I have posted this recipe in a different incarnation by cooking it all in the crockpot. Even though the ingredients are essentially the same, the result is a completely different meal. The chicken cooked in a crockpot can be shredded and used in tortilla shells or eaten with chips. The chicken in this recipe stays whole.  In grilling weather you can also put these ingredients in tin foil packets and cook it on the grill.

You will need:

Chicken: breast or legs, bone in or out
Salsa or picante sauce
2 cans of Black beans
Shredded cheese

First, pour your salsa or picante sauce into the bottom of your baking dish. How ever much you need. I wanted there to be extra so I could mix it in with the brown rice I was also cooking and have a spicy mexican rice to go along with the chicken.

Then I fillet the chicken breast, like I always do, to cut down on the cook time and the chances of the breasts getting dried out on the outside, yet still being raw on the inside.

Lay them on top of the salsa.

Put it in the oven at 350 for 25 minutes.

After 25 minutes, remove from the oven and pour your black beans in the baking dish. Pop it back in the oven for 10 minutes.

Don’t you love my pot holders?  One of my children went through a phase where he could not make enough of these.  He made them constantly .  And being ever so helpful he threw away all the other pot holders and mitts that we owned.

Take it out again and sprinkle the top with shredded cheese. Pop it back in the oven for 2 minutes or until the cheese melts. You can see my side of the dish over there on the left with no cheese. It is delicious without it.

Serve it over brown rice.

Aren’t they cute? I like to call them Hot-opuses. Which is also a cute name. Isn’t it?

Unless you have a three year old who butchers the pronunciation of things. Because then he will be shouting, “I wuv hot pu$$ies” the entire time you are eating dinner. And while it is very funny, you really don’t want to have to explain to the rest of your children why you are laughing. Trust me.
This is a very simple recipe. You will need:

2 lbs of shell pasta
1 1/3 cups of milk
1/2 cup butter
16 oz mild cheddar cheese
16 oz of sharp cheddar
You can use whatever kind of cheese you like. I picked these two cheeses because they are mild and my children like them.
Salt, to taste
Hot dogs

This feeds 10 people. If you have less than ten people to feed. Half the recipe

You want to grate your cheese so that it will melt easily. I have this antique cheese grater that I love. As I use it I like to think about the people who used it before I found it. What were they making? Did they grate the skin off of their knuckles like I frequently do? Did they say, “Mmmm, extra flavor!” like I do? Did they happily cast it aside when more modern inventions came along and made the task easier?

Using the grater is a lot of work. You may even need a snack to help you get through it.

And as always many hands make light work.

Of course you could buy your cheese already grated at the store. But then what will you do with yourself while your pasta is boiling away?

Next you want to grease your casserole dish with your butter. Really slather it on. Neatness does not count in this particular step of the recipe. That will come later.

Toss the rest of the stick of butter into the pot with your already cooked and drained pasta shells. Stir it up so that it melts and coats the pasta.

Next add your grated cheese.

A little at a time so that you can stir it up evenly.

Pour it all into your casserole dish.

Measure out your 1 1/3 cup of milk.

Pour it all over the pasta. Cover with aluminum foil and put into a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes. If you would like the macaroni on the top to get crunchy, remove the aluminum foil for the last 10 minutes of baking. My children do not like the crunchy pasta.

Ten minutes before the macaroni is done, prep the hot dogs.

You want to cut the eight “legs” before you boil them. Hold the hot dog and about one inch from the top of the hot dog slice in half lengthwise. Turn the hot dog a quarter turn and repeat the process. Now is the time for your perfectionist qualities to come out. Each of those four individual legs needs to be cut in half. Because octopi have 8 legs.

My husband said, “Isn’t four enough?” and then proceeded to chop one of the legs off by mistake. So I had to take over the leg cutting lest we have a whole slew of octopus amputees.

You can feel good about feeding your children hot dogs when you prepare them this way. Something about the length of time it takes you to prepare food makes it instantly more nutritious. No really. I swear.

Then put them in your shallow pan of water to cook. They do look like weird octopi now don’t they?

The “legs” will curl up. My 3 year old son saw them at this point and yelled, “They are holding hands!”

Remove macaroni from oven. You will want to scoop it into the bowl and set the hot-opus in top. If I had peas I would have added some to the top of the bowl at this point. But I didn’t.

Add eyes to the hot-opus with mustard or ketchup.

And so we have the perfect kid friendly meal, with nary a vegetable to be found.

Yesterday was a busy day and not particularly my favorite day ever. I’m trying to approach bad days like the British from now on. Instead of having anxiety attacks and debating throwing myself from a bridge I am instead understating the badness of things. The day? It was? Regrettable.

I decided to make this Potato Cheddar and Bacon soup from the Kraft.com website.  A few weeks ago some friends mentioned the Kraft website as a place they find quick to make and serve dinners. That’s what I want on a busy Monday so the soup seemed like a good trial. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time we met, I had (against my better judgment) created chocolate chip cookies mixed with whole chickpeas. The results seemed all right, but I remained skeptical. I mentioned the real test would be lunch the following day, would the kids eat both cookies? Shockingly, this is Max’s lunch container after school.

Both Max’s cookies remain untouched while Madison, my more typically picky child, could not resist the cookie appearance and ate them. Given this I will probably make these again, baking them slightly longer (I always struggle with over baking cookies so I erred on the opposite side this time) and mashing up the garbanzo beans at least a little before mixing them into my dough. One can only accept so many whole beans in one’s mouth before one begins to curse Jessica Seinfeld’s cruel garbanzo trickery. Continuing on with our Deceptively Delicious trial I continued to experiment with a couple more of Seinfeld’s recipes over the weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually I focus on food and related angst on Tuesdays and something relating to organization/productivity on Thursdays. However this week (and potentially next week as well) I’m just sort of focusing on food. Mainly because I spent (literally) 4 hours yesterday steaming, baking and pureeing vegetables.

On Tuesday I mentioned how I’d pureed a few vegetables following the directions in and it wasn’t all that big a deal. On Wednesday I tackled a major batch of vegetables following the directions laid out in Deceptively Delicious. Somewhere in hour two I remembered why I never made my own baby food. It’s kind of annoying if you don’t like cooking and/or messes.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Shocking Results From The Banana Hot Dog Experiment:

Before going forward I should let you know I got this idea from another source, only I don’t remember where I saw it. I’ve browsed the Kid Eats Flickr Pool and haven’t seen it but I swear that’s where I first saw it. Going forward just note, this was not my original idea.

Max did not touch the Banana disguised as a hot dog, didn’t even unwrap from the plastic wrap coating. It, quote: “freaked me out”. My son is generally the less picky of my three children (I’m counting my spouse) so this was surprising. Likes seafood chowder, hates bananas in hot dog buns.

Madison loved the banana disguised as a hot dog. Which is surprising because she typically hates anything which is different than white bread with peanut butter sandwiched between another slice of white bread. Hates seafood chowder, likes bananas in hot dog buns.

I honestly question whether all my children will be happy with the same meal at the same time at any point in my life. Read the rest of this entry »

I started out thinking I’d share a meal plan with you all and then, next week report back with the results of my family’s reaction and the ease of preparation. The ultimate goal being 3-5 more dishes I could add to my ‘Whip It Up’ quick dinner file. However, this morning I remembered my husband is in Los Angeles for the week and there’s nothing like cooking full meal for my kids and myself. Well there is something like it, something as irritating and pointless, like visiting the DMV.

Rather than torture myself, this week we’ll be eating a lot of plain pasta, cereal and other breakfast foods disguised as dinner.

I thought instead we could look at muffins! I’ve been having trouble packing lunches which are reasonably balanced and which the kids are able to consume in their limited lunch hours. The muffin could be the perfect food in this case because you can hide quite a bit of nutrition into just one. Read the rest of this entry »

A month ago my sister in law mentioned this certain brand of gelato she adores by saying it is the best thing she’s ever put in her mouth. Somehow both my brother and I have the same pea sized brain which created an innuendo out of the phrase. This week I put this tuna salad in my mouth and I suggest you put it in your mouth as well.

I made this recipe one afternoon for lunch and spent the entire meal saying out loud, “Wow, this is so good.” Just in case I wasn’t actually tasting it myself. This is one of the downfalls of working from home, no one to hear how delicious my tuna salad is. Except you I guess. Here it is all mixed up.

Here it is ready to get in my mouth.

Shockingly, my 6 year old ate some of this on crackers making it possibly a kid friendly option. But then, I wouldn’t count on it since capers and onions make a lot of kids run screaming (my 8 year old included).

Since we’re back on lunches I wanted to point out a couple items sent to me after last week’s Simplified Bento post. Sheryl of This Mouse sent along the idea to use silicone cupcake liners in your lunch boxes. I picked some up this weekend and think they are far more effective than the coffee filter I was using before.

Also Mary pointed me to this Flickr group, Kid Eats. Some offerings are more involved than I’ll ever attempt but others are exactly the kind of lunch I can easily see myself packing and my kids actually eating.

I’m really surprised how packing these tiny containers is changing the way I feel about packing my kid’s lunches.

I’ve had one full week of making school lunches, so far the chart I made last week has helped my son to keep his lunches varied. I think we’ll be adding a thermos so we can send soup or maybe even a smoothie along with him in the near future.

My daughter has remained firm in her love of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Which makes putting together her lunch exceedingly simple but also exceedingly boring.

I’ve bought one Lunchable for my kids since becoming a mother and I like those numbers. I generally believe in moderation when it comes to less than healthy food for kids. I don’t have a problem with the kids eating the occasional fast food and I buy potato chips sometimes and I’m actually a little ashamed of the number of times I’ve bribed my kids with candy at the grocery store.

Still I have a problem with Lunchables because it seems to me the people at Oscar Meyer are actually trying to make it not healthy. I like to picture their board room discussions,

“You know we’ve got this product and it’s pretty simple. Crackers, cheese and turkey a kid can put together for lunch. But turkey is generally pretty lean and cheese has so much calcium. How can we make this meal less good for kids? Anyone?”

“I know! Let’s load it up with added sugar, sodium and fat! Oh and put a funny character on it! With the money we save on sugar loaded processed turkey meat, let’s up our profit margin and pass the mark up onto parents.”

“Let’s roll with that! I love it!”

It frustrates me because really Lunchables are very simplified bento lunches. For more information on bento, check out Lunch In A Box and this FAQ at My Lunch Can Beat Up Your Lunch.

For the last few days I’ve tried making incredibly simplified home grown Lunchables using butter crackers, raisins, strawberries, 2% fat mozzerella, salami, turkey and for my adventurous daughter, peanut butter.

She has grapes, apples, raisins, peanut butter and crackers. I also put one small slice of mozzerella in, and shockingly it came back home untouched. She also came home with some leftover crackers, peanut butter and raisins and demonstrated how she made faces out of the raisins on her crackers and they were all sad because she hates school and hates me too. I’m sure that made all the new kids at lunch just frantic to play with my emo daughter.

Max’s version was a little more balanced offering some protein, fat and calcium along with his fruit. I spent a lot of stupid time trying to cut his salami and turkey into circles and in the future I will not be doing such a stupid waste of time thing.

This type of lunch works out well for my son because he likes lunch meat but doesn’t like bread, it doesn’t work as well for my daughter because she likes bread but doesn’t like lunch meat. She is also a slow eater and came home with almost all her crackers, peanut butter and raisins.

I’m once again looking at this bento box from Laptop Lunch, because this simplified version of the lovely more traditional bento is actually easy enough to plan and throw together each week and is also perfect for my kid’s simple taste buds.

But I won’t be putting together a masterpiece like this anytime soon and my bento will not be making an appearance on this flickr group where it would be shamed and laughed at.

Every time my kids have gone off to school, I’ve salivated at the promise. The promise of hours of uninterrupted time to work or do other things I’ve been unable to do for the last 3 months without a constant shadow trailing me. The first time I sent my daughter off to preschool I was thrilled to have five hours with just one child each week. Today when I dropped the kids off at school I counted up the hours, 35, and died of a heart attack on my way back home.

I also realized on that walk back home I am now going to be packing about 340 lunches over the next school year. My daughter will gladly eat peanut butter sandwiches every day but my son is a more adventurous eater and I’d like to encourage his healthy appetite.

I’m loving the Kraft Lunch Box Builder, the recipes are still incredibly quick and simple but they jog your brain for something a little different and all the sides you can easily toss into the lunch bag. I’m not kidding myself this year into thinking I’ll be preparing gourmet lunchbox cuisine for my kids. I still want them to have reasonably healthy foods although I have promised my daughter at least one Lunchable, maybe I’ll make it the new improved one.

I also spent a few hours putting together this magnetic lunch chart for the kids from Martha Stewart. I made just one for now, since like I said, my daughter wants peanut butter and jelly every single day for the next 9 months of school.

Unlike some of Martha’s projects, this was exceedingly simple to put together.

But since my husband doesn’t want anything to clutter up the fridge, I outfitted a cupboard with a magnetic board.

I also printed out a batch of these lunch labels on card stock to tuck into the kids lunch boxes. You can also print them on label stock but I prefer making them into notes for the kids.

My first day of freedom is nearly half over, I must run. Come back Thursday for another post.