Craigslist Kitchen Finds

In preparing for our move in a couple of months, I'm in excitement mode over getting things we need for our kitchen...the kitchen we will no longer have to share with anyone else! So when I browse Craigslist, I tend to go almost straight to the household items (after "Free Stuff" of course). This week, I found an electric griddle for sale for $5.

And this knife set...again for $5:

I also scored one of those little carousels filled with random kitchen utensils, measuring spoons and cups, etc., and a dishtowel/potholder set. Most of these things get to wait for the new apartment, but I think we'll be using the griddle soon to make some pancakes.

Baked Apple Oatmeal

Up until a few months ago, I never bothered with breakfast. But in the interest of losing weight and getting healthy, I've been trying to make it a part of my day. Most mornings consist of a granola bar, a piece of fruit, and some chocolate soy milk. It's good and keeps me going until lunch, but on weekends I like to experiment with different things. I've also been on a quest to find things that will keep well and give me variety for the coming week.

I decided to try Baked Apple Oatmeal from the Betty Crocker website.

Apples were on sale this week and the rest of the stuff we either had or was really cheap, so already, I can consider this to be a value meal.

It was also extremely easy. The only part I didn't so much like was chopping the apples. We do have a small chopper, but with everyone else in the house still sleeping, I thought it would be rude to try to run any kitchen gadgets (I'll be so glad when we have our own place...just a couple more months).

Everything mixed well in the dish. Two medium granny smith apples yielded alot of chunks, but they were tasty so it was okay. Here's the before pic:

And the after pic with some chunks already taken out:

The recipe calls for whatever toppings you prefer. The taste of the oatmeal without any toppings was a little bland and could have probably used more of something in the cooking process. I think I might like to try it with vanilla soy milk and a different fruit. To add some flavor to this batch, I just mixed some extra raisins into some brown sugar.

It's amazing the difference it made. This ended up being really tasty and pretty filling (go fiber!). After the bf and I finished ours, I packed the rest of it in tupperware. He's not a big breakfast eater, so I know have at least four breakfasts to get me through the rest of the week.

It'll be interesting to see if it makes good leftovers!

Chicken Quesadilla and Fiesta Rice

Because he had the afternoon off, Jon decided to do the cooking tonight. He always seems to get the more complicated recipes, but hopefully that'll start being more even the more we cook.

The recipe we used can be found here: at AllRecipes.

We tweaked it just a little bit by adding taco seasoning to the quesadilla. I don't even like fiesta rice but this was delicious. The plan for the next go round with this recipe is to use medium salsa instead of mild and a little more seasoning.

Definitely an A rated meal!

Two Nights of Simplicity

Things have been crazy around here lately, so we decided to play it low key for a couple days with two really simple meals. Last night was sloppy joes, straight out of the can. I've found all kinds of sloppy joe recipes on the 'net, but I'm pretty sure that for me, sloppy joes will always taste the best from Manwich.

This first picture is my version of the sloppy joe dinner, complete with frozen french fries and ketchup. See how neat and tidy I am?

My boyfriend, on the other hand, really likes to do it up sloppy:

What we have here is two open faced sloppy joes, topped with mustard and french fries. Right behind it is a mustard/Frank's Hot Sauce mixture for fry dippage.

Tonight's fare was even simpler. We went with the fries again and I drew on one of my childhood favorites: hot roast beef and cheddar sandwiches.

This used to be one of my favorite meals and is very simple. The sandwices consist of deli roast beef and cheedar cheese from the dairy department. After baking the fries, I lowered the temp from 450 to 350 degrees and put the sandwiches open faced into the oven for about 5 minutes, until the cheese was melted. It looks a little plastic in this pic but it was delicous. Jon ate his with some generic Miracle Whip and I ate mine topped with zesty italian dressing.

Tomorrow we're getting experimental in the kitchen again, and hopefully I'll be back with something good.

Teriyaki Ranch Chicken Tenders

First of all, big apologies for the picture. Every Sunday night we got to our friends' house to play DnD (yeah, total nerds, right?) and usually we order fast food or pick something up on the way. Tonight though, we had thawed chicken tenderloins we needed to use and to save money, we made a quick dinner and took it over there to heat up when we got hungry. I forgot my camera, so I had to use my camera phone. The camera takes pretty crap pics but the camera on my phone is worse.

My boyfriend, Jon, made these tonight and they turned out really well. I call them Teriyaki Ranch Chicken Tenders but he'll probably call them Felber's Famous Fingers or something crazy like that.

This was a quick makeshift dinner he threw together, so I don't have measurements. However, it's extremely simple:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix some teriyaki sauce and ranch dressing together. Drag thawed chicken threw the mixture, then coat with breadcrumbs. Bake for about 30 minutes.

The yellow "sauce" is honey mustard that we made ourselves...just mixed some regular mustard with a generous squirt of honey and voila! The other was some leftover spaghetti sauce we had. The tenders tasted delicious in both sauces. We didn't have fries so we served with chex mix and used our friends paper plates so we wouldn't have to wash their dishes.