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Chicken & Spinach Pasta Bake via Saving Money Living Life
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Garlic & Brown Sugar Chicken via food.com
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From the Freezer… Roasted Shrimp & Feta /2 via Make 5 Dinners in 1 Hour
We survived our THIRD WEEK of the crazy couponing! We went to three stores with THREE kids and lived to tell about it.
We overspent our $40/week budget once again, but not too badly. Though that is not counting our late night splurge on a yummy strawberry shortcake. Mmm, mmm! :) More importantly we are building up our stockpile and even finding coupon deals on butter and milk. Woot!
I improvised the Spinach Pasta Bake by taking out the chicken and replacing it with Black Beans. I can’t wait to see how it tastes… hoping it’s a winner. I didn’t have the rigatoni noodles, so I substituted elbow macaroni instead. :)
As a bonus, maybe I can convince Mr. Picky Pants Wade that I’m serving him Super Special Mac & Cheese!
I also tweaked the Garlic & Brown Sugar Chicken to make it easier for me. {Big shock, right?} According to the recipe, you should sauté the garlic cloves and then mix in the brown sugar. Then pour that over your chicken and bake.
I know a “real cook” would never do what I’m about to share, but I just hate TWO part cooking! If I’m baking something, I don’t want the hassle of having to cook part of it on the stove first!!
Am I the only one with this time saving culinary harming habit?
To skip the stove top step, I just combined garlic powder and brown sugar in a bowl and stirred in some olive oil. I sprinkled that over the chicken for baking.
Don’t hate on me too much, and I’ll let you know how it is!
I divided both of these recipes and sent them to the freezer for quick and easy use later!
The Spinach Pasta took forever long to make… couldn’t believe it when I checked the stop watch! Probably since I think I’ve only made it once and that was a while ago. I was doing my prep in the evening too with everyone around during part of it, and it is so much harder to work quickly with distractions everywhere! It wasn’t difficult… it just had a LOT of steps! Ironically, one of which was cooking the noodles on the stove before putting them in the casserole dish, lol, but I didn’t try to skip it, believe it or not. :)
Though if you tell me I can put dry noodles in a casserole dish and have them come out like the Crockpot Spaghetti, than I probably WOULD give it a shot!
41 minutes to prep FOUR meals… :) Woohoo!
Do you wanna take a stab at a stress free dinnertime? Click for more info on how on earth I do it. {Did I mention I ♥ it?}
Are you great at switching things up and swapping out ingredients left and right?
Do you simplify recipes to save time and effort??
Please tell me I’m not the only one with this bad habit. :) It is yet more evidence in the case for my non cooking abilities. :) I’m all about EASY in the kitchen, for sure.
I definitely think easier = better! That garlic & brown sugar chicken looks tasty – I’m gonna go check out that recipe!
It was very good!! Even with my cop out prep methods!! :) You should try it!
Mmmm, I’m stealing your recipes again!
We had the garlic brown sugar chicken a couple weeks ago and loved it! Definitely let us know how the one-step instead of two-step turns out!
I’m going to try the garlic chicken…thanks!
Thanks so much to linking to our chicken & spinach pasta bake. Let us know how you like it. :)
That is one thing I love about cooking I hardly ever follow recipes exactly as they are described. I am always adding or removing ingredients and they still turn out really good. Now baking is one thing I am not good at improvising if I do than it does not come out right.
BTW: Yesterday I was having a hard time getting to some of your links for the beutify your blog.
i am definately gonna try those first two!!
HI Renee, I keep telling myself that I will try and do this at least once, I mean, how awesome would it be to have all of the weeks dinners done? Awesome!!!! I’m just so afraid of the freezer though…I can’t seem to defrost things the right way. Your dinners look yummy by the way.
I know what you mean! The freezer used to be a dark and scary place for me where things went to die!
If it’s something I’m baking, I just try to maybe give it longer in there.
With crockpot stuff, I have it stored in a ziplock so I run the ziplock under hot water for a minute or two to get things loosened up. Then I just pour it in the crockpot and it’s easy peasy from there!!
Can’t wait to try this!I’m the same way. Just blogged today about leaving out capers from a recipe. Because a: I don’t know what they are, and b. I didn’t have them already at home. lol