I headed over to AllRecipes.com to look for the highest rated guacamole recipe they had. I know guacamole is avocado based but that’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject. We went with this guacamole recipe, and bought some fresh ingredients.

Initially, I imagined having turkey burgers and putting the guacamole on them as a condiment. But we also had two lonely chicken breasts in the fridge that were begging to be turned into something, so I turned my attention towards combining guacamole with chicken in a flavorful way instead.

We’ve done a lot of variations on stuffed chicken breasts or pork in the past, so why not guacamole stuffed chicken breasts? It was really as easy as it sounds. And by stuffed I should probably clarify and say “roll ups” because technically we rolled the guacamole up inside of the chicken breasts. Whatever you call it, plenty of tasty guacamole oozed from the chicken. So good!

Guacamole Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Ingredients

• Guacamole, freshly made from your favorite recipe. We used this one.
• boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• mayonnaise
• seasonings to taste or even breadcrumbs if you’d like
• salsa

1. Make the guacamole ahead of time, or open a jar of your favorite brand and set aside. Homemade would be the best, though!

2. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Using a meat tenderizer, pound the chicken breasts really flat and thin. You’re going to be rolling them up, so the thinner the better!

3. Spread the guacamole on the top of each flattened chicken breast. Begin from one end and roll the chicken up completely; you may need a toothpick or two to secure. I used one, even though the guac acted like “glue” and held the chicken together pretty nicely without. I used quite a bit of guacamole on each chicken breast so they didn’t roll beautifully, but I like guac and in the end this was irrelevant to the taste anyway!

4. Brush on a thin coat of mayonnaise to lightly glaze all sides of the rolled chicken breast. This will lock in moisture and also help the seasonings stick. We used Mrs. Dash Tomato and Basil Garlic seasoning to go sodium free, but you could also use salt and pepper or garlic powder or something. You could even coat the chicken in seasoned breadcrumbs at this point if you preferred. The mayo will help hold them on.

5. Place the chicken breasts in a shallow baking dish in the preheated oven and bake for 30 minutes uncovered.

We didn’t have any at the time that was low sodium, but we REALLY wanted to pour some salsa over the top of the chicken a couple minutes before the end of baking, though it would have also been good added right after taking the chicken out of the oven. Either way, salsa on top would finish it off nicely. We omitted the salsa this time, but will definitely be sure to have some for next time!

The chicken had such a delicious, juicy flavor, and it was bursting with tasty guacamole. We served it with steamed golden corn and enjoyed every bite. :) Hope you like it, too!

Buffalo Style Chicken Pizza

Happy Sunday!

We’re finally back after surviving the move and ready to try out a new recipe this week. Firstly, the move went great. Thanks to family and friends, we managed to complete the move in a couple of hours in one giant trip. We moved about 40 minutes north, closer to my new job, and we LOVE the new place. We have tons more space and at least one fantastic neighbor. :) (Thanks for all your help, Chris!) The area is beautiful, and we’ve spent our first week exploring all of our new surroundings and getting acquainted. I love that work is 10 minutes away vs. an hour and 10 with rush hour! We’ve found some neat little stores and places to eat that we didn’t have before, and each new place we discover is a fun little adventure together.

I’ve been stockpiling some of my AllRecipes.com emails with recipe suggestions to pick through once we got settled in, and this week with football season officially into full swing, we decided to try something Sunday-Football-Friendly. What better than pizza? Normally I don’t do pizza as I find typical pizza to be too greasy. However, I am a sucker for homemade pizza, and this was no exception. We created Buffalo Style Chicken Pizza, following one of the AllRecipes daily email suggestions I got last week in the midst of unpacking.

What’s interesting is that instead of traditional tomato-based pizza sauce, this recipe calls for a blue cheese base. I know that Lucas isn’t a big fan of blue cheese, so after reading some of the recipe comments, I decided to switch it out for a creamy white ranch base instead as many others had done with success. It was great! I will admit I didn’t really measure out the ranch dressing or hot sauce exactly as the recipe called for; it was more about saucing the pizza with as much ranch as I thought was good, and then tossing the cubed chicken in enough hot sauce to coat it thoroughly before adding it to the prepared pizza crust.  Speaking of prepared crust, that’s what we used, but in the future I wouldn’t mind making my own from scratch. In a pinch it was quick and delicious, though! We used a mild hot sauce since my spicy threshold isn’t as high as what Lucas can handle, but you could spice it up more depending on the wing sauce you used. All I know is that it made for a simple but tasty pizza that we’ll definitely be making again! :)

Can you believe that October 1 is next week? Where has September gone? Monday, October 11 is Canadian Thanksgiving, so I’m soon going to be on the lookout for turkey-based recipes to try out and share with family on the Sunday before. The following weekend we’ll have our friends Kara and Jake here, and the week after that our friends Trevor and Sheila will be here. And at the end of the month it’ll be my little nephew’s very first birthday. October is going to be a busy month! :) See you soon.

While cleaning out the fridge in preparation for a grocery run, I noticed that we had an extra frozen pie crust that looked a little lonely there in the freezer. I quickly racked my brain for meals I could make that would involve a pie crust, AND use up the two also-lonely chicken breasts we had, and the answer was clear… Chicken Pot Pie! You’d be surprised at how many chicken pot pie recipes there are on AllRecipes.com alone; I virtually thumbed through ten or fifteen before settling on one. I picked it because it used a pie crust set up (sorta), but since I didn’t have a double pie crust with a top layer, I decided I’d use some Bisquik mix to create a pour-over top crust like I remember doing in an old chicken pot pie recipe several years ago.

At the grocery store, keeping this top crust in mind, I grabbed a package of Bisquik garlic cheese biscuit mix – just add water! I figured this would be a nice touch and I’d pour it all over the top of the pot pie to create a tasty top crust. Sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t. But that’s why we try new recipes and try new things – to learn!

We followed the Chicken Pot Pie III recipe with the exception of one substitution and the top crust; I boiled the two chicken breasts and combined cubed chicken with some mixed frozen veggies we blanched. The new ingredient for me was that this recipe called for a can of condensed cream of POTATO soup along with half a can of cream of celery. I’ve never seen cream of potato used in the filling of chicken pot pie, and in the end, I think this was the one ingredient that made ALL the difference. It was like the can of cream of potato soup was magic. I will admit I substituted cream of chicken for cream of celery, but mostly because I don’t like the flavor of cream of celery so much. So in our chicken pot pie we used one whole can of condensed cream of potato soup and a half can of condensed cream of chicken. Seriously, the combination was magical, and I’m convinced that cream of potato soup in chicken pot pie is genius. I don’t know if cream of potato is common in chicken pot pie recipes elsewhere or not, but it was new to me and now will be a permanent ingredient in any chicken pot pie I make going forward. Delicious!

I poured the filling into the pie crust and checked the instructions on the Bisquik garlic cheese biscuit mix – it only needed 15 minutes to bake, so I decided to wait and pour the top crust on the last 15 minutes of bake time. So I put the pie in without a top crust for the first 30 minutes with the pie crust edges covered in foil. The next 30 minutes saw the foil removed as the recipe instructed, and then the final 15 minutes was for the biscuit mix poured on top. And by ‘poured on top’, I mean ‘made a huge mess.’ See, the biscuit mix was a bit too doughy and sticky to spread easily on the top of a hot, almost-finished chicken pot pie. In an old recipe I used, the top crust I made from Bisquik mix was more liquid-y and could be poured easily so that it spread out naturally on top of the pie. I wasn’t really thinking and tried this with the biscuit mix and it didn’t turn out so well. I did the best I could to spread it evenly across the top, and in the end it all tasted fine, but this step would’ve been easier if I had:

A. Just gotten a double pie crust like the recipe called for to avoid adding a top crust later .. OR ..
B. Used more liquid-y Bisquik mix that would’ve made it easier to pour, instead of trying to spread sticky dough.

That little poor choice aside, the final resulting chicken pot pie was seriously amazing! I can’t gush enough about the magic of the filling flavor – again, I believe due to the use of cream of potato. The veggies were just right, the chicken was flavorful, and the crust (including the tasty garlic cheese top) all came together really well. Lucas said that I can make this again anytime I want… which is a good sign ;)

Next weekend we’ll be in Georgia for Dragon Con so there won’t be a new recipe, but definitely stay tuned for updates and photos from our trip to Atlanta with friends. :) Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

The idea is that each week we’ll type up a post to share what recipes we used for that Sunday’s menu. Not only will this allow us to share great recipes with the whole two of you that read our blog, but it will also help US keep track of all of the food we make (with notes about what worked, what didn’t, what we liked and didn’t like, things we omitted or changed or substituted, etc.) so that we can access recipes easily later on, or share things with our family and friends a lot more concisely. Like a lot of aspects of our life, it’s all about sharing. :)

Another great benefit to documenting our culinary experiences with this new tradition is that we’ll be able to keep track of the new dishes we discover and start eliminating the food boredom that has overcome us recently. Our meals have been too predictable and repetitive. This ensures we can always look forward to something new and exciting. The best part? We’ll be doing it together. What a great side effect!

And if nothing else, it’ll give us a reason to update the family blog at least once a week, right? Ha!

As this is week 2 of our tradition, I’m just going to share what we created the last two Sundays really quickly. What I’d like to do for these Sunday posts going forward, though, is to describe the dishes in better detail in their own post and include picture(s). We’ll also make any notes about changes we made and our thoughts on the food in general and how it did (or didn’t) turn out. Maybe there will be a mistake or we don’t like the way something turns out. We’ll document that, too, and hopefully it’ll help us learn so that we won’t make the same mistakes in the future.

OH! And we have signed up for an AllRecipes.com account to keep a virtual recipe box of things we try or things we want to potentially try so feel free to look over there. It’s fun to sort through user-submitted recipes for inspiration, and is usually our go-to place when we begin planning our Sunday menu.

Here’s what we cooked up the past two Sundays:

Sunday July 18, 2010
Jalapeño Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts
This. was. amazing. I forgot to include the thyme and dill in the actual cream cheese/jalapeno mixture before adding it to the chicken breasts, so instead I lightly sprinkled them on top of everything just before it went into the oven. These turned out absolutely amazing. Delicious! I was seriously in love with the resulting creamy cream cheese jalapeno “gravy” after baking.

The Best Steamed Asparagus
Followed this recipe for the most part – based on user comments, we only did about an 1/8th cup of white wine with the butter. We steamed these according to the instructions (2-3 mins on high) on the Ziploc Zip ‘n Steam bag we used for steaming in the microwave.

Zesty Steamed Red Potatoes
We actually modified the recipe “Zesty Potatoes with Sour Cream & Chives” over on the Ziploc website because we used the Ziploc Zip ‘n Steam bags to steam our potatoes in the microwave. We used small new potatoes (the red ones) and omitted the chives and sour cream. These steamed perfectly in the baggie and were full of flavor! They were a *tad* spicy with all the chili powder so some might consider this possibly *too* spicy when paired with the jalapeno of the chicken main dish? Not too much spice for us, but just be aware.

Sunday, July 25, 2010
Tangy Sirloin Strips
These were good. We overcooked the beef a bit (hard to find just the right amount of time to get the beef not TOO done but the bacon fully cooked) but the flavor and the sauce especially, were really tasty! I think they would’ve been a bit better for us personally had we been able to find sirloin and had a grill. We used the countertop griddle because we didn’t have access to a normal grill/barbecue.  Still delicious, though. LOVED the sauce. We didn’t have molasses and it wasn’t available at our closest grocery store when we picked up fresh ingredients, but not sure it really took away from the final result of the sauce anyway.

We were a bit “boring” today and fell back on the delicious steamed asparagus we had last week and a new version of seasoned steamed potatoes. We did the small red potatoes again, but this time around we steamed them in a mixture of lemon juice and butter with rosemary and basil seasoning. We stuck with the familiar on the sides because we were testing out our ability to microwave steam without the Ziploc Zip ‘n Steam bags. I think I liked the result better with the steam bags so we’ll keep that in mind when we steam things in the future.

Hopefully next week we’ll have all new sides to go with our new main dish AND we’ll start having photos to share, too! Hope you enjoy experiencing culinary adventures with us. :) You can follow us on Twitter, too, if you’re so inclined and want another feed to follow. A food feed. Ha! See what I did there? See you next week!