Thursday, January 15, 2015

Whatcha' Been Eating?

When the crowd was here over the holidays, I did a lot of cooking. I'm the main cook here these days anyways with DH working full-time so I have a few 'old faithful' recipes that I turn to when we have a lot of people here. I thought I'd share a couple of those with you and hope that you'll share a couple of yours with me!

For company, a party or any gathering of people, I love Skinnytaste's Kalua Pork. My preferred way of having it is to make it into a roll using lettuce with a bit of rice at the bottom, shredded pork and hoisin sauce to top it off. Yummy! My crock pot cooks too hot so mine is usually finished in 12 hours versus 16. I still put it on overnight though, just in case.

Another family favourite (and one even the boys ate last night without me hearing 'Yuck! I'm not eating that!' was shared with me by my friend ML years and years ago. It's Cooking Light's Braised Herb Chicken Thighs with Potatoes recipe and it turns out gorgeous every time. I don't bother to use small potatoes and just cut up whatever potatoes we have on hand into ~1" chunks. I have just started increasing the recipe by 50% to ensure we have leftovers for lunch the next day. The boys are only 7, 5 and 3. Lord help us with the groceries when they're teenagers!

I found this recipe awhile back and love it. My PC skillet goes right into the oven so I find this an easy to put together and fantastic tasting recipe. I serve it with rice (brown for me, basmati for the boys) and a green salad. It's WW's Maple Baked Chicken recipe. As I've found to be true with so many WW recipes, this dish is jam packed with flavour. 

Finally, this next recipe is a new one I found over the holidays that I tried out on my poor unsuspecting family, using them as guinea pigs. Luckily for me (or them?) it was a hit. I wanted to use up some fresh cranberries that I had in the freezer and the Crockpot Chicken with Cranberries recipe met my requirements. As my father is diabetic, I made his in the oven excluding the sugar and he said it tasted great. I also didn't add extra water at the end but scooped out some broth from the bottom of the crock pot while the chicken was still in it and only added about 1.5 tbsps of flour to that. Whisk up the broth and flour mixture until there are no lumps then slowly whisk that into the hot crock pot. Be careful though. The chicken is so tender that it will fall apart easily if you hit it while you are stirring. Not a big deal for me but it might be for you.

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Sunday afternoon was simply gorgeous. I love clear blue skies and sunshine on sparkling fresh snow. It makes my heart ache with happiness. If we're going to have Winter then, please, let there be lots of snow. Enough for skiing, sliding, snow shoeing, snow mobiling, etc..

Our town was a Winter Wonderland over the weekend.


My favourite kind of winter day.


And if you think it looks cold, it was. The wind was BITTER! I stopped next to the post office to capture these pictures looking right into the bay.


We see these spectacular icicles each year but this is the first time I've slowed down long enough to take pictures.



No, I have no knitting progress photos as I'm on the third time knitting the same two inches (tell me you do that too!). Apparently an easy pattern and my hand brain coordination make a challenging mix.

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