May's second new dish: Beanie (turkey) weenies!

I was pretty excited about this not only because I really like beanie weenies, but also because I got a great deal on all the ingredients and the meal has a lot of fiber in it.

I just used a simple recipe and substituted turkey hot dogs for regular hot dogs to save a bit on the calories and fat content.  The turkey dogs were on sale and I had a coupon!  The beans were generic brand and also on sale (woo!) so the total cost of the meal was ($1.35/2) + $1.19 = $1.87 for the two of us!  We used half of the pack of turkey dogs (which is why it's 1.35/2) and I'm not counting the cost of the brown sugar and mustard I added to the dish because we already had those ingredients on hand and I used so little of each that I don't think it matters in the overall cost.

These were so very tasty and it only took about 20 minutes to make it all.  We had the rest of the turkey dogs left over so Keegan made three of them for dinner the other night (he says he's saving the last two for me) but I don't mind if he eats those also (but they are really good!  I've also been thinking about buying ground turkey sometime so maybe this positive experience with turkey products will finally convince me to take that step).  When I make this again I will probably put one more hot dog in it to make the meat to bean ratio a little more even, but otherwise it was perfect :)

Mmm, can't wait to make this again!  I'm sure it will be a kid favorite in future years (and let's face it, Keegan and I are pretty much kids at heart!)  :)

May's new dish: Fried onion-coated chicken breast

As the name of the post suggests this month I made chicken breasts that were coated in crushed fried onions.  I'm sure that's not very healthy but since we just ate steamed vegetables with the chicken and no other sauce was involved since the crushed onions gave the chicken a really nice flavor and also did a great job holding the moisture in, we didn't really need anything else to flavor it at all!  It was really easy, just coat a chicken breast with egg, shake it around in a bag with flour and crushed fried onions, then bake!  Mmm, we will definitely be having this for dinner again sometime!  :)

Well, I only have a picture pre-baking, but you get the idea.

April's new dish: Pasta dough

Well I don't have any pictures of this and really all I have is a blurb about it, but oh well, at least I tried to make something new!

One of the students in our lab finished this year so for our farewell John dinner one of the other guys in our lab made a fabulous multi course evening of deliciousness.  To help with this preparation I went to Matt's to help him chop things and generally do whatever he told me to do.  In this case I helped him make some sort of sauce that I believe eventually went into some eggplant and tomato bruschetta topping but that was something new for me.  The coolest new thing that I did was make my own pasta dough!  Matt was making some sort of squash, eggplant, zucchini (?) stuffed ravioli and he makes all of his pasta from scratch.  So I separated all the eggs, measured a bunch of flour out, and then just kneaded a lot of dough.  Unfortunately I couldn't stay long enough to help with the stuffing of the ravioli (because I would really enjoy learning how to do that!) but at least I can say I've made my own pasta!