Gift Wrapped Chicken

Oh man do I have a delicious recipe for you today! This one comes compliments of my Memaw. I had it a couple of times at her house and then just had to get the recipe from her. It is a chicken dish that is delicious, I don’t usually eat a lot of meat (I focus more on the sides) but I clean my plate with this meal.

Ingredients:
– 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
– 16 oz. can whole berry cranberry sauce
– 8 Tbs butter, divided
– 16 oz phyllo dough, defrosted in the refrigerator
– 1/2 cup butter, melted

Directions:
1. Cut each chicken breast in half the short way and pound each piece to lightly flatten.
2. Place one tablespoon cranberry and one tablespoon of butter on one half of chicken breast and place the other half on top, do this for all pieces
3. Cut dough in half the long way
4. Stack cut strips of dough to make a star shape, just layer two strips to make an X then add remaining two on top to form a +, brush each piece with melted butter as you stack them
5. Place filled chicken in center of your dough star and pull ends up together in the center, pinching them closed at the top like a beggar’s purse (Note: This dough is very thin and breaks easily but as long as you aren’t going for perfection it will still taste delicious even if it doesn’t look great)
6. Bake at 375 for 25 minutes, temp chicken to ensure it is fully cooked
Serves 4

This recipe is delicious, the cranberry and chicken inside the buttery dough is so yummy! The dough is sometimes a bit tricky to work with but you just have to not worry about what it looks like and go for it. It is delicious. Let me know if you try this recipe out and what you think? We love it!

Swiss Cheese Chicken

or Patty’s Chicken as it is known in our house, but I thought I would give it a name that reflected the deliciousness that is in it! If you have never made this then you need to make it. We had it last night and it is delicious, another family favorite.

Ingredients
-4-6 boneless chicken breasts (for the 6 of us my mom would cut three in half)
-Swiss Cheese slices (6 or more, it’s your choice)
-1/4 cup white cooking wine
-1 can cream of chicken soup
-1 cup Pepperidge Farm Herb Stuffing Mix (I use the one that is the blue and white bag)
-1 stick margarine, melted

Directions
-Grease or spray baking dish
-Place chicken in dish and lay swiss cheese slices over to cover
-Combine white wine and soup on small bowl; spread over cheese
-Sprinkle stuffing mix over top
-Drizzle melted margarine over top
-Bake at 350 for 45 minutes, uncovered

When my mom makes it we have it over mashed potatoes and it is delicious. I don’t ever have the time to make homemade mashed potatoes and I don’t care for the taste of instant mashed potatoes, so last night we had it over rice and that was delicious. It makes a delicious creamy sauce to go over the rice or mashed potatoes. It is also good with broccoli for the vegetable.

Hope you all enjoy this dish, it is scrumptious (a word I’ve picked up from the many Fancy Nancy books I read at my job).

Quick and Delicious Chicken Spaghetti

This is a recipe I had posted a link to before but wanted to share with you all how I make it. It is so easy and delicious. I can come home from work and easily prepare it and have a fast and delicious dinner.

Ingredients:
-8 oz. angel hair pasta
-Canned chicken-I just used one small can, it’s really how much chicken you prefer in your casserole
-1 can cream of chicken soup
-1 can cream of mushroom soup
-1 can (10 oz) Rotel diced tomatoes and green chiles, undrained (I use mild but this can be whatever you prefer)
-16 oz. sour cream- the recipe I got this from calls for 8, I like mine extra creamy so I use 16.
-Sprinkling of Parmesan or Mexican Blend Cheese (I use the Great Value, Fiesta Blend Cheese)

Directions:
Boil Pasta and drain
Mix into pasta all other ingredients, except the cheese
Place in a 9×13 casserole dish
Cover with foil and bake on 350 for 30 minutes or until warm and bubbly
Remove from oven, uncover, sprinkle with cheese and return to oven to melt cheese

Serves 4
Is also great leftover!

And then it is ready. It is so delicious and so easy!

Adapted from: The Boomer Brief

Three Cheese Pasta Bake and a Guest Post!

Today I am so excited to share with you guys that I have been given the honor of doing my first guest posting on another blog. Like Mother, Like Daughter is a great blog that shares all kinds of yummy recipes. I have found my new favorite meal from this blog Creamy Chicken and Broccoli over Rice which we are still having almost every week.

I wanted to share a recipe with you guys that we had on Sunday night. It is all about pasta and cheese, lots of cheeses. We found the combination of cheeses to be a little much but some people could love this combo. I added a few things to it and even feel like a few variations on this recipe would be good as well.

Ingredients:
-1 (16 oz) package ziti
-2 (10 oz) containers refrigerated Alfredo sauce
-1 (8 oz) container sour cream
-1 (15 oz. container ricotta cheese
-2 large eggs, lightly beaten
-1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
-1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
-1 1/2 cups mozzarella cheese
{Optional} – This is what I added to it
-chopped pineapple
-chopped bell peppers (I sautéed mine but that is optional)
-canned chicken

Directions:
Prepare ziti according to package directions; drain and return to pot
Add chopped pineapple, chicken and bell peppers

Stir together Alfredo sauce and sour cream and toss with ziti until evenly coated
Spoon half the mixture into a lightly greased 13 x 9 inch baking dish

Stir together ricotta cheese and next 3 ingredients; spread over pasta mixture in baking dish
Spoon remaining pasta mixture over ricotta cheese layer; sprinkle with mozzarella cheese

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until bubbly

We had this dish and Tyler gave it a 6.5 but I wanted to share because I feel like there are people who would love it. I also thought it could have been really good before you added the ricotta cheese mixture. When reading the reviews on the recipe I also saw people who had substituted cottage cheese for the ricotta. I think there are many versions of this recipe that could be delicious. I hope you enjoy it and let me know if you make your own version of it!

Source: Southern Living

Poppyseed Chicken Casserole (sans Poppyseed)

So how many of you have had Poppyseed Chicken Casserole before? I’m sure a lot of you have had one version or another. If not then you need to try this casserole! It is delicious! I didn’t have my moms version so I used one I found online and changed a couple of things, including the fact that I didn’t have any Poppy seeds so that kind of negates the name but its basically still the same.

Adapted from: My Recipes

Ingredients

2 Chicken Breasts, cooked and chopped

1 can Cream of Chicken Soup

16 oz. Sour Cream

1 roll of Ritz crackers, crushed

1 stick of butter, melted

Instructions

1. Boil chicken until done and then chop up

2. Combine chicken, cream of chicken soup and sour cream

3. Spred mixture in a lightly greased casserole dish

4. Melt butter and then mix in crumbled crackers

5. Spread cracker mixture over chicken mixture

6. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes or until bubbly and hot

So that is the way that I made it. It turned out delicious and we always eat it over rice. It is an easy, delicious comfort food. Enjoy!

Easter Weekend Wrap-Up

We had a great Easter weekend! We had beautiful weather and were very productive. Friday I was off work and created my new spring wreath! We had Spinach and Ricotta Shells for dinner which I have shared with you all before. They were delicious as always. You can’t go wrong with stuffed shells. We caught up on some of our DVR shows Friday night and just relaxed.

Saturday, we had breakfast at Bob Evans and then headed to Lowe’s We bought everything we needed to finish fencing in our yard! You can read all about that on Tyler’s blogging post, his first contribution to the blog. And he is a good writer and funny so I will be having him do more posting. While Tyler worked on the fence I weeded my flowers and put up my new potted flowers and garden flag. I was quite excited about those and now our yard looks so cute and ready for spring!

After our yard work we got ready and headed over to the Twaddell’s for Easter egg dying, dinner, an inspirational egg hunt, cheesecake and Nertz. If you have never heard of Nertz or experienced the Twaddell’s playing it then you won’t understand my excitement about coming in 3rd place!! It is a game of speed and that is something the Twaddell family excels at, the Ballards and Glovers not as much. So I was proud to come in 3rd out of 7 people playing!

On Sunday we dressed up and headed to church for Easter Sunday. Growing up in a Southern Baptist church I just felt the need to dress up for Easter. When I was a little girl it was always so exciting to get our Easter dresses! It was a dreary and rainy day on Sunday so we came home and spent the day lounging on the couch and I also prepared us a delicious meal, Chicken Casserole and Pineapple Casserole, recipes coming later this week!

We had a great weekend and this morning it was back to the grind. I am not the biggest fan of Monday’s but I mean who really is? But this work day is close to over and then we are one day closer to the weekend 🙂 This coming weekend if the weather is nice we are hoping to go into DC and check out the Cherry Blossoms! Quick find the Zyrtec, hello allergies!

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!

Dolly says “Happy Easter” 

New garden flag!

Front porch!

The Easter Bunny came!

Dying Easter Eggs at the Twaddell’s!

Chicken Spaghetti and Spinach Stuffed Shells

Ok I am trying to get better about blogging more often and eventually I will blog some recipes of my own that I didn’t get from Pintrest. I am currently in love with Pintrest. I have 201 recipes pinned and I have only made a handful so I am really trying to get better about it. So I thought I would share two delicious recipes that I made this week. One I found on Pintrest and one I found on MyRecipes.com but a lot of time I find recipes and wonder if they are good, which is why I love Pintrest so much because people are sharing them and commenting on how they are.

So first I have made the Spinach and Ricotta Stuffed Shells multiple times and I love it. My husband loves it too even though I think at first he was not pleased by the idea of spinach in the stuffed shells. But you don’t really notice it and I consider it healthy because hello it has spinach in it. The only thing I do differently with this recipe is that I put ground beef in my sauce because men like meat. I would be fine without it but my husband prefers it with meat. So it is good either way!

The next recipe I made this week which I was nervous about turned out great! I cooked up a storm on Monday and prepared 3 meals because I was off work and I commute so I don’t have a lot of time to cook dinner during the week. Then my husband comes home saying something smells bad, that’s what you want to hear after cooking all day right? Fortunately it was none of my meals I don’t know what it was.

New paragraph so you don’t associate the above with this delicious recipe for Chicken Spaghetti. My mom and grandma both have given me recipes for their Chicken Spaghetti but both seem to require a lot more work than I am willing to put in. This recipe was so easy that I could have just made it the night we ate it. I used canned chicken and threw it all together then threw it in the fridge and cooked it on Tuesday night and it was delicious! A thanks to Charlotte over at The Boomer Brief for sharing this delicious recipe! I’m not a Baby Boomer but my husband and I did enjoy this recipe!

Anyways that’s all for now. Next time I make Zucchini Pie I will share that recipe. That is one I got from my mom and not one I have seem anywhere on Pintrest. It is an absolute favorite at our house 🙂