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.

Chocolate Banana Bread

Most people who are fans of baking seem to find it calming. I never understood this because being the kitchen generally made me nervous. Tonight though I decided to try it out. After yet another issue with the roommate situation, my irritation took me to the store to cool down and pick up the ingredients for Chocolate Banana Bread, a recipe I've been wanting to try since finding it here.

For the record this is my first attempt at making any sort of bread. I even bought two new bread pans in honor of the occasion.

The only part of the recipe I did different was instead of toasting any nuts, I just bought a small bag of already chopped pecans and through them into the batter.

For an evening snack, I had two slices of this with Blue Bonnet Light butter and a glass of Silk Light Chocolate Soy Milk. It was awesome and I'm totally psyched that it came out as well as it did for me.

I ended up feeling much calmer and chilled out after the actual act of baking the bread too. Still can't wait to be out of here and in my own apartment wtih my own kitchen....but it's good to know baking therapy is always an option no matter where I am.

Swiss Chicken Casserole

So I fell pretty behind in my quest to keep a food blog, but c'est la vie...it's the way of the world. Lately we've been cooking more and I've decided to get back into blogging and so I wanted to update this one as well. I'll be honest, the BF has been cooking more lately, so not all of these recipes will be mine. Take this one for example...I'll take credit for the planning, but he gets all the props for fixing.

I know it looks like a mess on the place, but this was absolutely delicious. The recipe can be found at http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Swiss-Chicken-Casserole-II/Detail.aspx. I don't even think he tweaked it much. We used eight chicken tenderloins and reduced fat soup.

The corn was leftovers from last night's dinner and the recipe wasn't all that expensive and so will be x-posted to http://frugalandhappy.blogspot.com/ with a listing of the how much everything cost.

Because of the roommate situation, we don't often enjoy romantic or comfortable meals. This one was spent in the living room in front of some re-run of CSI: New York. Unfortunately, after living with a law student, I can no longer enjoy this show because reality has ruined it for me. But the meal was good and it was probably better that I focused on the food rather than the TV.