Recipe Review: Chicken Fajita Pizza

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If I am perfectly honest, pizza is the greatest food of forever. I mean, what's not to love? It's cheesy, with a yummy sauce of a multitude of varieties, and topped with whatever your heart desires. Plus,  you get to eat it with your hands!! What could be better?

I do love me some pizza, and I'm always looking for interesting toppings to add to the fun of eating it (my current favorite is jalapeno and pineapple), so when I stumbled upon this recipe, I was really excited about it. We like to have pizza about once a week, and we had exhausted all of the other pizza recipes we usually make, so we wanted to find something new. I was looking for a good chicken fajita recipe and found this one instead.

The Recipe: Chicken Fajita Pizza

The Procedure:
The how-to for this recipe was pretty simple. Slice up some green peppers, onions, and cut chicken into small bite-size pieces (the recipe specifies 2 inch pieces). I heated the oil in my skillet (I used olive oil instead of vegetable oil), and tossed in the chicken. I decided to let my chicken cook for 7 minutes instead of 5. I'm a little paranoid when it comes to chicken being cooked all the way through. I think it made the chicken a little drier, but Travis said it was perfect. After the chicken cooked, I added my veggies and seasonings, and let it cook for another 3 minutes.

For the crust, I just used the store bought pizza crust and I sprayed it with a little cooking spray beforehand (I used my Misto). I spread my yummy chicken mixture on the pizza, making sure it covered every spot. Then I added the salsa and fresh shredded monterrey jack cheese. And into the oven it went for 12 minutes!

Ready for the oven!

Look! Fiesta plates! :-)

The Verdict:
Mmmmmmmmm. The spices, combined with the veggies and the chicken, made it taste like a fajita, and the pizza crust and cheese made it taste like pizza. It was such an amazing combination of Mexican and Italian cuisine. We ended up with 6 slices, and it was so filling, I could only eat 2. Travis ate all his! :-P

The Low-down:
This recipe was super simple and so tasty. The cheese was melted and nicely browned when it came out of the oven, so if you like your cheese not toasty, pull it out a minute or two early.

This was amazing! 5 stitches!

Recipe Review: Homemade Skinny Chocolate Cake

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Happy Valentine's Day! The holiday of love! Ok, so I personally believe that you should show people you love them more than just one day a year. Love is a verb, afterall, but I digress.

On Tuesday nights, we host a Bible study at our house, and this year, Valentine's Day lands on a Tuesday. So what does this mean? Well, Sarah's gonna bake for everyone, of course! I found an amazing recipe at Gina's Skinny Taste (thanks Gina!) for heart shaped chocolate cake from scratch. Before I say anymore about this delicious recipe, lets get to it!

The Recipe: Homemade Skinny Chocolate Cake

The Procedure:
This recipe first looks pretty complicated. But its really just a basic chocolate cake recipe...with pudding, and applesauce, and yogurt...and no butter. Wait, what? No butter? How is this ever going to taste good? Butter makes the world go 'round! Well, pudding, yogurt, and applesauce are all tricks that you can use to cut back on oil and butter in cakes, cookies, brownies, muffins, etc. Gina combined all of them together and it really makes a difference.

I made this late Monday (around 9pm) and Travis helped me with it. It was fun baking with him :-) While I was combining the dry ingredients together, he was mixing the coffee and cocoa together. After I finished, and while he was still stirring, I poured in the milk and the vanilla. Then we fired up the Kitchenaid and put in the oil and sugar, followed by the applesauce and eggs. We started alternating the dry and wet goods until everything was incorporated and then we added the yogurt. After making sure everything was mixed together, it went into my glass 9x13" dish and into the oven. Gina says that hers took 40 minutes but cupcakes would be shorter. I didn't know if she was using glass or metal or ceramic so I started checking the cake at 30 minutes. It ended up taking right at 40 minutes. I let it cool, and then covered it to sit overnight. Yesterday, I used a heart shaped cookie cutter and cut out 9 hearts of cake and placed them on a plate in the refrigerator.

I melted down some Nestle Toll House Semi Sweet Chunks in the microwave (put in for 30 seconds twice, mixing in between, and then 10 second intervals after that until melted, mixing in between). I took a pastry bag and cut off the tip, and then put the chocolate in the pastry bag. You don't want the chocolate to be super runny. You want it to have the consistency of frosting, but you need to make sure its fully melted. I then proceeded to write the name of everyone in our home group in chocolate on wax paper. I underlined each name and then added a stem. Then I put them in the freezer to harden.

As home group was getting ready to start, I pulled the cakes and drizzled some Hershey's syrup over the top. I then pulled the names out of the freezer and carefully cut the wax paper around each name to separate them. Then I placed them in the cake and garnished with a few fresh raspberries.

The Verdict:
The cake was absolutely amazing. It was so moist and super chocolatley. It's WAY better than anything that comes in a box! The chocolate names came out beautifully, and were a huge hit with everyone! This is definitely my new go to recipe for chocolate cake!


The Low-Down:
Make the cake the day before you serve it so it has time to cool. It seemed to taste better cold.


Make the chocolate names (or shapes) the same day and keep in the freezer until ready to serve. Mine started to melt after being out of the freezer only 10 minutes. A friend recommended adding a little paraffin to the chocolate to help with that

This is seriously, the best chocolate cake I've ever had. If I could give it more than 5 stitches, I totally would!

Rearranging 2012: Continued

As previously stated, we've been really working hard to get our house in order and get rid of a bunch of stuff that we don't need/use. As of my last post, we had finished the garage (for the most part) and the main room in the basement. After some contemplation, we decided to move my desk and sewing table into the main basement room for me to have a sort of workspace that's all my own.

Tada!

Now, it doesn't look like this anymore since we've had to move things from other rooms in here to rearrange stuff, but it will be back to this glorious splendor once we're finished.

Our next stop on the rearranging tour was the downstairs bedroom. Up until this point, it had been used as a sewing room and a guest room. After discussing, we decided to make the guest room into an office for Travis so that if there's a day he works from home, he has a quiet place he can hide.

Eek! And this was AFTER removing a lot of stuff

As you can see, we had a mess to start with, but thankfully most of those boxes were empty and just needed to be broken down. We moved all the junk upstairs to the old office and moved all the office stuff down here so that Travis' workstation would be completed. We also took down that fan and replaced the light, and hung a shop light over Travis' workbench. It looks amazing in there and I know he loves the outcome.

Hard to believe its the same room, huh?

So, what's left, you ask? Well, mainly the old office upstairs which is going to become Penelope's big girl room. We've decided to give her the futon that was in this main room. The mattress is quite comfortable, and she may end up like having a bed that folds into a couch as she gets older. It may only be a temporary thing. We're not sure yet. After we finish her room, then we're gonna have to rent a dumpster (Yes, a DUMPSTER) to get rid of the rest of the junk and just make sure that everything is back in order. It's taking us longer than we originally anticipated, but it feels good to declutter.

And I'm still working on the fruit leather. My first batch failed miserably and I haven't had any luck with a batch since. I've contacted the woman who wrote the recipe and she's been helping me figure out what I'm doing wrong. I'll keep you posted!

Culinary Experiment: Homemade Fruit By the Foot: Part 1

Penelope LOVES fruit snacks. I mean LOVES. She will ask for them over and over again...even if she just had some. I usually buy the Welch's ones because they're made with real fruit, but I don't really like all the added sugar they put in them. Plus, they're not exactly cheap.

So while perusing Pinterest the other day, I found a site with healthy snacks for kids, and one of those links was for homemade Fruit By The Foot, or fruit leather. What I particularly liked about this recipe was that it had no added sugar. It was just frozen fruit. It's a recipe that if she wanted to eat a whole bunch of them, I'd let her, because its just fruit. And its a fun way to eat fruit.

Here's the link to the site: Homemade Fruit By The Foot

So I tried this last night using a frozen berry mix from Kroger. It had blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Lemme tell ya, it smelled SO GOOD and I was really excited.

I cooked the berries for about 10 minutes. They broke down pretty quickly so it didn't take very long. I blended them until they were liquid and poured the juice onto my cookie sheet. I tilted the cookie sheet to get the juice to even it out and into the oven it went.

After 15 minutes at 250, I turned off the oven and put a note on the door not to open it. This was at 5pm. At midnight, I opened the oven to check it and it wasn't done. The sides were good, but the middle was still gooey. I decided to let it sit in the oven overnight and see if that helped. I opened it this morning and there was no change. We were able to peel the side pieces off and they had dried to the right consistency, but the middle was just goo.

I emailed Amy over at superhealthykids.com to see if she had any insight as to what went wrong. She gave me a couple of suggestions to try.

So I learned a couple of things on my first attempt at fruit leather:

1. It's a long process and it sucks if it fails - mainly because you have to wait even longer for good fruit leather.

2. If the leather is too thick, its not gonna set right. The recipe calls for 2 cups of fruit. I used the entire bag of fruit which has 3 cups in it. The thinner edges dried perfectly, but the center where it was thicker just didn't work.

3. Make sure that the bottom of the blender is screwed on nice and tight to prevent the juice from leaking onto your counter tops. :-)

Oops

I'm gonna give this a try again tonight. I'll post the results soon!

Coupon Savings: January 2012

As most of you know, I'm a couponer. I'm not one of those crazy couponers you see on TV, but I do clip to help our weekly budget. I used to spend $150+ PER WEEK on groceries. Since I started couponing, I have reduced my weekly budget to $50-$100 per week. That's for 6 dinners, lunches, and essentials (milk, eggs, cheese, etc)

My friend over at This Mom's Heart (thanks Katie!) taught a class last March on how to coupon and I've been able to implement my savings over the past year. I think I saved $3000+ last year on groceries thanks to the techniques that Katie taught me. And, I've been having people coming up to me asking me questions about how to do it. (I am, by no means, an expert! In fact, I still ask Katie questions!)

So, I've decided to keep track this year of exactly how much couponing saves me each month, and by the end of the year. I do my grocery shopping on Monday mornings, so watch for monthly updates the last Monday of each month!

January 2012:
Total (before savings): $816.28
Spent: $570.46 ($70 over budget - BUT this includes everything for our Super Bowl Party)
Savings: $245.82
Percentage: 30.11%


2012 YTD:
Total (before savings): $816.28
Spent: $570.46
Savings:245.82
Percentage:30.11%

Oh! And Travis and I *almost* made it the whole month without eating out! We had some fast food this weekend, and decided to go out for Mexican on Sunday after church. We only missed it by 2 days! Not too shabby! :-D

Happy Couponing!

Rearranging 2012

My husband and I are both pack rats. We're not collect-everything-never-throw-anything-away-hoarding-pack-rats, but we both tend to keep things longer than we should. This is apparent to most of friends when they see the condition of our house. It never gets terribly dirty - just very cluttered.

So in anticipation for Baby Number 2 (Don't freak out, people! I'm not pregnant YET!), we've been wanting to move Penelope into the room next door (office) to her current room (nursery). Well, this isn't going to happen if the office is still a mess. And the office isn't going to get any better until we move all the stuff in there downstairs. And the basement has become a dumping ground and NOTHING will get done until we get that area finished. And so, we started in the basement.

We started in the garage. I had a bunch of boxes from before I got married that desperately needed to be gone through. I was able to take 2 boxes of collectibles, and 7 boxes of pre-marriage-Sarah-stuff down to 3 storage bins worth of stuff. Travis was able to do the same (ok, he didn't have 7 boxes, but still!). Combine that with reorganizing the Christmas and camping stuff and we significantly increased the amount of storage space in the garage.

Yay! Organization!

Once the bulk of the junk was out of the garage, we started in the main room in the basement. We had A LOT of stuff to go through and have made HUGE improvements. We've thrown a lot of stuff away , and have donated a lot too (I've already dropped off 3 boxes and a couch to Goodwill). Here's what we started with:

So. Much. Stuff!!

After a couple of weeks of working a few hours (almost) every night after Penelope went to bed, I am happy to announce that the main room of the basement is complete! Tonight, we moved the rest of the stuff out (empty boxes, storage bins, trash bags, random things that are staying in the basement, etc), vacuumed, and shampooed the carpet. I must say, I'm very happy with our progress! We're hoping to get the basement finished by next week so we can then dive into the office!

Smells like clean! (The bookshelf is staying there. We just need to go through the books)

Travis found a really neat home modeling app for the iPad that has allowed us to figure out exactly how we want to place everything. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the rearranging process. Since this room is now complete, we can start moving things out of the downstairs bedroom and putting them where they need to go in this room. And then that'll free up space in the bedroom to be able to move stuff from the office down here, and so on and so on! Stay tuned for more updates!

Happy New Year!

2012

I can't believe its here already! According to the Mayans, we only have 354 days until the end of the world! :-)

2011 was filled with heartbreak, and with joy.

I watched my daughter turn 1 year old this year, and I also said goodbye to a very dear friend.

I got to see my aunt get married, and I said goodbye to a very special great-auntie.

I got to spend an amazing couple of weeks with family that I have missed dearly, and I spent New Years Eve sick at home.

All in all, I can't complain too much about the year. It was pretty good.

So what's in store for 2012? Well, I don't really like to make year long resolutions because I tend to break them pretty quick. What would I like to happen? I'd like to lose some weight. I'd like to have another baby. I'd like to be more committed to my job (I'm only required to work 10 hours a week, and usually don't even meet that.) I'd like to be more active and get more exercise. I'd like to blog more. I'm also going to be participating in a leadership program through my church, which I am very excited about! More about that later.

One thing that Travis and I have decided to do is to budget our money better. We're still getting used to the new pay schedule from his job, and its proving to be more difficult that we originally thought. So I found an idea online that we're going to try and implement.

We've decided that for the entire month of January, we're not going to eat out at all. Now, this doesn't include lunches. We each take a certain amount per month for meal money so that he can have lunch at work and I can have an occasional lunch with some friends. This amount has already been budgeted for. I'm talking about "Honey, I'm tired. Let's just order pizza." We do that way more than you think we would.

So its quite an endeavor, and it means I gotta get better about my meal planning, but I'm excited to try it. I'm curious to see how much money we have left at the end of the month, and I'm curious to see how much better we feel by the end of the month.

What are your resolutions? What would you like to happen this year?