Chicken pot pies

Shelley, inspired by my pie crust, suggested chicken pot pie as a perfect use for my crumbly crusty, so in turn I was inspired to create. She and I ran out of time to do this together, so I share this with you and with her — enjoy!! ❤

 

 

Chicken and rice soup

Freaky good zah

Meatballs, glorious meatballs

We had to plan a quick meal for friends and their children for Saturday night.  We checked some recipes, and headed to the market (Martin’s supermarket), where we happily found a 1 lb. ground beef/veal/pork blend called “Meatloaf Blend” in the butcher section.  This was a very happy discovery, because otherwise we would have had to buy separate 1 lb. packages of ground meat and combine them, and we would have had lots of leftovers!

For our meatballs recipe, we started with Betty Crocker’s Easy Meatballs recipe, and we also borrowed from an Italian-American Meatballs recipe on allrecipes.com.  We made just a couple easy tweaks to the combined recipes:

1. Rather than use 80% lean ground beef, we used the grocery store butcher’s Meatloaf Blend 1 lb. package (ground veal/beef/pork).

2. When blending the ground meat and ingredients, we added finely chopped garlic and parsely, and

3. We made our own inexpensive bread crumbs in the food processor with some slightly stale sesame sourdough that worked perfectly.

Our meatballs stuck a little to our baking pan, this could have been avoided with a little cooking spray, and perhaps rolling our meatballs around once during cooking to allow for even results :^)

Our Saturday night easy meal for friends: Sun Dried Tomato Linguine (Farfalle (bow-tie pasta) for the kids) with Marinara and homemade meatballs, Potato Soup, fruit salad and the ubiquitous bacon crumbles as a garnish.

Freakybites Mini Toasted Italian Meatball Sandwiches on Italian Bread

Chicken Stock

Black Mountain Chocolate, Ancho Ginger Test

Salmon with Pasta, Tarragon, Bacon & Asparagus

Blackened Tuna Atop Arugula and Baby Romaine Blend

I found the freshest tuna and pan-seared it with blackening seasoning. And, olive oil.
I make the spice blend with cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder, white pepper (if I have it) and black pepper if not and paprika.
I put this on top of arugula and baby romaine with feta, kalamata olives and 3 kinds of tomatoes.

And, with this, I added bacon, avocado, shiitake mushroom and pear Gorgonzola vinaigrette.