Yummy Recipes

Today's post will be a light-hearted, fun deviation from the norm around here :)

Thursdays are my 'cleaning day', so I tackled that this morning.  This afternoon, I decided to try a new pie recipe for dessert.  I had originally planned to make this on Sunday, but we're starting a Whole30 challenge on Monday, and I didn't want to have to throw away any leftovers.  I had my favorite dinner planned for tonight, and figured this would be an excellent follow-up.

First, the meal.  Chicken enchiladas.  I'm not a fan of the typical red enchilada sauce, but these don't call for any.  I stumbled across this in one of my church cookbooks awhile ago, and it's been a favorite ever since!

Chicken Enchiladas
3/4 cup shredded cooked chicken
2 T (or more) green chiles
3 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 C shredded mozzarella cheese
1/2 C milk
4 flour tortillas (I make mine from scratch)
Optional:  sour cream
Combine chicken, chiles, and cream cheese.  Mix thoroughly.  Put 1/3 C of mixture on each tortilla and wrap up.  Place in greased 9x9 glass dish, seam side down.  Pour milk over tortillas and cover with cheese.  Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.  Top with sour cream before serving, if desired.  Note:  This can easily be doubled and made in a 9x13 glass dish.  Today, I actually threw these in the Crock-pot on high for one hour, then on low for an additional hour.  It was just too hot to turn the oven on, and it worked great!

For dessert I made cream pie and tossed some partially thawed frozen berries on top right before serving.  I've never worked with gelatin before, and it's been years since I had to whip cream.  I was a bit nervous about this turning out, but it tasted great!  DH went back for seconds, so I'm assuming he really liked it as well :)

Summer is for Smoothies :)

Have you been as hot as we have been?  My goodness.  It’s so crazy to me that we have already had a couple days of temps in the 100s.  One doesn’t think of summers that warm happening in the upper Midwest, but they do!  It’s so ironic to me that we lived in the coastal subtropics for a year and the warmest it got was about 94, now back in the Midwest we hit the 100s.  Craziness.

We’re pretty frugal and didn’t turn the A/C on until it got to 84 in the house.  We only keep it at 80 during the day and 82 overnight, so it can still feel warm and stuffy in the house sometimes.  Thus, it makes no sense to use the oven or stove and nobody has much of an appetite anyways.  I have been so thankful for smoothies this week!  Wow, has our blender gotten a workout lately!

Here is one of my favorite smoothie recipes.  I just had this for lunch today!

Peanut Butter Banana Shake

You will need:

5  ice cubes

¼ cup yogurt (I prefer plain to keep the calories down, but vanilla works great too)

½ milk

Spoonful of peanut butter

One banana
Sprinkle of cinnamon

Blend until it’s all mixed and liquid.  Enjoy!