My kids love oatmeal. In fact, that's what they consider cereal. They don't eat dry cereal. When I saw a pin for Apple Pie Breakfast, I was sure my kids would love it. Luckily, I'm an early riser. This takes 2-4 in the crock pot. I woke up at 5 am, and got it all ready. It smelled wonderful. The kids were so excited about it. And then they took their first bites. No go. Sunshine, who is the picky one, at least picked the apples out of it and ate those. Monster wouldn't even do that. Pretty sure it was the steel cut oats they didn't like since I use regular oats and put all kinds of fruit in it normally. There's one more pin that got deleted.
A recipe that went over really well was Mexican Pizza. The great thing about this is that I was able to change it up to meet the tastes of all family members. Monster and Sunshine shared one and Husband and I each got our own. There was a layer of refried beans and then a layer of ground chicken. After that, we changed it up to meet the needs of our family. Kids got mozzarella cheese because they don't like melted cheddar, no sauce, and olives and tomatoes. Husband and I did cheddar cheese and sauce. I got tomatoes, he did olives. We completely forgot about the scallions that I had in the fridge for this meal. We'll do that next time. Sunshine was the only critic. Next time, we'll leave out the chicken layer for her. Everyone else loved it.
Another night, I Hawaiian Luau chicken. Along with it, I decided to try crock pot mashed potatoes. We ended up with chicken and a last minute thrown together side dish. The potatoes were supposed to take 4 hours on high. I was also supposed to use 5lbs, which I didn't. After 6 hours on high, the potatoes still weren't very soft. Even though we couldn't have them with that meal, I finished cooking them (7 hours on high) and saved them so we could at least try them out. That didn't work though. No one in my family wanted to give them a shot. I was going to fry them up into potato pancakes, but then completely forgot. So, I had to toss them. I'll try this again, making sure I give them longer to cook!
Swim nights are difficult to find things to make for dinner. By the time we get home, we can't have anything that takes too long if I actually want to get the kids in bed at a decent time. Last several rounds of swim lessons, I gave up and just had junk for dinner, and by junk, I mean processed popcorn chicken and fish sticks. I'm making a real effort this time around to get back into crock pot meals for swim nights. Since we love Mexican food in this house, I decided to try Mexican chicken in the crock pot. The directions were to put the chicken and enchilada sauce in the crock pot and cook on low for 4-6 hours then top with cheese and cook on low another half hour. That's not how this turned out. It was so runny that if I tried to melt cheese on it, it would just sit in liquid. The flavor was good. However, if I had to do this again, I wouldn't bother with the crock pot and just bake the chicken using this recipe.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a wrap with Laughing Cow and cucumber. The actual "recipe" calls for turkey, but I can do without lunch meat. I'm not the biggest fan. This was awesome. Seriously great. I used the herbed Laughing Cow, which gave it a nice flavor. Since then, I've also used regular Laughing Cow, which is still good, but the herbed is better.
Even though my family rarely ever eats red meat, I decided to try beef roast in the crock pot. I was the only one who liked this because I am the only one who loves salt. And even for me, it was a bit on the salty side. Husband watches his salt intake, so I rarely ever use salt in anything. When the kids bit into this, they were spitting it out telling me it was way too salty. Husband agreed with them. Aside from the saltiness, the flavor was good. Not sure how to tweak this to make it less salty, so I'll probably have to delete this one, too.
Last night was supposed to be Pizza/Movie night, but Monster has handwriting tutoring now on Sundays, so there's less time to make the pizzas. I had pinned a recipe for pepperoni pizza quesadillas, so I figured that would be a quick fix to the pizza issue. Since I was with Monster, Husband was left to make these. When I got home, he told me we should never make these again. The recipe calls for a cast iron skillet, which we don't have. I didn't think it would make the much of a difference, but, apparently, it does. The food itself turned out to be a big hit. They tasted great. They were just more of a hassle to make than actual pizza, at least for Husband (and I'm not allowed to fry things since I may burn down the house).
I've got two new recipes on deck for this week and hopefully some sweet treats also. Happy Eating!