Here is what I am planning unless I get a better offer!
Homemade Pizza
Chicken Tortilla Casserole
Jambalaya
Beef Burgundy and creamy noodles
Chicken Pot Pies
Okay, our next dinner is going to be homemade pizza. Now, a lot of you out there don’t have a Trader Joe’s near you, but if you did, it would be a great thing. I’d shop there exclusively if they add toilet paper and cleaning supplies. So anyway, I’m making homemade pizza. I’m going to Trader Joe’s and they have fresh pizza dough for like $1.20 and it’ll make a large pizza, but I cut it into four and make four mini pizzas. We usually do 2 packages to make eight of them and freeze four, or give the neighbor a couple. You just take the dough and roll it out. You may need a little practice doing it, I did. I put it on parchment paper to transfer it to the pizza stone. It just works a little better that way.
I spread out the dough and then I mix a little olive oil with oregano, a few little red pepper chili flakes, and garlic. I spread it on the pizza dough. Then I use Trader Joe’s pizza sauce, because I think it’s the best. The one in the jar. Then I use Trader Joe’s Quattro Formaggio, which is their Italian cheese. It’s all the different pizza cheeses that you could use, all mixed up. Then I buy their pepperoni. So, we’re going to have pepperoni and then we’re also going to have ham and pineapple pizzas. Then Honey cooks the pizza on the stone in the barbecue.
A few of my friends have pizza ovens, but I think for us, it’s too much trouble. We can get our grill super-hot, so it’s perfect. We even bought a pizza stone to take to our place out in the desert. It’s a small one and we can make pizza out there on our barbecue. So, that’s what we’re having.
Next up, we’re going to have chicken tortilla casserole, as known to my immediate family as Chicken Bolero. That’s when you take leftover chicken that you’ve already cooked and you take leftover corn tortillas, which you slice up in strips so that kind of you’re pretending it’s a lasagna. Then you mix two cream of chickens, one cream of mushroom, 3/4 of a cup of milk, 3/4 of a cup of salsa and three cubes of chicken bouillon squares. I don’t actually buy those anymore, but that’s what the recipe calls for. I buy my bouillon in a jar now.
So anyway, you melt everything but the chicken and tortillas all together in a sauce with a whole poop load of cheese, maybe half of a 16-ounce bag of cheddar bag of shredded cheese. Then you have the sauce, you have the tortillas, you have the chicken and you just layer it in a greased casserole dish. The recipe says to make this and let it sit overnight because then the corn tortillas just kind of meld, and it’s just a beautiful casserole. We love it.
When I made it in advance I had Honey record me, but the video didn’t turn out very good though. We were experimenting with learning how to video, anyway, when I make one, I make two. I put the two meals in casserole dishes and then I cooked one a few weeks ago. This weeks is the second casserole I had frozen, it’s thawing in the refrigerator now. EASY DINNER NIGHT. I’m sure I’ll post the recipe someday, or you can find a similar recipe anywhere.
Then I’m going to make Jambalaya. I buy Zatarain’s Jambalaya mix, and it is a little spicy. So as per the instructions on the side of the box, I use a can of diced tomatoes and an extra half a cup of rice that I throw in and it tones it down a little.
Then I add something that I’ll be introducing over the next couple of months. I buy yellow, red and orange bell peppers. (I don’t like green.) Then I cut them up with onions and I sauté them down and then I freeze them. I stick the mixture in a Ziploc bag. Because it’s cooked in oil, it won’t freeze solid. I take the Ziploc out and then I thinly slice it what I need.
I heat the peppers in a pan, and then I have the diced tomatoes and the extra rice and I add in the boxed rice mix. Then on the side, in a separate pan I cook sausage. I don’t like andouille sausage so I use cut up Polish Kielbasa and I cut it into little cubes and I sauté it up with a little barbecue sauce and so I get it a little brown. I cook a little of the sweetness out of the barbecue sauce. Then after the jambalaya is cooked, I mix in the sausage with the small amount of the barbecue sauce, I don’t use a lot and it also makes the Zatarain mix a little milder.
Then I’ll throw in some leftover chicken pieces if I have it. I know you should add shrimp but Aunt Janet’s allergic. So, there is my jambalaya recipe. We have a salad and bread and butter with it.
As I said last week I was going to clean out the freezer and figure out what I had in the freezer and I have a whole bunch of stuff. So, that’s where the chicken tortilla casserole was. Then I saw my beef burgundy, which is boeuf beef Bourguignon, that I have already made so I’ll heat that up with some beautiful noodles that I’ll make a little Alfredo. I add some butter, garlic and cream, parsley and Parmesan cheese to a pan and then put the noodles in that and that’s what I’ll have.
Then lastly, chicken pot pies, which I have already made in advance. Once again, I was doing inventory in the freezer. I have chicken pot pies that I had made from some creamed chicken and added vegetables, and I keep some puff pastry dough in the freezer. I put them in, make little round pot pies out of them and that’s easy. Honey likes rice so we’ll probably have a little rice mixture with that, instead of potatoes. Or maybe stuffing and gravy. If we really want potatoes, I’ll boil a potato or we’ll use instant potatoes, we don’t care. Then we’ll put some more vegetables on the side and there you go.
There are my dinners for this week. Homemade pizza, chicken tortilla casserole, otherwise known as Chicken Bolero, jambalaya, beef burgundy and alfredo noodles, and chicken pot pies.
Here’s the beauty of this week. I had already cooked the beef burgundy and froze the other half. I already made the chicken pot pies, with left over roast chicken, and put some vegetables in and made a pot pie and the chicken tortilla casserole. So, that’s amazing that I can find dinner in my own freezer.
If you make one, make two!