Back to food!

With all the excitement of our last month I have to admit that I have not been doing a ton of cooking!  Imagine that!

Once we got home it seemed like we had very little time to regroup before we were on our way to Nebraska with Uncle LeRoy.  Now we are home for a while though and I am going to get back to posting some recipes.

One meal we made that made for good leftovers was
White Chicken Chili

4-6 Chicken breasts, baked and chopped up
2 cans of chick peas
2 cans of white kidney beans
2 small cans of diced green chilies
2 cups of brown rice, precooked
4-6 cups of chicken broth (more if you like it more soupy)
3-4T of powdered milk
Rinse and drain beans -
Mix it all together and simmer for 15-20 minutes.
Top the soup with some diced cilantro, green onions and sour cream.
I threw the chicken breasts in the oven while Conner was making breakfast.  We had chicken breasts with raw veggies for lunch and then the rest went into the soup for dinner.

Another meal that we threw together quickly was
Beef and Barley Soup
2 round steaks chopped and browned in Olive oil with 1 large onion. 
5-6 carrots
5-6 stalks of celery
10 cups of Beef broth
1 cup of red wine
1/2 cup barley
1/2 cup split green peas
Simmer for 2-4 hours and serve with crusty bread.
This was better the 2nd time around!
I don't have a picture of this one to show you though.

An always easy standby is this one.

To bake the whole chicken I squeeze a lemon on the outside of it, rub some garlic into it, put the squeezed lemon in the cavity with an onion and bake breast down until the temperature in the breast is 165. 
The green beans are just canned beans with dehydrated onions and salt/pepper
The pasta just cooked pasta with some canned tomato sauce. 
And of course we cannot forget the ranch dip!

Then the leftover baked chicken makes for great Ceasar salads the next day!