With the chicken breasts, I decided to cut them up into bite size pieces and make the Chicken and Wild Rice dish from my new wonderful cookbook, Not Your Mother's Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook by Jessica Fisher. I was just a little bit shocked that it takes almost 2 hours to cook! But it came out great! And we have leftovers & even gave one serving away.
Next, I tackled the Costco Rotisserie Chicken. I discovered, some of it was gone! I think I have a chicken loving hubby in the house. So, I got all of the lovely gelatinous stuff off the bottom and all the skin & extra fat too, then started taking the meat off the bones. Once that was done, I started cutting it up into tiny pieces, maybe about 1/4 to 1/2 chunks. I decided to make the Chicken Enchilada Bake with Green Chiles and Jalapenos. I'm not a big fan of green or red chiles (even after living in New Mexico twice) or jalapenos, so I only used 1/2 of the amount of green chiles and no jalapenos. Also, I'm not 100% sure that my kids will like this dish. I then pulled out my Homemade Cream of Celery Soup from the freezer, defrosted 2 containers and chopped some onions & mushrooms. I also had to shred some Monterey Jack cheese. The recipe calls for cheddar or Monterey Jack, so I decided to use half of each. I put all the "wet" ingredients in the bowl, along with the veggies, cheeses & spices and stirred like crazy. Then I added the bite size corn tortillas. It works really great to take 5-7 at a time & cut them in slices, turn the cutting board & cut crossways. Most of the pieces will be about 1 inch squares. Then I added the cut chicken. Stirred again like crazy. The recipe states to put in a casserole dish, sprinkle with more cheese & freeze. Since I'm getting a little tight on freezer space in our side by side fridge/freezer, I decided to just put the mix in gallon zip lock freezer bags. Then I put those bags inside another freezer bag and added a quart size freezer bag of the extra cheese. Into the freezer 2 meals went.
Yesterday, while the girls & I went to their weekly ski lessons, my hubby decided to make his winning chili again! We came home to wonderful smells in the house. Not only did he make his chili, but he also cooked some rice and shredded some cheese. His chili has these small pieces of steak in them and almost melt in your mouth. We like to eat our chili over rice with shredded cheddar. Some of us also like to add sour cream to cool off the little bit of heat. We had more than 8 cups of chili left, so 2 cups went into freezer containers (from Glad) and the leftovers went in the fridge.
this is the buttermilk cornbread mixes I made ahead of time, just for chili
I think between the steak meals, the enchilada bakes, the other chicken meals, the chili, Marie Calendar's pot pies and the frozen salmon, I do believe we will have some pretty good meals over the next couple of weeks.
I totally forgot to mention how the dehydrated food came out. I did accidentally leave the celery & chard in the dehydrator too long, so the celery came out teeny tiny, but I still ended up with about a cup of it. I can use about a tablespoon when a recipe calls for a stalk of celery. The chard stems were still not dry, so I broke up the leaves & put them in a jar, crushing them as I went. I can then add the crushed leaves to recipes later. The stems went back into the food dryer to finish.
I do still need to make the veggie bolognese, but that is tomorrow's task.
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