I’ve been in the mood for chicken, so it featured heavily in two of our dinners this week.

Wednesday:

Sweet and sour chicken wings with vegetable fried rice.

I had a packet of sweet and sour sauce sitting in the cupboard, so I decided to make use of it. You basically just fry up some pineapple and then add the mixture from the packet to make the sauce. I defrosted some chicken wings that I had in the freezer, boiled them, and then added them to the sweet and sour sauce. Then I made some rice and fried that up with the rest of the broccoli that I had in the fridge, half a can of water chestnuts, half a can of mushrooms, and an egg. I forgot to put in any onion, but added it to the leftovers and fried it up for lunch the next day.

But I was still craving chicken, so here’s what I made on Thursday:

Lemon chicken, potatoes, and pumpkin stuffing.

I used this recipe for the chicken and potatoes, except I omitted the spices and added way more lemon juice. (I follow recipes pretty loosely, as you may have noticed!) I also used regular potatoes, not canned. This was a big hit! The chicken and potatoes were very juicy. Yum!

And the pumpkin stuffing turned out awesome. I had a lot of homemade pumpkin puree in the fridge and a loaf of bread that needed to be used, so this was an obvious choice. I used this recipe as a guide, but changed a lot of things. Basically, I fried some onion in Thyme, ground Oregano, and Fines Herbes, and then added it to the stuffing, which was composed of roughly half a loaf of bread, about half a cup of pumpkin puree, an egg, half a cup of chicken stock, two chopped cloves of garlic, and some salt and pepper. Then I added more of the spices to taste. This was the first stuffing I’ve made, and I was a little leery about how it was going to turn out – but it was really good. I like the pumpkin puree in the stuffing, because it adds a nice flavoring without being overpowering, and it also acts as a binding agent.

Thursday night’s dinner:

Potato Pizzas with Roasted Garlic Lemon Broccoli, served with a bottle of homemade wine that we were given.
I topped the potatoes with “pizza sauce”, fresh tomato slices, onion, mushrooms, and black olives. I substitute Ragu pasta sauce every time a recipe calls for any kind of tomato sauce – I figure that tomato sauce is tomato sauce, and I have a cupboard full of it, so I may as well use it. I quite like the extra flavor that it lends, and I have yet to find a recipe that it didn’t work in.
This tasted more like yummy baked potatoes than pizza, partly because I just cut them in half instead of slicing them thinly as recommended in the recipe.
I love this broccoli recipe, but I’m still tweaking it. It seems like the broccoli is either underdone or too brown, so I’m looking for that happy medium. This is also partly due to my whacked out oven – I need a new one, so let me know if you see any coupons for ovens!

Yesterday’s brunch:

Oven baked banana pancakes.

This was interesting. I was using a pancake recipe from my favorite Betty Crocker cookbook, when I accidentally misread 1 tablespoon of sugar as 1 cup. OOPS! To try and compensate, I added more flour and eggs. I had also put in two organic bananas, apple butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, a dash of vanilla, and some lemon flavoring. It certainly had a very interesting texture when I pulled it out of the oven. It was very dense – definitely more like a banana bread than a pancake. I didn’t care for it, but apparently Jai liked it, because he was snacking on the leftovers all day.

Yesterday’s dinner:

Vegan Chili, cornbread and pineapple chunks. This was served with beer, which was also given to us!

Yum! This was good. This isn’t spicy in the slightest, which is perfect for me. And yes, I used Ragu pasta sauce in this, too!! It hasn’t failed me yet!
All those corn muffin mixes that I got free over the summer came in handy for this meal. If you’re wondering about the pineapple – I read somewhere that serving pineapple as a garnish with bean dishes is supposed to make it easier to digest. Who knows if that’s actually true, but I love pineapple so it doesn’t matter! I’d like to give a quick shout out to The Glamorous WAHM, since I won the jar of pineapple and some other fruits in a giveaway that she hosted recently.

As usual, this made a ton of food. We had leftovers for lunch this afternoon, and there’s still a lot of cornbread left.

You may have noticed that both of these dinners were from vegan recipe websites (although not 100% vegan the way I prepared them). I’m going to experiment with making a few meals like this every week, in an effort to eat more veggies and cut some calories. We’re in the thick of the holiday season, so I figured I better start my new year’s resolution early – between all the inevitable holiday cookies, turkey dinners, and my cupboard full of free Lindt chocolate, I need all the help I can get!

Thursday’s dinner:

Chicken and dumplings, adapted from this recipe. This was my first time making this dish, and it turned out pretty good. I wish I had cooked the dumplings longer, but it wasn’t bad. Baked potatoes served as the side dish, because I felt like having them again!

Usually, I make a big batch of food for dinner and then have the leftovers for lunch the next day. I find this to be a convenient way to eat something quick yet nutritious for lunch. There were plenty of chicken and dumplings left over for today, and there’s still some in the fridge.

For dessert, I used up the last of my apple bounty:

Baked Apple Wedges, taken from this recipe.

Sunday night’s dinner:

Steak, baked potato, and grilled apple slices. I have a bunch of steak in the freezer from back in May, when I got an awesome deal on it. I marinated it in Weber Mesquite grill mix – a product that I got overage on during the summer. It added a really nice flavor to the steak. On the packet, it suggested sprinkling apple slices with cinnamon and grilling as an accompaniment; well, I’m all about using up these apples, so that sounded like a good idea!
Finally, I have a big bag of potatoes that I bought recently, so I thought a baked potato would be the perfect thing to round out this meal.

Here’s last night’s dinner:

Bean and Cheese Pie. I guess I’m just in a casserole mood this week! This is one of my favorite recipes from a Betty Crocker cookbook called Vegetarian Cooking. Here’s what you need to make it:

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup milk
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
1/4 cup chopped onion
2 teaspoons chile powder
2 teaspoons fresh or 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 can (15 1/2 ounces) garbanzo beans, drained
1 can (15 ounces) kidney beans, drained
1 can (8 ounces) tomato sauce
Another 1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese (for the topping)

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Spray pie plate, 10 X 1 1/2 inches, with nostick cooking spray. Mix flour, 1/2 cup cheese, the baking powder and salt in medium bowl. Stir in milk and egg until blended. Spread over bottom and up side of pie plate. Mix remaining ingredients except 1/2 cup cheese. Spoon into pie plate; sprinkle with 1/2 cup cheese. Bake uncovered about 25 minutes or until edge is puffy and light brown. Let stand 10 minutes before cutting.

I made quite a few substitutions on this to suit my tastes. I omitted the pepper and chilie powder, just because I don’t do well with spicy stuff. I also used black beans and pinto beans instead of kidney beans, and substituted fresh chopped garlic for powder. I usually use cilantro instead of oregano, just because I like it that way, but I totally forgot to buy either!!

I also doubled the recipe so that there would be plenty of leftovers for lunch today.

For the side dish, I made Roasted Garlic Lemon Broccoli. Sorry the picture’s so blurry!

I still have a bounty of apples to use up, so I made baked apple pancakes for breakfast this morning:

This was sort of an amalgamation recipe. First, I chopped 3 apples into small pieces and threw them in a bowl. I left the skins on because I like them, but you could always peel them if you don’t. I then added an egg, about a cup of water, and some Bisquick. As I mixed it I realized that there wasn’t enough Bisquick left, so I poured what I had in the pan and then mixed together an adaptation of this recipe. I only used 2 eggs, and I added way more flour and even a pinch of baking powder – which really wasn’t necessary, but I was throwing everything into the bowl at this point! I also added Nutmeg and AllSpice. After mixing it all, I poured it on top of what I had in the pan, and baked until it looked done – about 20 minutes or so.

I’ve gotten a lot of great questions recently from readers and friends who wonder what a hardcore coupon shopper eats. Since I love to cook, I thought it would be fun to share more of the meals that I make on my budget of $20 or less a month.

Tonight’s dinner:

The picture isn’t great, but this is called Easy Garden Bake. I love this recipe – it’s a yummy casserole loaded with zucchini and tomato.

Dessert:

Baked Apples. A friend gave us a bunch of wonderful apples from her tree that are very ripe and need to be eaten soon, so I tried this recipe out. It’s great Fall comfort food!