and some WONDERFUL bread my husband's sister-in-law introduced me to ... you can get it at Sam's and have hot, fresh baked, crusty bread in on TEN minutes! It is in the frozen food section at Sam's and is Member's Mark Organic Tuscan Artisan Bread. I know I serve a lot of prepared, frozen stuff like the veggies and the bread ... I really can bake homemade bread (and sometimes do ... I'll post a recipe for that tomorrow) ... but with three preschool age boys, I do good to keep the laundry washed and put away and the floors relatively clean much less cooking a full meal from scratch! Anyway, hope you enjoy this version.

If you have a recipe to post on Wednesday, send an e-mail to the Fairy Blogmother at fairyblogmother@sympatico.ca and she'll link back to you for "What's Cooking Wednesday". She has a collection of lots of YUMMY looking recipes linked on her blog.

French Toast Waffles

This is one of my boys' favorite breakfasts. Since we had extra time this morning, I made it for them and they were thrilled! I like this recipe because it is easy, I can use high fiber bread for the dairy poster boy, and making it in the waffle iron makes the bread much less soggy than normal French toast. My husband and I are probably the only two people in the world who don't like the over night French toast casserole everyone makes. We just really hate soggy bread! Yuck! If you are like us, you'll like this recipe because it gives you the flavor of French toast without being soggy.

INGREDIENTS

Bread (as many slices as you want ... I guess I usually make around 8 pieces with this and like I said I use double fiber bread. A friend made this for her niece who doesn't like whole wheat bread and she loved it until she came back for a second piece and saw my friend using wheat bread ... kids ... and some big people, too! :o)

2 eggs

3/4 to 1 cup of milk (I use 1%)

Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

3 kitchen tablespoons of sugar (sorry I didn't measure with a real measuring spoon ... I normally don't measure at all)

1 tsp. of vanilla (I forgot to add that today, but they were still really good without it)

Preheat your waffle iron. Mine is big enough that I can do 2 at a time, but many waffle irons will only be big enough to do one at time. Beat the eggs, milk, sugar, and cinnamon and nutmeg together. Dip your bread into the mixture to coat it. Open your waffle iron and spray it with cooking spray. Put your egg mixture coated bread on the iron, close it and cook it until desired doneness. If you like your bread soggy, don't cook it as long, if you like it crispier, cook it a little longer.

I top it with light butter and sugar free Mrs. Butterworth syrup. The sugar free Mrs. Butterworth brand is the BEST sugar free syrup I've ever eaten ... this is not an advertisement, I just really like this syrup. (There are several types of food that I have to have only one certain brand. I may list those one day.) This sugar free syrup is thick and doesn't have as bad of an artificial sweetener twang to it as some do. Being thick and not watery helps a bunch, too. Yummy! The kids don't know the difference and it cuts WAY down on their sugar consumption.