Recipe: Mexican Chicken Panela

Tonight I made what I am calling Mexican Chicken Panela. For anyone not familiar with it, Panela is a type of cheese. I could not find it at my grocery store, but I'm still calling it Mexican Chicken Panela because I like that name better than Mexican Chicken Jack - the Jack cheese that I got is actually "Golden Jack" it's from the fancy cheese area. The recipe also calls for Cotija which I finally found in the "processed/shredded cheese" area instead of the fancy cheese area.


This recipe is adapted from Mexican Style Chicken Parmesan. I kept the ingredients mostly the same. I did change the directions to match how I make Chicken Parmesan in a skillet; I didn't want to turn the oven on.

2 to 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts sliced into two thin pieces
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/4 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp chile powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 1/2 cups picante sauce
1/4 lb panela (or jack) cheese sliced thin
1/4 cup cotija crumbled
1 teaspoon oil

Mix the cornmeal, salt, cumin and chile powder together. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Dip chicken in the cornmeal, then egg, then cornmeal again to coat. Brown the chicken on both sides, approx 6 minutes.

Remove chicken from skillet and drain oil. Return chicken to skillet, place one slice of Panela cheese over each piece of chicken, then pour chile sauce over chicken. Simmer until chicken is cooked through (about 10 minutes).

Serve with cotija crumbled on top of each piece of chicken.

The Verdict:
I think we all liked it. Claire ate her entire piece of chicken without me having to prompt her to eat it. Justin would like to try it with flour instead of cornmeal. We also weren't entirely sure about the Cotija cheese - it was good when fresh, but once it got wet from the picante it had a funny texture, almost rubbery. I liked it with jack cheese, if I ever see Panela cheese and I'll have to try it that way too. Overall, it will definitely be on the menu again.

31 Before I'm 31

There's this thing going around the blog world - at lest the blogs that I read - where on their birthday people make a list of things they want to do before their next birthday. The number of things on the list is the age you'll be on your next birthday. And since I am kind of a follower, I decided to do it too!

So, we're going to call this my 31 things I would like to do before I'm 31. Now, in the interest of honesty, I've had this list on my mind for a while, but my birthday was back in April, and now it's July. Some of them have been done in the past 2.5 months and some of them are things I just thought of as I was writing my list. I also didn't include anything that I really may want to do, but I know it just isn't going to happen this year, like going to Disneyland/world. I wanted my list to be mostly reasonable, not outrageous where I would be setting myself up to not be able to complete them.

The List

1. Make a Cheesecake from scratch
2. Run (not walk) an entire 5K
3. Take a photography class (online or in-person)
4. Take Ali Edward's 31 Things story tellng class - IN PROGRESS: the class was May 17 - June 16, I took the class, but only finished about half of it.
5. Continue with Project Life 2012 - IN PROGRESS: PL Layout Posts
6. Clean out the basement room
7. Bake cookies at work - DONE 7/2/2012
8. Complete Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred
9. Find reason to hang out with friends at least once of month
10. Go to the Nelson Atkins Museum
11. Repaint master bedroom & bathroom
12. Make 6 kinds of Pie - IN PROGRESS: Peach Pie, Apple Pie
13. Read 12 non-fiction books (ideally one per month)
14. Finish PL 2009
15. Go to KC Market
16. Stop biting my fingernails (yes it is nasty, I know)
17. Take an adult swimming stroke improvement class
18. Update blog regularly throughout the week (approx 20-25 posts per month)
19. Finish December Daily Album from 2011
20. Go to the Aquarium - DONE 4/28/2012
21. Take a scrapbooking class through Big Picture Classes - IN PROGRESS: Taking Becky Higgins Project Real Life class
22. Mail a card/letter to someone every month (starting in July)
23. Rent an expensive camera lens for the weekend - DONE 10/20/2012 Calling this done, although I borrowed from a friend instead of rented from a company
24. Go Camping-ish
25. Host a charity bake sale type thing?
26. Make 12 different kinds of cupcakes
27. Invite people to my house
28. Tour the Roasterie Coffee plant
29. Go to a wine tasting (yes in KS)
30. Visit Science City - DONE 8/1/2012 (Vacation Day 1)
31. Become an Aunt (coming Oct 2012)

Let's see how many of these I can't get crossed off my list by April 24, 2013! Obviously a lot of them won't be crossed off until next April since they involving doing something EVERY month, but that's ok. And if everything doesn't get crossed off, that is okay too. And okay, number 31 really doesn't have MUCH to do with me really, but oh well.

Recipe: Apple Pie

For the Fourth of July, my brother specifically requested an Apple Pie with a pie bird in it. Being the awesome sister that I am, I humored him and made an Apple Pie using a pie bird (borrowed from my mom).


I couldn't decide on which Apple Pie recipe to use. So I kind of made up my own based on Smitten Kitten's Apple Pie recipe plus a few notes she made about the pie afterwards. And I switched out 1/4 cup of the granulated sugar for brown sugar since so many of the other recipes I saw used a mix of both. I couldn't find McIntosh apples and ended up using Golden Delicious.

2 9" pie crusts (this recipe makes two)
3 Golden Delicious apples (cored, peeled and sliced)
3 Granny Smith apples (cored, peeled and sliced)
1 Tbsp Lemon Juice
1 egg - beaten
1/2 cup Granulated White Sugar
1/4 cup Brown Sugar
2 Tbsp Flour
3/4 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp Nutmeg
1/4 tsp Allspice
1/4 tsp Salt


Put apples & lemon juice in large colander and toss carefully.

Carefully put one pie crust in the pie plate lifting the edges of the dough to push it down into the bottom corners of the pie plate - try not to trap air bubbles under the dough. Brush with some of the egg (helps the crust not get soggy while baking). Place in fridge while preparing filling.

Combine the sugar, flour, spices and salt in a large bowl. Add the apples and mix gently until all dry ingredients are wet.

If you are using a pie bird, place your pie bird in the middle of your prepared crust. Dump apple mixture into prepared pie crust around the pie bird, create a slight mound in the middle of your pie. If using a pie bird, cut a slit in the middle of the top crust to allow the bird to come through. Carefully lay second pie crust over the filling and press the edges together with the tines of a fork (or however you want to do it). Brush top crust with remaining egg. If you are not using a pie bird, cut slits in the crust to allow the pie to vent.

Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes. Then reduce heat to 350 degrees and continue baking for 30-35 minutes. If crust browns quickly, cover with foil, or a pie shield, for remaining cooking time. Pie filling will probably be bubbling through slits when the pie is done.

The Verdict:

My pie was REALLY soupy. I'm not sure if it was because it needed to cook longer - the crust wasn't very brown. Or it I had too much sugar - although that was pretty much standard between all the recipes I looked at. The taste was great, there was just lots of liquid. I may have to try it again to see if I can get the filling right.

Website Review: Zenni Optical

I love Zenni Optical - https://www.zennioptical.com/. They are awesome, particularly if you have kids that wear glasses, because let's face it: glasses are EXPENSIVE, even with insurance.

I've been ordering glasses from Zenni for about 4 years I think. The first order, was just glasses for Anaya. Her prescription had changed not terribly long after her mom had bought her a couple pairs of glasses. Since she was living with us at the time, we were going to be buying the glasses and I couldn't bring myself to pay what our eye doctor charged for glasses.

I learned about Zenni from one of my favorite bloggers, Mir, on her blog WantNot.net, she reviewed them in January of 2008, our first order was in May of 2008 and we have continued ordering from them about every 6 months ever since. In fact, I just placed our third order this year - mostly because I suck and don't think about ordering Justin & myself each a pair of prescription sunglasses when I ordered a pair for Anaya.


They ship them in a padded waterproof envelope with each pair wrapped in a soft cleaning cloth and in a hard plastic case so that they are (hopefully) not damaged during shipping. Now, I'm not going to say I love every single pair of glasses that I have every gotten from them. In fact, the pair that I ordered for myself that I just got last week, I hate them. It's not Zenni's fault unless I want to blame them for not being able to try the glasses on before I buy them, but such is the internet. And I could call and get a return number and mail them back to them and get a 50% review (which isn't bad considering the lens are my prescription), but when they only cost $6.95 in the first place, I don't think the effort is worth $3.50. Plus, even though I don't LIKE them, I could still wear them if something terrible were to happen to my normal pair.

They have a ton of different styles starting at just $6.95 up through about $50 I think. They also have transition lens which we've gotten a few times. And they can apply a tint, we've only gotten one pair of tinted lens to far, but we have two more pairs on order right now. They have different colored tints which we haven't tried because I neglected to mention that to Anaya, otherwise I'm fairly certain she would've wanted colored lens instead of normal sunglasses.

Just a few of our Zenni glasses throughout the years:


Also, just so you know, I am in no way associated with Zenni Optical and every pair of glasses that I have gotten from them I have paid for - although not much because their glasses cheap! And not bad cheap where they fall apart, good cheap where they just don't cost much money.

Menu Monday

I've actually already re-arranged the menu plan, but I figure it doesn't count if I haven't posted it online yet. We've had Hoagies on the menu for 2 or 3 weeks and we still haven't actually had them. Mostly because I schedule it for the weekend, so when I make my mid-week grocery run I don't buy the deli meat, but then I don't feel like going to the store on Saturday. We'll see if we end up having them this week.

Monday - Steak, tots, jello
Tuesday - Ravioli, garlic bread
Wednesday - 4th of July at my mom's (bringing an Apple Pie)
Thursday - Breakfast Casserole
Friday - Chicken Nuggets, Mac & Cheese
Saturday - Mexican Chicken Parmesan, Rice
Sunday - Hoagies

The only new recipe is the Mexican Chicken Parmesan. I'll probably change the name of it if I decide to keep the recipe around because it doesn't have Parmesan on it. It's just the same basic concept as Chicken Parmesan, but Mexican style.

On the 4th, I am making my first ever Apple Pie. I've already found a recipe and bought the apples. Now I just need to get my mom's food processor and a pie bird (because my brother is insisted that my pie needs a pie bird).

Project Life: Week 25

Week 25: June 18 - 24

I looked at my pictures from this week and discovered I had a few from every night that we were outside playing in the water table, and pictures of our dinner, and that was pretty much it.


I liked the little set of pictures that I made for this post about the water table, so I made something similar along the bottom of both pages with labels on each picture of which day it was taken.


I also liked last week's collage picture of our dinner's for the week, this time I had four dinner pictures, so I made 2x3 crops. Instead of the recipe name, I put the date on each picture. And this week I finally bought Claire a Mermaid (she now has three, but this was her first Mermaid and first Barbie). She's been seeing kids playing with mermaids are the pool, and whenever a kid leaves one laying somewhere, she goes and picks it up. So tonight I bought her a one of her own.


Justin bought me some "just because" flowers - I love Spider Mums, they might be my favorite bouquet flower. I made a new muffin recipe and they were yummy. In the picture where Claire is sitting on me while I'm holding the iPad, I was trying to buy an app for her, but she kept hitting letters whenever I would go to type in my password. My attempts to get her to leave it alone were making her giggle. Justin took that picture. So great to have non-posed pictures of Claire and I. Usually any pics of the two of us are taken using my camera's timer.


Thanks for coming and seeing my Project Life!

Recipe: White Cheese Sauce

This cheese sauce tastes very similar to the white cheese sauce that I used to get at Miguel's in San Diego while I was in college. We would go there and eat the chips and the cheese sauce and barely have room for dinner. That could be part of why my freshman 15 turned into a sophomore 30, but it was delicious!

Ingredients:
1.5 cups Whipping Cream
1 cup Sour Cream
1 tsp Chicken Bullion Granulars
2 Tbsp Salted Butter
1 Tbsp Flour
1 jalapeno, minced
1 Tbsp juice from bottled jalapenos
6 oz (or more) Shredded Cheese (cheddar & jack)


Directions:
Heat whipping cream in saucepan over high heat, when the cream is about to boil, stir in the sour cream. Once the sour cream has melted (dissolved), reduce heat to medium. Stir in chicken bullion and jalapeno juice and simmer.

In a small skillet make a roux: melt butter over medium heat, add flour and mix with a whisk until the mixture turns a pale gold.

When the cream mixture is about to boil, add the roux whisking constantly until roux is incorporated. Turn heat to low and stir in minced jalapeno and shredded cheese until cheese is melted.

Serve with tortilla chips. Makes about 3.5 cups.


The original directions called for 2 oz total of cheese, which I tried the first time I made this and it wasn't nearly cheesy enough. Since I upped the amount of cheese, I also decreased the amount of whipping cream (originally it was 2 cups). For the minced jalapeno, I usually just get about 6 slices out of my jar of sliced jalapenos and dice them up. Much easier than using a fresh jalapeno.

I love this sauce, I could probably eat about half of it by myself which is why I don't make it that often. But it is so freaking delicious. And much easier than flying to San Diego just for White Cheese Sauce. You definitely want to keep it warm, the last time I made this I put it in a mini crock-pot on the "warm" setting.

Project Life: Week 24

Week 24: June 11 - 17


I ordered my pictures on Monday night, picked them up over lunch on Tuesday, ended up going to the Baseball game that night, sat down to work on Project Life Wednesday evening, decided that I wanted to do something a little different with a few pictures and make an insert which meant I had 6 empty 3x4 inch slots so I had to order MORE pictures which I picked, photoshopped and ordered on Wednesday night, picked up my new pictures on Thursday over lunch, work on my layout Thursday evening, took pictures of it during lunch on Friday and now I'm finally posting it. Makes me tired just thinking about it.


I've been taking more pictures of what we're eating for dinner recently. Mostly because I sometimes want to post recipes here, so I like to have a picture of my "plated" food. This week I took 3 dinner pictures and combined them into one 6x4 print, I also typed the name of the dish on each section - the first one is hard to read, it is the the BLT Chicken Pasta Salad.


I also took quite a few sprinkler/water pictures which is what was made into an insert. The previous week Justin had bought some water guns and we finally played with them outside. I love the picture of Claire being excited about the water gun. I had so many cute pictures of Claire, but I forced myself to only order one.


Sunday was Father's day, so on Friday night I had the girls all come outside and wash Justin's car (and mine while they were at it). Saturday morning, Claire & I went to The Berry Patch to pick berries. Definitely should have forced the Anaya & her friend to get up and go with us, we ended up only picking a pound because Claire wasn't cooperating with me. I made two Father's Day desserts so I included a picture of them. Then I made Justin and the girls pose in the backyard for a Father's Day picture.


Thanks for coming and seeing my Project Life!

Baseball Game

I was planning to work on my Project Life layout last night, then at 4pm, our company receptionist/office manager sent out an email about Royals tickets for that night. I called Justin to make sure he didn't mind and sent in a email to try and "win" the tickets. They do a drawing I think of all the people that say they want the tickets, I'm not sure if not very many people wanted them or if I was just lucky, but I won the tickets. So after a quick dinner, we headed out to Kaufman Stadium for our once a year baseball experience.

I've been spoiled by the company tickets, they are in the Diamond club. There are seriously FOUR actual rows in front of us and then a few rows of dugout seats and then the field. And in the Diamond Club, they have people that come down and take your order for food and drink. There's no way I would spend the amount of money required to buy these tickets - we enjoy going, but not THAT much. This picture - from my seat, no zooming.


I wasn't originally planning to take Claire, but she would've been so sad to stay home while Anaya, H and I went. And I had four tickets. So she got to come too! And she did MUCH better than I thought she would do. I did take the iPad so that she could play with it when she started getting antsy. She and I also went on a walk around the entire stadium.


We ended up staying until the beginning of the 9th inning. At that point, the Royals were ahead 8 to 2 and Claire was crying because everyone was screaming and yelling because someone hit a home-run that got 3 runs in. Then Claire looked at me and said "All Done" and did the sign she does when she's all done at dinner time (hands out facing up and kind of shrugs). So we packed up our stuff and went home, it was about 10pm at that point.


By the time we got home and put Claire in bed and took H home, it was too late to work on PL. Maybe tonight?

Water Table

I almost got rid of Claire's water table last year. We don't usually take good care of it, I think we may have filled it up once last summer (if even that) and then flipped it upside down and then rain water filled the underside and leaves and bugs and crap and someone would've had to clean it and yeah. But last Thursday, Justin cleaned the water table. Ok, the underside is still kind of gross looking, but it's MUCH better than it was. Since the water table only came with three toys and I didn't want to bring out the real pool toys, I brought her LittlePeople Noah's Ark out for her, I need to find the rest of her animals and bring them out too.


On Friday, Justin surprised us when we got home with one of those little plastic pools for Claire. We have a toddler-sized inflatable pool, but we just wanted something small she could wash her feet off in if nothing else. We've had a plastic pool before too, it got all gross and nasty and then I threw it away. I think that was 2 years ago? On Friday, Claire was happy to sit in it and play with her Little People animals. She hasn't gotten in her little pool since Friday, not sure why not, but I'll ask her if she wants to get in the little pool and she'll say "Nooo".


I have discovered that I can read a book while Claire plays in the water table. I could probably do something a little more productive too - like weed a flowerbed in the back yard, or something. But I've mostly been reading ridiculous romance novels from the library. And I have to say, I LOVE that my house faces west, that means the backyard is in the shade in the evening. By 6pm, the patio is in the shade and even though it is warm outside, it is not terrible to sit in the shade while Claire's splashes around the water table.