New Dishes

Last week, I tried two new dishes. I wasn't sure how they would end up, but I knew I needed to try some new things.

Typically Mr. McB is not a huge fan of my cooking. He is an amazing cook and simply makes things up and they usually end up good. I am not like that. I cook and sometimes it ends up good, but I have to follow a receipe. However, I am getting better at adding and taking away from the receipe.

My first new attempt this week was Southwest Chicken Skillet from Betty Crocker. Of course their picture is much prettier than how it looked, but smelled great. I made a few changes, so here is what I did.

I poured a bit of vegetable oil into the skillet and added my chicken chunks. With a dish like this, I usually cut the chicken into chunks. I let the chicken cook for awhile, then I added a bag of Kroger peppers and onions. I did not use broccoli or mushrooms, b/c broccoli doesn't sound southwestern and the bag did not have mushrooms in it. I heated the vegetable mix up to get rid of the excess water that would cook in the dish. I then added a drained can of black beans and 1 cup of chunky salsa. After that cooked for a few minutes, I added the cheese. Instead of using flour torillas, we put our skillet over crunched up tortilla chips. Mr. McB and I love crunchy food. We then topped it with a dab of sour cream. It was a great meal. I really liked it and so did Mr. McB.

The next meal was taken off of Delicious Meliscious' blog. It is the Mexican-Style Chicken and Penne. Mr. McB loved this one even more and I thought it was quite good. With this one, I made up a lot of it on my own. I started off by cooking the penne in boiling water. Then a put some oil in the skillet and cooked up more cubes of chicken. The start of this dish was much the same as the previous. I added some salt and pepper to the chicken and then added some onion salt and minced garlic. Real onions would have probably been better, but I didn't have any on hand. I then added a fresh banana pepper from our garden and a can of drained diced tomatos with jalapenos. In WV, I couldn't find the chipotle in adobo sauce, so I used some sour cream mixed with taco seasoning and a little water to make a creamy type of sauce. This was as close to the chipotle and adobo sauce as I could get. I omitted the corn and let it cook for a few minutes. Then, I added white quesadilla cheese and a dash of cilantro leaves. This was an amazing dish. I immediately feel in love with it and Mr. McB said it was the best thing I had ever made.

So, two good, but easy dishes down the drain for the week. :)

Let me know if you try them and enjoy them.