I finally had another of my Adventures in Making the Recipe Up! Now that I use Pinterest so regularly, I've hardly had the need to be creative in the kitchen. But last week I found myself with a cast of ingredients on hand that were just screaming to be combined into something. Using this recipe from All Recipes as an inspiration, I created Baked Macaroni with Chicken and Mushrooms! While I doubt I'll ever create this exact recipe again, it was a tasty, easy use of some ingredients that may have gone to waste otherwise.

It all started with this container of shredded chicken leftover from my attempt at Slowcooker Greek Chicken Pita Folds. They weren't nearly as flavorful or fun as I had hoped, and they made a LOT of chicken!

I also had some remnants of a few types of tomato sauce,

and half a box of elbow macaroni.

I chopped up an onion, a clove of garlic, and some mushrooms

which I sauteed for a little bit while the macaroni cooked. Once they were softened, I added in the chicken and the tomato sauce, letting it all simmer together for a few minutes. Then I folded in the drained macaroni and some shredded cheddar cheese.

I transferred the whole shebang into a greased casserole dish and topped it with more cheese and bread crumbs. After 15 minutes in the oven at 350, voila!

This would be great with just about anything you have on hand--any short noodle, any meat or vegetable, any cheese. The original recipe called for diced fresh tomatoes, or I'm sure you could use a can if you had that around. Basically, it's a blank slate! Shredded chicken is one of my favorite things to build a meal creation around, and this concoction did not disappoint.

Have you played around in the kitchen lately? How do you get creative with leftovers?

I'm linked up to the Tasty Tuesday Parade of Foods!
 

Hello, my name is Laura, and I am a Nicholas Sparks fan. I include Nicholas Sparks books first and foremost on my “guilty pleasure” reading list, and I always feel like I need to justify why I like reading them. Every time a new book or movie of his comes out, I think to myself, “Oh, I can skip this one.” And then I never do. Honestly, though, the subject matter of his books is so real that they always draw me in emotionally, and they almost always make me think about how I might handle certain situations. I feel like, at least in that sense, he’s a better writer than I often give him credit for. So while I was late to the game on this book (The Lucky One), which is already a movie for pete’s sake, here are my two cents.

Like Traveler’s Rest, which I recently reviewed, this book ties into the Iraq war, which still fascinates me as a literary and cultural phenomenon. The male protagonist is a marine named Logan (played in the movie by an all-of-a-sudden grown up Zac Efron!) who found a photo in the sand and carried it with him through his 3 deployments. When he returned home, and following a tragic accident, he decided to walk across the country to try and find the woman in the photograph. He does, of course, and you can probably imagine where things go from there.

One thing Nicholas Sparks does extremely well in my opinion is create characters who are absolute snakes. I like that we get to see the story of The Lucky One unfold through the eyes of several different characters, and it’s incredible to see how wrong everyone’s perception is of the character named Keith Clayton. The story from his perspective, full of chauvinism, objectification of women, and scathing opinion of his 10-year-old son, makes my skin crawl, and it’s definitely a major part of the plot to watch everyone else figure out how vile he is.

The thing that always gets me with Nicholas Sparks books, though, is the ending, and this one was no exception. I often disagree with the way he has things play out. As with Traveler’s Rest, I almost felt like the way Sparks chose to have things unfold in this book was a copout. But, it did work out the way I hoped it would for the female protagonist, and the way it had been foreshadowed it would, and therein lies the catch. I’m not sure it could have gotten to such an ending without the so-called copout (i.e.if things unfolded as they might in real life!), and I wouldn’t have been happy with that either. I’m sure as a popular writer it’s a trade-off: I read books to escape from reality but then am upset when they aren’t realistic, so how can you possibly please me?! And really, the fact that I even cared how the book ended is a sign that I enjoyed it. If I hadn’t been invested in the characters, it wouldn’t have made a difference to me one way or the other. So really, this complaint is a good complaint.

And you know, I just might need to watch the movie now…

I feel like I haven’t posted a recipe in ages! The hardest thing for me about posting recipes is remembering to take pictures of the food as it’s being cooked and again once it’s done and plated. And even when I do remember, my pictures usually aren’t all that great, so it doesn’t make me particularly excited to share them here. Food photography is an art form unto itself! But I initially said that this blog would be an outlet for me to share recipes and cooking adventures, and I do cook new things fairly often, so I should stick to that more!

I’ve cooked some pretty delicious things lately (thank you Pinterest!), and I want to share a few of them with you so you can join in the fun.

For the 4th of July I made Plain Chicken’s Slowcooker Baby Back Ribs. I had never cooked ribs before, let alone bought them, so I was pretty clueless at the grocery store. I’m also not used to buying meat full price, so I was doubly overwhelmed. But I managed to find a package (a rack? a slab?) of “pork loin back ribs” for a reasonable price at Publix, so I bought them. I wasn’t sure if they were the correct type for the recipe, but I figured how bad could they be? I had no idea how to remove the membrane from the back as the recipe directed, so I didn’t. I also ended up needing to cut the slab in half in order to fit it in my crockpot, and I couldn’t get them to stand up as the recipe called for, but slow-cooked meat with a delicious rub can hardly turn out bad. Once I broiled the ribs briefly with some barbecue sauce, they were absolutely delicious. We enjoyed 3 each that night and 3 for lunch the next day! The meat came off the bone so easily that I actually made mine into a sort of sandwich on Hawaiian rolls. Mmm! If you don’t have a grill, or don’t want to grill, this is a great way to still have that festive barbecued meat.

Plain Chicken is one of my favorite blog resources for simple, unpretentious but delicious recipes, and I can also highly recommend her creamy jambalaya pasta, her slowcooker ham and beans, and just about any casserole she features on her blog!

For a quick, weeknight meal these pizza quesadillas have been a lot of fun. I’ve had, erm, issues trying to make quesadillas before wherein the smoke detector went off, but the guidelines in this recipe have opened up a whole world of quesadilla making to me! You can definitely play with the ingredients here and honestly use just about anything you have on hand. I like recipes like that.

For some reason during summer I find myself craving Southern foods like pimento cheese and chicken salad. I’ve made this skinny pimento cheese twice now. Andy doesn’t normally like mayonnaisey foods, and even though this uses Greek yogurt instead of mayonnaise I was worried it would hit the same textures triggers, but even he loved it! It makes up a nice-sized batch, and it’s great to have a dinner option that doesn’t heat up the kitchen at all.

And finally for today, check out Jessica Alba’s turkey meatballs. (Who knew that she was multi-talented?!) I found these on a whim when I had some ground turkey in the freezer that I decided I wanted to make into meatballs. A quick Google search turned up several recipes, from which I picked this one, and I’d say it was a success! The recipe could have been easier, but since it yielded enough for one meal and more for the freezer, I’ll forgive it. :-) I love that these use turkey instead of beef and even have some sneaky vegetables in them.

I’m usually really bad about making a recipe once, declaring it delicious, and then never making it again. But I’m starting to have some go-tos, a few of which are included here. How do you find recipe inspiration? Do you tend to make the same thing frequently, or do you flit around like I do?

P.S. If you’re interested in keeping closer tabs on what I’m cooking, or gleaning some ideas, you can follow me on Pinterest! I make my meal plan from my pins every week, so it’s highly likely that I’ll actually try the things I pin.

When it comes to time management, I feel like you can read all the books and articles you want, but nothing will change until you figure out what works for you.

For example, my intended routine is to get up at 6:45 every weekday morning and go to the gym. I can have plenty of time to get ready for work as long as I’m in the shower at 8:00. I seem to go through phases where this happens more regularly than others. There are definitely weeks when I don’t wake up when I’m supposed to and go work out in the afternoon instead, but for the most part, I try and do it in the morning.

HOWEVER, I’ve realized that Mondays often need to be an exception. I’ve always had a sort of slump on Sunday evenings, and I tend to get grumpy or overwhelmed thinking about the week ahead. In school, it was usually stress about homework or upcoming tests, whereas now it’s more about making sure things are ready for lunches and dinners. This mostly involves cutting and packaging any fruits and veggies I want to have on hand. It’s also nice to go into the week with the kitchen cleaned up and the apartment in order. But sometimes, it all just seems like too much, and I’d rather just have a nice Sunday evening and get to bed at a reasonable time! On those weeks, I’ve found that I can be really productive if I get up at my prescribed 6:45 on Monday but do all of my Sunday night tasks instead of going to the gym. I can roll out of bed, cut up all the fruits and veggies, unload the dishwasher if it needs it, organize my to-do list (which I keep on scrap paper from coupons I’ve printed that didn’t take up the whole page…yep), write a blog post, etc., and get to work feeling totally on top of things.

An important part of this whole routine, though, is giving myself grace. It would be easy to beat myself up for not doing these things on Sunday and for not going to the gym on Monday morning, but instead I choose to be pleased that I got so much done. And, I can hit the gym hard come Tuesday morning!

That’s what works for me. But like I said, you can read all the blog posts you want and still not be organized or efficient, because what works for someone else might not work for you!

Do you have any routines that help streamline your week? How do you go about managing your time?

Today’s post is about an experience that was both fun and frugal!

I don’t remember exactly when daily deal sites came on the scene, but I do know I fell for them hard and fast. I had a lot of fun with Living Social trying to get 3 people to purchase the voucher from my link so I could earn it free, and I was excited to subscribe to Groupon in Atlanta as soon as we knew we were moving! The trip Andy and I took for our one-year anniversary was actually with a voucher purchased from one of the sites. I think the concept is great.

But lately I’ve been getting disillusioned with all the emails. I’ve unsubscribed from all but the major players, and even then I feel like I rarely buy anything anymore. But one thing I do always keep an eye out for are discounts on experiences rather than on products or restaurants. And I’ve had good luck with that of late, with purchases including admission for 4 to the Atlanta Museum of Design, a brewery tour, a walking tour for 2 of Historic Oakland Cemetery, and one that I used this past weekend for a tea tasting for 2!

The tasting was at Zen Tea in Chamblee. Chamblee is a bit farther than I usually like to drive to do things, but for $10, I thought it would be a fun experience. Plus, I was able to share it with my good friend Kimmie, who was in town for the weekend. I would definitely try Zen Tea again. A leisurely tasting there, perhaps with lunch involved, and a visit to the consignment shop next door would be a delightful girls’ afternoon out. The $10 voucher I had included 3 small pots of tea and a dessert for each of us, but the 3-pot tasting is normally only $10.50 (not including dessert), which is definitely not unreasonable.

Kimmie had a giant carrot cake muffin-esque thing, and I had a delicious slice of red velvet cake that didn’t last long on my plate.

The 3 teas that we chose from the extensive list were Cafe Spiced Chai, White Christmas (Heaven) (how could we resist it with a name like that???), and Spearmint.

I honestly wasn’t wowed by any of the teas, but it quite possibly could have been because my taste buds were too overwhelmed by the red velvet and cream cheese deliciousness. Oops. The mint was the best, and I bought some of that to take home, as well as some chai. I also am never sure what’s the best protocol for sweetening tea. I know how I like it, but I don’t know if the level of sweetness I enjoy is necessarily the best for bringing out flavors. So since I was tasting, I tried to sweeten less than I normally would, which may have also affected my enjoyment of the flavors.

All in all, though, it was a fun experience at a pleasant little shop that I’m glad to now know about. Chalk up another success for Living Social amongst the plethora of liposuction, facial, and car detailing vouchers that flood my inbox daily!