New recipes

This is very over do! I've done some cooking here and there with mostly new recipes and wanted to share my thoughts! (All pictures are from the original recipe websites linked below)

A month or so ago I tried a new crock pot recipe from my Southern Living crock pot book - Sweet Glazed Chicken. Honestly it was pretty average and I likely wouldn't make again, although that could be because I served it with rice and I don't so much love rice... Neither Mike nor I are fans of sweet sauce on meat (unless it's bbq!) but for some reason it just sounded good to me. Ah well, it was a home cooked meal! Live and learn. It was super easy and quick to prepare though so if you're into sweet chicken check it out!

I also made pesto for the first time from this recipe and used it in this pasta recipe. I used bow tie pasta instead of penne and added rotisserie chicken. Mike gave his approval and we will be having it again! Hooray for a great use of my basil plant and left over rotisserie chicken!

I don't know about you but I'm hearing a lot of buzz about quinoa so we gave it a try in this recipe. I liked the quinoa, but the rest of the "salad" was just ok. Something about the bbq sauce turned my stomach. I will definitely make quinoa again and will use the same cooking method, cooking it in chicken broth! Yum!

This recipe (sorry no picture) was an interesting variation on chicken marsala. Mike really liked it - and I like that it is another use for marsala, although truthfully I prefer this traditional recipe.

Tonight I made this avacado and corn salad and it was soo yummy!! Since it was just for the two of us, I used 2 single serve bags of frozen steam fresh corn instead of grilling corn on the cob, just 1 avocado, and a handful of cherry tomatoes until it looked about even. I also omitted the cucumber and only made half of the dressing. Very good and very easy - especially since I used frozen corn (I did cook it). I think it would probably be tasty with out the dressing and just some fresh cilantro.

Last night I made this lasagna recipe. This is another keeper - I love tomato and basil in the summer! An advantage of being unemployed is I have time to cook things like this! It really did take a long time to prepare which was kinda fun for the first time, but next time I'll make a few changes! The white garlic sauce really is great and the thing that made me most proud - I created "home made" sauce! And it was good! Unfortunately the lasagna came out kinda soupy and did not serve well at all. Not sure if I should have let it sit longer? Next time I will use penne pasta or something similar instead of lasagna and toss everything together to save on time! I might even use cherry tomatoes too. Quick note - I used mild turkey sausage instead of hot since Mike is sensitive to spice - still very good. I highly recommend you give this recipe a try!

Alright! Hopefully I'll do better about posting new recipes so it's not so jumbled and all over the place! Have a good evening!!