Italian Lemon Chicken
I love an easy recipe! I think this could be the easiest one I’ve made yet. I put the Italian Lemon Chicken in the crockpot and when I got home, the house smelled SOOOOO good!!! Once I ate it, I found out that it tasted just as good as it smelled!!!
Ingredients:
1 cube of butter
3 lemons (juiced)
2 packages of Italian Dressing Mix
Chicken
I threw all the ingredients in the crockpot. The chicken was even frozen.
Crockpot was on high. I was surprised that there was a lot of juice in the crockpot after cooking it a few hours. Chicken is done when it hits 170 degrees. It took about 3 – 4 hours.
YUM! Seems like I should have thought to make a vegetable or something to eat with my chicken…but I guess I will have to learn how to do that another day!
Is There Ever TOO Much Chocolate?
I finished making my strawberries and I had WAY too much chocolate left over. I started grabbing anything I could think of to coat with white chocolate. I even added some sprinkles on the Lay’s Potato Chips. The pretzels were good too. I could have added sprinkles on them, but I was really ready to be done with this whole project. I still want to try chocolate covered bacon, but that will have to hold for another day!
Practicing for the Fourth
Thanks to Pinterest, I’ve started contributing to random parties that I’ve been invited to. Before that, I just graced everyone with my presence. Maybe that is why I’m not invited to a lot of parties…hmmmm…. Well, now that I’m becoming domestic, I’ve been trying to remedy that. Fourth of July is coming up, so I get to test my party etiquette. I looked everywhere for a pretty red, white and blue layered alcoholic punch to bring, but I could only find non-alcoholic ones. So, I decided to make these pretty strawberries instead. They turned out ok, but I think I can do better on the actual day of the party.
Ingredients:
DRY Strawberries
White Chocolate
Blue sprinkles
Vegetable Oil
Put white chocolate and a tiny bit of vegetable oil in a bowl. (I used too much vegetable oil, so I suggest using it sparingly.)
Microwave the chocolate for about a minute. Once it’s hot, stir it up until it’s smooth.
Get a bowl of blue sprinkles. This bowl was too small. I ended up getting a bigger one and filling it up. You’ll use more sprinkles than you would think you’d need.
Dip the strawberry in the white chocolate, then dip it in the blue sprinkles, then wait until the chocolate hardens to eat. YUM! I’m pretty sure these will be a hit at the party!!
Braised Hoisin Beer Short Ribs
Now that I have my crockpot, I had to cook something in it. My first meal had to be short ribs. I think the crockpot was probably invented just to cook short ribs. I found this recipe on Food.com. It was probably the easiest short rib recipe that I found. I prefer the recipes that involve me throwing things in a pot and leaving it. I’ll make one of those next time. I’m going to buy a crockpot cookbook on my iPad, but I’m not really sure which one is the best. If anyone has one that they like, feel free to let me know!
Ingredients:
3 lbs short ribs
salt and freshly ground pepper
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
10 – 12 garlic gloves, smashed
1 inch piece gingerroot, peeled and sliced into 1/4 inch slices
12 ounces good ale
3 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
1/2 – 1 cup hoisin sauce
Season the ribs with salt and pepper. Brown the short ribs. Remove the ribs and pour off all but a couple tablespoons of the fat.
Sauté the ginger and garlic, once it’s sautéed pour the beer over it to deglaze and then turn the flame off.
Put the browned short ribs in the crockpot
Put the sautéed garlic and ginger on the ribs
Pour beer and vinegar on the ribs until it’s covered.
Cook in the crockpot for about 2 1/2 hours.
Add Hoisin Sauce and put in the pre heated oven (300 degrees) for 30 minutes.
Put on a plate and serve with your favorite vegetables. YUM!!!
BBQ chicken
I love making stuff in the crockpot. It’s so easy to throw everything in there and then forget about it. I’m really not the type of cook that wants to make a fuss. I saw this recipe and really wanted to try it because it involved coke in the ingredients. I rushed out to the store and bought all the ingredients, came home and started preparations to cook the chicken. The only thing I didn’t factor in is that I have a really small crockpot. I couldn’t get the chicken to fit in, so I had to have Mike cut off the legs and wings to make it fit. Then, since the chicken took up all the room, the other ingredients didn’t really fit either and it ended up overflowing. After I got the majority of the ingredients finally in the crockpot, I turned it on and left it for a couple hours. I’m not sure what possessed me to go look at the progress, since that is a little more work than I was planning to do, but when I checked I noticed that the crockpot wasn’t even working!!! OMG!! It was all just sitting there marinading I guess. I moved the crockpot to another plug and changed the setting to high and it miraculously started working, so it all worked out in the end!
Ingredients:
Onions
Lemon
BBQ Sauce
Coke
Whole chicken – (or one with no legs or wings works too!)
Cut up the lemons and onions
Put the lemons, onions and chicken in the crockpot
Add BBQ sauce and coke
Cook until the chicken is ready. Probably about 4 – 6 hours.
This looks pretty pitiful, but it’s really tasty!
Mike said he made the best bbq sauce ever by using all the stuff the chicken was cooking in and adding a bunch of other stuff, but I have no idea what he added.
Quick dip
Today I had the opposite problem than I had the other day. I have chips, but I have very little cheese. When I make nachos, I have to use A LOT of cheese. I still had some sour cream left over from the bean dip, so I made my favorite easy to make dip:
Ingredients:
Sour Cream
Pace Picante Sauce
Shredded cheese
You can use whatever amounts you like.
Put Sour Cream in a bowl.
Add Picante Sauce, I like Pace Medium.
Add shredded Cheese and mix it up good.
Dip chip and eat. YUM! I like this dip with my nachos too. Sometimes I don’t add the cheese to the dip.
Cheese quesadillas
OMG!! I am out of chips, so I can’t make nachos! I almost had to go without dinner tonight until I found tortillas in my fridge. I decided I could make some cheese quesadillas. They are almost as easy to make as nachos and they have CHEESE!! I only had wheat tortillas, so I had to make due, but flour tortillas are better because they get pretty crunchy if you cook them long enough!
Melt butter in a pan
Put a tortilla on top of the butter and add cheese to the top of the tortilla. (You could put meats or veggies on here too, but I just like cheese.)
Put another tortilla on top of the cheese. Cook until brown on one side and then flip it over and get the other side browned.
Cut in to quarters and eat! Obviously I made 2 quesadillas. I was hungry, ok!?
Brie Bites
As usual, I was looking on Pinterest at all the delicious looking food and found a recipe for Brie Bites. I love brie, so this seemed like a match made in heaven for me. When I looked at the recipe up close, I felt like they looked kind of bland, so I made some adjustments. I’d say that this is the first recipe that is mostly mine. I figured everyone loves bacon, so I added that and apple to the recipe and got rid of the pecans. I was going to make these for one of the parties yesterday, but I think it’s better that I had the opportunity to try them out first. I’ll be bringing these to future party events because they are GOOD! Mike said he would add something spicy to the mix, maybe cayenne pepper or jalapeño peppers, but I don’t really like spicy.
Ingredients:
Phyllo tarts
bacon
brown sugar
apple
brie
Make some bacon bits
While bacon is cooking, put the phyllo tarts on a cookie sheet
Add brie to the phyllo cup
Top the brie with about 1/2 tsp of brown sugar
Top that with apple
Top that with bacon, put in the oven at 350 for about 15 minutes or until the brie is melted.
Let cool and eat!
crockpot beer chicken tacos
Since there is just two of us, eating a whole chicken is a week long process. So far I’ve really enjoyed the crockpot beer chicken that I made the other day. I have said it before, everything tastes better in a tortilla. I decided this is a good time to test that theory out by putting the beer chicken into a tortilla with cheese. My theory is still right. This makes a great little taco and was a great leftover meal!
Ingredients:
Chicken
Cheese
Tortilla… I used wheat tortillas because that is all I had.
Microwave for 1 minute. Then eat!
Beer Crockpot Chicken
Now that I have gotten in to attempting recipes, I’ve been trying to find things that I would like to cook. I really prefer to make desserts, but I also want to get better at cooking main dishes. I really enjoy cooking with the crockpot because it is so easy to put a bunch of ingredients in a pot and walk away. I got this recipe from My Daily Dish. I figured that I like chicken and I like beer so it HAS to be good!
Ingredients
1 whole chicken (according to the recipe I used, you can also use cut up pieces or 4-6 chicken breasts)
1 can of any kind of beer (I used a bottle of Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat because that’s what I had in the fridge)
1/2 tsp Garlic Powder
1/2 tsp Basil
1/2 tsp Paprika
1/2 tsp Kosher Salt
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
I put all the ingredients in first and then added the whole chicken.
Cook in the crockpot on high for 3 – 4 hours or on low for 7 – 8 hours. I cooked it on high.
The recipe said you could also cook a frozen chicken, you just have to cook it longer.
Fabulous after FIFTY 