Yummy Chicken Spaghetti!

My first food post in a loooong time!

This recipe was given to me by our good friends Jon and Amy. They had us over for dinner one night when we first moved to the Austin area and wow'd me with this dish. Tony loves it and I've shared it with a few people at work who have worked it into their monthly rotation. It is really easy and can be tweaked to your liking. Here's what you'll need.

Ingredients

• 3-4 chicken breasts, cooked on grill or your way of preference (you can use frozen ones you buy chopped up already or a can of chicken breasts). They need to be chopped into small pieces.
• 1 can Rotel (we go for the extra hot stuff but up to you)
• 1 can cream of chicken soup
• 1 can cream of mushroom soup
• 1/2 block of the small Velveeta, diced
• 1 package of spaghetti noodles

Directions

Cook noodles and drain. Combine cooked chicken and noodles with Rotel, both soups, and diced cheese. Bake at 350 degrees until bubbly.

We usually serve this with a salad, corn, and yummy garlic bread. I've found this is a great make ahead meal to take in a tin casserole dish to someone who just had a baby or surgery. If you make it, let me know how it goes! =)

Busy.

That pretty much sums up our past three weeks! Tony's been working crazy hours to meet a deadline for the highway 290 project his company's designing. I turned 25 on Wednesday while he worked the longest day+ of his career (a whopping 33 hour day!). Before that there were bachelor parties, a rehearsal dinner and wedding in Dallas where Tony was a groomsman, ice castles, and lots of cold weather!

On our calendar this past weekend was to do nothing except have a date night. The past two weekends have been non-stop movement and the majority of the time we've seen each other during the past two work weeks have been while we're brushing our teeth and eating breakfast. On Friday after we had a dog training session for Einstein we had at home date night with Freebirds burrito (Tony) and Taco Cabana (me). We caught up on our DVR (which makes me very happy to go from 20+ recordings to 1) and relaxed. We've been watching Giuliana and Bill and it's become one our guilty pleasures (along with the Real Housewives and Operation Repo).

It's a fun show to watch with Tony because we're pretty ridiculous together like they can be.

Saturday night was date night out on one of my students thanks to a birthday gift card. It was just what we needed! I'd say part of my New Years goals of more date nights is going well!

Today Tony had to work, but I kept busy visiting a friend who had a baby on New Years. I brought her dinner and hung out with her and her beautiful boy. Afterwards it was back to relaxing and cooking with Einstein!

I haven't shared many recipes on here in a while, but we have been cooking up a storm! Last night we spiced up our go to easy penne pasta dinner by adding roasted veggies as done here. It was fantastic and we'll definitely be eating our go to dinner like this from now on. Talk about an easy and delicious way to get extra veggies!

Tonight we'll be having King Ranch Chicken via a great church cookbook I've mentioned before. It's actually the same recipe my mom used to make when I was growing up.

King Ranch Chicken

1-2 chicken breasts cooked (we grill)

1 large onion cut up

2 ribs celery, cut in medium pieces (we skipped this b/c we were out of celery)

1 can cream of mushroom soup (campbell's healthy request version to make us feel better)

1 can cream of chicken soup (ditto)

8 oz Cheddar cheese, grated

12 corn tortillas

1 large bell pepper, cut in small pieces

1 can Ro-tel tomatoes

Chili powder and garlic salt

salt and pepper

Directions:

Cook chicken according to preference and shred or cube. Mix soups and grated cheese. Spray large casserole dish and spread 4 tortillas on bottom of casserole dish. Spread 1/2 of each of the following on top of tortillas: chicken, bell pepper, and onion and sprinkle with garlic salt and chili powder. Add 1/2 soup mixture. Cover with 4 more tortillas. Spread remaining 1/2 of ingredients left in same order as above (I put the soup mixture first before the chicken and bell peppers because it's easier to spread this way). Apply 4 tortillas across the top. Pour can of Ro-tel tomatoes (don't drain) over top.

Bake, uncovered, at 375 degrees for approximately 30-35 minutes.

In our house we serve it simple: with ranch style beans and corn for my country boy. You can dress it up however you want. If you make it let me know how it went!

Today I also prepped several meals for the week. I pre-made taco meat and Mexican rice for tacos this week as well as Chicken spaghetti to re-heat at some point this week. I also washed, diced, and stored lots of veggies and fruits for things I'll be making this week.

This makes it easy just to throw in a blender for a smoothie for breakfast or add to a salad or pan in no time. I learned this lesson from a fellow teacher I work with who premakes lots of her meals on Sundays so that cook time is next to nothing during the week. I like! I can imagine this would help so many people save time during the week if they just gave it a try. It's a pretty cool rush to know that Sunday at noon I have two to three meals done and other parts of meals prepped for the week ahead. Score!

Oh, this is a cute little bowl a little girl in my class gave to me for my birthday. She made it at one of those pottery stores and painted it and wanted me to have it for Einstein. She said it could be a food or water bowl, but in my head I knew it was way too small for that. On Friday we had a session with our dog trainer and he showed us how to train Einstein to go to his "place" when someone rings the doorbell or comes over. In the beginning you have to train him with treats so I thought that bowl would be a perfect and cute way to store them by his "place."

There's our baby in his place. So far so good!

Stroganoff Casserole

Ingredients:

• 12 ounces wide egg noodles
• 1 pound lean ground beef (turkey works too)
• 1 whole onion, chopped
• 1 whole bell pepper, chopped
• 2 whole celery ribs, chopped
• 1/2 cup dry red wine
• 6 ounce can of tomato paste
• 4 ounce can of sliced mushrooms, drained
• 1/2 teaspoon dried Oregano
• 8 ounces sour cream (I used light)
• 12 ounces small curd cottage cheese (I used low fat)
• 1 teaspoon Garlic salt
• 2 cups shredded Mozzarella
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

I'm not going to lie. I wrote down all the ingredients I thought I needed for this and forgot to get the dry red wine. In a panic as the egg noodles were nearly done cooking, I googled what I could replace for the dry red wine. Thank you Yahoo answers for telling me I could use either cranberry juice or apple juice to substitute. Lucky for me I still had some cranberry apple juice (oh yes I did use it for this!) left over in the fridge. Since it was my first time making this dish, I couldn't tell the difference (ha!).

Overall this dinner was pretty good! It's a great way to get kids to eat a ton of veggies (especially if you serve it with a salad) at once! The only thing I think is that one of the veggies was pretty strong in the dish. We couldn't figure out if it was the mushrooms or bellpepper but next time I'll go easy on both and hope for better reviews. Everyone still cleaned their plate so it obviously didn't put anyone off too much. I'm so surprised at how many recipes I'm seeing using cottage cheese as a replacement for ricotta. I have said before how I despise the stuff, but it's a great way to lighten the calorie load in a dish and inside a meal like this I can't even taste it.

I can't take credit for this recipe since I got it here. If you try it let me know how you liked it!