Here’s our menu for Day 25 of the All You Grocery Challenge:
For breakfast, we toasted the leftover Blueberry muffins from Day 24. For lunch, I took the remaining cooked chicken in the fridge and whipped up a casserole, served with homemade bread and iced tea:
We had company, so this served 3 with generous leftovers. I actually made 3 casseroles, because I had so many ingredients! The casserole consisted of two boxes of cooked spaghetti, chopped chicken from about 3 and half breasts, a little flaxseed, and seasonings. I scooped it into casserole dishes, topped with shredded cheese, and prepared two cups of Shirley J Universal Sauce, which I poured on top. I added a little more seasoning, and baked at 350 degrees until it looked ready.
Since we had so much casserole, we ended up eating it again for dinner. I know that’s redundant, but we didn’t mind. I was too tired at the end of the day to care!
I put one casserole dish inside a ziploc bag and froze it – I can’t find a definitive answer on how well cooked spaghetti in a creamy sauce freezes, so this will be my experiment so that I can find out. Should be interesting!! The remaining casserole and a half went into the fridge for future meals this week.
When I was cutting the meat off the chicken breasts, I saved the bones, skins, and other little leftover pieces, and put them back in the stockpot to make soup. I added cold water, leftover celery and carrot sticks from Tuesday’s lunch, seasonings, and let it simmer all day. I took it off the heat before I went to bed, and put it back on the stove this morning to simmer again. My plan is to strain out the bones and serve it as a nice chicken soup for dinner – I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out!
Just read about the Shirly J sauce and I went to ebay and I was able to get a sample packet for 1 cent and free ship. Limit to one per ebay address. Cant wait to try….just not sure what to do with it.
Nice deal, Lisa! I’ve only used the sauce a few times so far, but it seems quite versatile – they have a bunch of recipes on their website: http://www.shirleyj.com/recipes.html
Your casserole with the cream sauce should be fine when you reheat it (if you haven’t already). I make a chicken tetrazinni that has a cream sauce. The recipe makes several pans of it, so I end up usually freezing a couple of 9 x 9 pans. The only thing I do is I do bake it first, but I leave off the parmesan cheese on top. Then when I take it out of the freezer to heat up, I add a little chicken stock then sprinkle w/the parmesan chese.
Hey Carrie –
That is great to know! I’ve heard conflicting things about freezing pasta in cream sauce, so it’s great to hear from someone who has done it successfully!