Update on a Failed Dinner

Okay folks, I know that there are many of you out there who are wondering what the heck happened to David and I last Thursday night. You have been checking my blog EVERY day, probably multiple times a day, to see if we were able to eat our dinner. You have probably been taking my lack of posting as a sign that we ate the dinner, and then died from food poisoning! Well, never fear... we are alive and well. Our dinner, unfortunately, was the only casualty. (p.s. Give me a break for thinking that anyone cares about my blog. I know that only like two people read it. Oh well!)

This is what we came home to. The first rule about crock pot dinners is: NEVER PUT PASTA IN A CROCK POT FOR THREE HOURS. Yes, that is what you see before you. Tomato soup with farfalle noodles. The noodles just expanded x10 and fell apart before you could even get them in your mouth.

So what did we do? Well.. we went to Taco Bell of course! Taco Bell and Burger King AND McDonalds.

See? here are our bags next to our "gourmet" tomato farfalle soup. Which looks more appetizing?

You can see what we chose.

I realize that it looks like a lot of food. But we were STARVING! We went to Taco Bell and got our food there, but then on the way home we decided that we wanted shakes. Arby's doesn't do Strawberry shakes anymore, so we pulled into Burger King because it was on our way home. When we pulled up to the screen, the lady came over the microphone and was like "Would you like to order a Bacon Cheeseburger Extraordinaire (I don't remember what it was called) for only $1.50? I was shaking my head at the poor lady who was forced to try to upsell her customers when David turned his head and said "Yes." I was so surprised! I started laughing and told him that if he got his hamburger, then I wanted to go to McDonalds to get some french fries. And so we did.

We came home and ate our delicious meal while watching the first episode of the second season of Remington Steele. I mourned the absence of Murphy and Bernice, but David has promised that Mildred is a wonderful combination of them both and that I will grow to love her. 

To prove my ability in the kitchen, I decided to share my favorite recipe. This is mostly inspired by THIS post on Mindy DeGering's blog. (She is hilarious and I love her blog.) I have had it in my blog drafts for a while, but to defend my honor in the kitchen I am sharing my favorite recipe with you. 

Chicken Enchiladas
2-3 chicken breasts
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
1 pint sour cream
diced green chilies (this is the most important part)
lots of shredded cheese
1/2 onion
white flour tortillas

Boil chicken breasts until done. Cool in refrigerator. Shred. Mix the soup, sour cream, and chilies together. Chop the onion, and add to sauce mixture. Separate the mixture into two bowls. (It's supposed to be 1/2, 1/2, but I usually do like 1/3, 2/3 because I like more mixture inside the enchiladas.) To the larger mixture, add the shredded chicken and lots of shredded cheese. Fill the tortillas with the chicken mixture enchilada style and place tightly in a 9x13 glass pan. (I pack these suckers in there!)Spread the remaining sauce mixture over the top and cover with cheese. Cover with tinfoil and bake at 350 for 45 minutes. Remove tinfoil and bake for another 15 minutes or until cheese is starting to crisp and the sauce is bubbling.

It sounds like a lot of work, but is really, really simple and will be a family favorite guaranteed.


In fact, when we made this at David's house over Christmas break his brothers told me that they were glad that I was in the family specifically for this recipe. It's a lucky thing that I can make a good enchilada, or I may have not made it into the hearts of ANY of the Peaden boys. (You know it's true David, you only married me for my Chicken Enchiladas!)

Try it, you wont regret it.

My Culinary Masterpiece...

I just have to share this story because it is too good to NOT share:

Recently, I have decided to do better about scheduling and making meals for David and I for dinner. Because I work from 5-8:30 every night and David is on campus with me until then... I have decided to really amp up my crock pot cooking skills. Last night we ate a delicious Lemon-garlic chicken and potato dish and I was really excited to get home from student teaching today so I could make a delicious tomato and farfalle soup. (Remember this: I had to hurry REALLY fast because I only had about a half hour to get the soup in the crock pot before I had to leave for work.)

*I must interject here: I AM a good cook, most of the time. I really am. Today was just an unfortunate blemish on my spotless cooking career.

I started by chopping the onions, which went well. Then I moved on to sauteing the onions while I finished dicing the green peppers. I got the rhythm down fairly well: *Chop, Chop, Chop the peppers*Stir, Stir, Stir the onions* Chop Chop Chop the peppers*... you get the idea. I was fairly impressed with my efficiency and was patting myself on the back as I was chopping the celery when I realized that my onions and peppers were burning. I quickly analyzed the situation and deduced that my onions were indeed quickly approaching the extreme end of Maillard browning. (That is for all of my lovely FCSE/Nutrition friends.) They would just NOT be suitable for my amazing soup-to-be. So I dumped the whole thing out and started over, but FASTER this time. *ChopChopChopStirStirStirDiceDiceDiceStirStirStirChopChopChop*.  I was really hurrying this time because I seriously had to go to work in like 15 minutes.

They turned out perfect and I dumped them in the crockpot and got ready to add all the other ingredients. So I went back to my recipe and it said "Add one can cream of chicken soup." I thought that it was odd that it would tell me to add it, but honestly, David and I eat cream of chicken soup in almost everything that we make so I didn't think TOO much about it. Besides, I was in a hurry remember? After I added the can(and stirred it in really good, of course) I went back to the recipe and it said to add condensed milk. I was really confused. I was sure that I hadn't read that it needed condensed milk before. Then I realized my terrible mistake. I had started reading the recipe right next to MY recipe, and it was a recipe for "Hearty and Creamy Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup." AHHHHHH! I panicked. And by panic I stood dumbfounded at my own stupidity. And not only that... I didn't have any extra green peppers or onion... let alone time to re-chop them. I flashed through my possible solutions which mostly consisted of a Little Caesars Pizza or a beefy 5-layer burrito from Taco Bell (you know that commercial for the Taco Bell beefy 5-layer burrito? I love that commercial like you wouldn't believe. It's my favorite. Don't know what I'm talking about? Click HERE.)  But then I steeled my nerves and decided that no matter what I was making this dinner and it was going to be delicious. Thats all there was to it.

The next 5 minutes consisted of me dumping my concoction into a giant strainer and running it under water to get rid of all the cream of chicken soup. (Yes, I had to pick out all of the little chicken pieces.) I threw the sauteed veggies back on the frying pan with some butter to try to get some of the flavor back into them while I was dumping the remaining ingredients into the crockpot like there was no tomorrow. "One teaspoon basil? Thats fine... dump, dump, dump. Bay leaves? Sure! Shake, shake, shake." Then I dumped in the freshly sauteed veggies and stirred the entire thing up. Seconds later, the lid was on and I was running into my bedroom to throw on a hoodie and tennis shoes.

Right now I am sitting at work, still laughing at my concoction that is brewing back at home. I have already told David my story (and by told him my story, I mean I choked out the basics of what happened in between bursts of laughter on my part) and he knows that he is expected to eat the dinner as if it was prepared by the finest chef known to man, which lets be honest... it was.

Wish us luck! We may end up at Taco Bell after all. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Welcome to Europe...

Yesterday was wonderful, David and I have been having quite the time adjusting to being back in productive mode. Honestly, yesterday was a much needed holiday! (Okay, okay. We basically took the entire weekend off and decided not to do anything productive. EXCEPT, of course, to get to level eight on Super Mario Brothers Wii. Why yes, that would probably take about 10 hours of non-stop gaming.) But like I said, the extra day off on Monday was wonderful. We slept in, read out books, cleaned the house and then... we went on a date to Europe.

Yep! You heard me right. David and I decided it was a great opportunity to start seeing the world, and so we hopped on the next flight to Europe from the Salt Lake airport.     ..... umm ... Yeah, just kidding!

Really, we just decorated our apartment as a little European Cafe because two of Davids brothers came up to go on a triple date with us. The entire idea actually came from the birthday present that David and I gave to Jeff for his birthday. We gave him a "Complete European Adventure Date Kit - (Girl not included.)" This weekend was the perfect time to put that kit to good use. 

Here is how the date went: While Jeff and Kevin were out picking up their dates, David and I finished decorating the apartment and hung a "Welcome to Europe" sign on the front door. When they arrived, they entered "La Caffe` Peaden."

The full shot of the "Caffe`."

The caffe` table.

Me posing with "La Caffe Peaden" sign. 

(You may notice that the arrangement of words is different in this picture than in the first picture. That is because I just put "The Peaden Cafe" into an English to Italian translator online, and it said "La Peaden Caffe`." So that is how I posted it. As soon as David realized what I had done, he switched the words and made us take another picture so people wouldn't think that we were "gringo's." Apparently Italian is VERY similar to Spanish. I learned this when we were watching The Italian Job and David started translating what they were saying. Who knew!)

Here is the whole crew (minus David who is taking the picture). We ate a delicious "Italian Dinner" complete with homemade bread sticks (okay, we used Rhodes Rolls... so they weren't completely homemade), spaghetti, salad and Italian sodas.

A closeup of our food. And the ranch bottle. 
You may be wondering about the #8 on the bottle, but don't you worry... there is a very good explanation for that. However, it is a story for another day. I will be blogging about it soon though. 

Next up on the agenda: Sightseeing!

This was the best part of the date. You see, in the "Complete European Adventure Date Kit" that we gave Jeff for his birthday, we included a Balloon Architecture Kit. This kit gave step by step instructions on how to make famous buildings out of balloons. (You know.. like balloon animals?) The intention was to make something like the Colosseum or some such thing.

Here is David working hard to tie our first balloon. 

Jeff and Lindsie, off to a great start.

  Kevin and Kayli starting on their construction project.

The beginnings of our project. :) 

Davids SUPER SAD FACE because one of his balloons popped while he was trying to twist it! 

Hard at work. Seriously, these things took some real EFFORT!

Can you guess what they were making?

Yay! Part 7-12 is finished!

Ta-da! Our finished product! The Brooklyn Bridge! (Did you know that this was the first bridge to be completely lit by electricity? I didn't either. Look at how much you can learn by playing with balloons.) 

Look at how similar it looks to the one in the book!

Here are Jeff and Lindsie with the US Capitol Building! 

And last but definitely not least, the Eiffel Tower!!!!!

We had a blast. Amidst all of the balloon construction there were quite a few sword fights (using carefully crafted balloon weapons) and other such activities. I even figured out how to make a balloon flower all by myself! 

Me with my balloon flower.

To finish off the date, we ate Cannolis for dessert. If you don't know what a cannoli is, please google it. They are beautiful italian desserts. However, they are also very complicated... so upon Googling "Simple Italian Dessert" we came up with these knock-off cannolis.

A special thank you to Rachel Ray and her Cannoli Fake out!

Another very special Thank You to my very special husband. This date wouldn't have been anywhere near as wonderful without your support and your incredible personality. I love you and am so grateful that we can have such a great time without leaving our house!