Tag Archives: dinner

Many years ago, I had a random burst of inspiration to create a non-traditional lasagna as a surprise dinner for my over-worked boyfriend.  I had never actually made a lasagna before, and was only basing the recipe on a few items I wanted to include.  Ground turkey, bacon, smoked cheese, and spinach.  I researched a few different lasagna recipes to get a sense of other ingredients I would need, as well as the mechanics of cooking a lasagna.  I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as hard as I thought!  The stars aligned for this Alfredo lasagna recipe – after an hour or so of winging it, I had one of the most delicious lasagnas I’ve ever eaten!

I’ve continued to make this lasagna recipe throughout the years, always trying to remember exactly what I did by looking at pictures.  It had been a while since I last made this lasagna, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to finally write out the recipe.  That way I’d finally have it, and best of all, I’d get to share it with all of you!

I hope you all enjoy my Turkey and Bacon Alfredo Lasagna recipe!

• 2 16 oz. bags of frozen spinach, defrosted and drained
• 16 oz. of ricotta
• 1 box lasagna noodles
• 1 lb. of ground turkey
• 1 package of turkey bacon, diced
• 3/4 medium onion, chopped
• 3/4 medium bell pepper, chopped
• 2 cups of mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1 TBSP oregano
• 3-4 garlic cloves, minced
• 12 oz. smoked cheese blend, shredded
• 2 jars Alfredo sauce

In a large bowl, combine ground turkey and your sauteed vegetables.  Set aside about a 1/3 of the diced bacon; this will be for topping the lasagna.  In a medium bowl, combine the rest of the bacon, ricotta, and drained spinach.  You really want to make sure you get all the liquid out of the spinach, so it doesn’t make the lasagna watery.

You now have all the components to assemble your lasagna!  Lightly coat a 9×13 casserole dish with cooking spray, and then spread a thin layer of Alfredo sauce on the bottom.  Layer lasagna noodles on top of the sauce, and sprinkle 1/4 of cheese over the noodles.

I previously mentioned in my Spinach and Prosciutto Lasagna recipe, I use no boil noodles, because that’s the only kind Trader Joe’s carries.  If you choose to use no boil noodles as well, I like to soak them in hot water for about 5-10 minutes.  They will be more pliable and you won’t have any crunchy noodles in your lasagna!

As always, let me know if you make this recipe and how it turns out!  Happy eating!

HELLO, everyone!  I am back after a SUPER long hiatus!  Gosh, things have been so busy – I haven’t been able to devote the time I wish I could for this blog.  Thank you to anyone who continues to visit, and I promise I’ll keep posting even if it’s sporadically!

Today I’m going to share one of our favorite staple dinners – a Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas recipe! It’s super fast and easy, which makes it the perfect weeknight dinner.

Daniel LOVES Mexican food, and after living in Los Angeles for 4 years (and dating Daniel), I’ve grown to love it as well. While we often make tacos and burritos, we didn’t start making enchiladas until we saw enchilada sauce at Trader Joes. Once we realized how easy they were to make (and how delicious), we couldn’t get enough of them!

We followed some of the basics and ingredients from this recipe. You know us though, we added our own touches and switched things up a bit! Check out our Chicken Enchiladas recipe below!

Here’s what you need:

• 5 chicken tenderloins
• 1 onion, diced
• 1/2 pint of sour cream
• 1 jar enchilada sauce
• 3/4 cup sliced black olives
• 1 and 3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 2 avocados
• 6 large flour tortillas
• 3/4 bell pepper, diced
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 3/4 cup frozen corn
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp chili powder
• 1 tsp cilantro
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• Tomatoes, diced (for garnish)

Here’s what you do:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Heat olive oil over medium heat and cook chicken. [You can read what kind of chicken I like to keep on hand, and how I cook it here]. When the chicken is cooked through, dice and set aside.

Set aside about a 1/4 cup of onion for topping, and sauté the rest of the onion and bell pepper until tender. About 5-6 minutes. Add corn and cook for another 2-3 minutes.  Add 1 cup of cheese, sour cream, spices, garlic, 1/2 cup of olives, and the chicken. Heat over low heat until cheese melts, stirring occasionally.

Spread a thin layer of enchilada sauce on the bottom of pan. Fill each tortilla with equal amounts of filling, roll, and arrange in pan.  Evenly spread remaining sauce over enchiladas and top with cheese. You can also top with the remaining olives and onion, or add them after baking.

Bake, uncovered, for 20 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes, and then top with a dollop of sour cream, a few slices of avocado and diced tomatoes (also the onion and olives if you didn’t already add them). Serve with your favorite rice and beans, and enjoy! This recipes makes 6 servings.

These can be a little tricky to get out of the pan. We like to use 2 large spoons and pick them up from both ends. It’s inevitable that some of the filling will spill out though, so have your plate ready and close by!

This meal is so delicious, and as you can see, very quick and easy! We recently substituted chicken with ground turkey the last time we made this. It was a tasty way to switch things up, but I think I still prefer using chicken. Try them both out and let me know which one is your favorite!

I hope you enjoy this Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas recipe! Let me know if you try the recipe in the comments section below! Happy eating!

Before Christmas, I shared with you all a few recipes I intended to make for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  As promised, I now want to share how they all turned out!

You may remember that the main event was a Spinach and Prosciutto Lasagna from Martha Stewart.  After reading the reviews, I omitted quite a few things and added others.  I also made mine a lot bigger since the original only made 4 servings.  Not nearly enough leftovers for the amount of work, I think!

Here’s what you need:

• 2 (10 oz.) packages of spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
• 16 oz. ricotta cheese
• 4 oz. thinly sliced prosciutto, diced
• Lasagna noodles
• 1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
• 1 1/2 jars of tomato sauce
• 1/2 white onion, diced
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
• 9 button mushrooms, sliced
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/4 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
• 1 green bell pepper (optional)
• 3/4 red bell pepper (optional)
• 3/4 yellow bell pepper (optional)

Here’s what you do:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Over medium high heat, saute your onion and mushrooms in olive oil for 3-4 minutes.  Add your spices and saute another minute or so.  You don’t need to cook the veggies too long, since they will finish cooking in the oven.  Set aside to cool slightly.

In a medium bowl, combine ricotta, spinach, garlic, and cooled veggies.  Set aside.  Also in a medium bowl, thoroughly mix your diced prosciutto with your tomato sauce.  Set aside.  You can use any sauce you’d like, we combined a four cheese sauce and a basil marinara, both from Trader Joes.

In a 9×13 casserole dish, spread a thin layer of sauce on the bottom of the pan.  Then place a layer of noodles on top.  I used no boil noodles because that’s all Trader Joes had, but either will do!  If you do use no boil noodles, I highly suggest soaking them in hot water for 5-10 minutes before working with them.  This will make them more pliable, and help to ensure they will cook all the way through.

Evenly crumble 1/3 of the spinach and ricotta mixture on top of your noodles, and then spread 1/4 of the remaining sauce.  Repeat noodles, mixture, sauce two more times.  Place one more layer of noodles on top, the last 1/4 of your sauce, and then top with shredded mozzarella.

Now, if you did see my previous Christmas recipe post or just went to my Pinterest board, you know I planned to create a Christmas tree topper for my lasagna.  That’s where those optional bell peppers come in!  You’ll want to slice the green peppers, dice and create a tree stump from the red pepper, and dice and create a star from the yellow pepper.  I thought it was pretty awesome looking, what do you think?

With or without the topper, bake uncovered until brown, about 35-40 minutes.  Then let stand 5 minutes before serving and enjoy!  My recipe will make about 12 servings, and Daniel said it was the best lasagna he’s ever eaten!

Here are a few pictures of our tasty lasagna and our Christmas Eve!

We served our lasagna with garlic bread and salad, and plenty of wine, of course!

For dessert, as I suspected, we were too tired to make this peppermint bark cheesecake.  So sadly I can’t tell you if it was delicious or a fail, BUT I can tell you that the frozen cheesecake sampler from Trader Joes is worth a try!  It comes with 2 slices of 3 different kinds of cheesecake, and all you have to do is thaw it for an hour on the counter.  A great find if you want something easy!

We did make breakfast and mimosas for Christmas morning though!  We made cranberry mimosas, and they were pretty tasty, although the orange juice really overpowered the cranberry.  I think next time we make them I’ll fill the glass with mostly cranberry juice and add just a splash of orange.

We had a few unused glasses already rimmed with green sugar from our holiday party, and Daniel had the brilliant idea to use them that morning.  I LOVE how festive they look!

We also made baked french toast and baked bacon!

I followed this french toast recipe exactly, and it turned out beautifully!  The top is the perfect french toast consistency, and the bottom has a delicious buttery brown sugar sauce – it didn’t even need syrup!  This was the first time I had ever baked bacon in the oven, while I wouldn’t say it made the clean up any quicker, it did produce an entire pan of perfectly crisp bacon.  So I definitely think I will be cooking it in the oven from now on!

Well, it’s always a little sad to see Christmas come and go.  It was a very relaxing and quiet Christmas with my best friend and love, and all around favorite person in the world.  It will be a Christmas that I will cherish forever!

Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a fantastic New Year’s Eve, I’d love to hear how everyone celebrated!  Daniel and I procrastinated, so we ended up just going out for dinner and then watching New Year’s Eve specials while drinking champagne at home.  Even though it was pretty low key, it was one of my favorites thus far!  We realized we had never spent New Year’s in our home!  It was fun to experience something new, and it was also our first New Year’s Eve in Portland!

Now that the holidays are over, I can finally catch my breath and start blogging about everything we did.  If you read my post about holiday party ideas, you know that pretty much all inspiration came from Pinterest.  And now I want to share my results with you!

Let’s start with food, shall we?  You may remember that I wanted the food to act as the decorations, and I had quite a few examples of festive cheese platters.

You can see I chose to do a combination of all of the examples I found, and did a mixture of salami, cheese, and grapes.  I thought it was pretty cute, and a very quick and easy appetizer to whip up before a party.

Another Christmas-y food I wanted to replicate were these cookie cutter pizzas.  They were adorable, and were a big hit with my guests!  I will say they were a little difficult to work with because they were so small.  If you can find bigger cookie cutters, I think it would be a bit easier.

Because the pizzas were a little hard to make, they took a bit longer than we had planned.  Luckily, we had a backup plan and made one full sized pizza… in the shape of a candy cane!  Equally as delicious and adorable!

For dessert I made melted snowmen cookies, and they turned out beautifully!  You can find the gingerbread cookie recipe and what I changed on my previous blog post.  The only suggestion I made that I hadn’t tried out at the time was replacing white sugar with brown sugar.  I made that adjustment for the party, but I didn’t notice much of a difference in taste, so you can really use whichever you prefer.

I made a simple royal icing with powdered sugar and a little bit of milk.  I definitely recommend making sure the icing is on the thick side for optimum results.  You can see 3 of the cookies have better coverage, whereas the one in the back is a little see through.  Merely an artistic suggestion, as they were all tasty no matter how the icing looked!

Here are a few more pictures!

Before placing the marshmallows on the cookies, we microwaved them for a few seconds to give them a more melty look.  And we used colored gel icing from the baking section at the supermarket for their faces and bodies.  Pretty good for our first try, don’t you think?

If you stumbled on my holiday party ideas board on Pinterest, you may have seen a champagne drink that gained a lot of repins.  So many repins that there was no way I couldn’t try it out at our party!

A very simple drink that had so much wow factor!  I found green colored sugar at the grocery store, which I used to rim the champagne flutes.  I bought pomegranate seeds already deseeded to save on time, put those in the bottom of the glass, filled with champagne – boom, done!  They were seriously too pretty to drink (almost)!

I also made party favors for my guests, which sadly I forgot to hand out!  Word of advice:  keep party favors in a prominent place, and near the front door!  Then you won’t have to sheepishly hand them out after like I do.

Other than forgetting to give them out, I was very happy with my results.  Very easy and quick to do!  Because I could only find large candy canes, I used two marshmallows for each (most examples I saw only used one).  Then I just dipped them in melted chocolate and coated them in crushed peppermint candies.

I found these super cute snowmen bags at the Dollar Tree store, and put a hot chocolate stirring stick with a packet of hot chocolate in each bag.  A very nice gesture that doesn’t require a lot of time or expense!

I also made a white elephant gift, which I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  All I did was Sharpie instructions onto the mugs and baked it in the oven.  I had a hard time getting the Sharpie to come out as dark as the original, but perhaps my pen was just running out of ink.  It was also a little difficult to find dessert in a cup recipes that had good reviews, but I finally found these that seemed to be the best (leave me a comment if anyone wants the recipes!).

Tip:  Apparently people have a lot of trouble getting the Sharpie to actually stay on the mug after normal use and washing.  A few suggestions I found were to increase your oven temperature to 425 and bake for 30 minutes, do not preheat your oven first, and allow the mugs to cool completely in the oven after they’re done baking.  I rubbed the writing pretty hard afterwards, and it seemed like it was on there permanently!

Last but not least, I had shared a holiday decoration with you all and this is how it turned out!  I already had the wine glasses, we saved trimmings from our tree, and I bought the ornaments and candles from the Dollar Tree store.  For a very elegant looking decoration, it only cost $2 and was super easy to setup!

We also used it for our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations as well.

Here are a few pictures of our coffee table and main table displays!

Looking back on it now, I probably took on a little too much, especially since it was my first time hosting a party.  But despite a few moments of stress, everything turned out great!  We had blast and so did our guests, so I’d say our first holiday party was a success!

This year, Daniel and I will be spending the holiday in Portland, just the two of us (three if you count our cat, which we do!).  We were fortunate enough to spend Thanksgiving with Daniel’s family and Christmas last year with mine.  While we will both miss our families this holiday, we are also both looking forward to having a quiet Christmas to ourselves sans traveling!  As our relationship has progressed, we have been having fun sharing our families’ traditions and coming up with new traditions of our own.  That’s actually one of the fun things about getting older, I think, is starting to create your own traditions like your parents did when they were your age!  Since we’re on our own this year, it’s the perfect opportunity to try some new ones out (and see if they’re awesome enough to make a tradition)!

A couple of years ago we started making ourselves fancy dinners on Easter, and we decided to do the same on Christmas Eve this year.  I haven’t tried these recipes out yet, and I will definitely blog about my results after, but I wanted to share them now anyway in case any of you are looking for ideas.  We toyed with a few different options, you can see my massive amount of pinning on my Christmas recipes board, but we narrowed it down to either making lasagna/stuffed shells or a pot roast with a couple of elaborate side dishes.

We chose to make a spinach and proscuitto lasagna, and pair it with a simple salad and garlic bread.  As much as I really wanted to go all out with our dinner, we’ve both been pretty stressed out trying to get everything done for the holiday, social commitments, and work.  So we decided to take it easy on ourselves and do something a little easy.

Based on some of the reviews, I plan to cut out the salt because a lot of people complained the lasagna was too salty.  Proscuitto alone should provide enough flavor.  I also plan to use full fat mozzarella and ricotta cheese, mainly because I’ve used reduced fat in lasagna before and it didn’t turn out well.  I will also be adding more spices, herbs, and garlic and I’m going to double the recipe as well.  We like lots of leftovers in this household!

Also, because I’m a little cheesy, I’m totally going to make a Christmas tree out of bell peppers to top our lasagna with!  Oh, the things you find on Pinterest!

Some of you may remember that Daniel and I went wine tasting in Forest Grove, OR, and purchased a bottle of “Holiday Magic Wine” (gluhwein) from Shafer Vineyard Cellars.  We decided to save it for Christmas Eve, so we will be having that with our dinner!

We will most likely be purchasing a dessert to cutback on stress, but I’m still toying with the idea of making this peppermint bark cheesecake.  It just looks so amazing!  I may have to keep the ingredients on hand in case I get a second wind after our holiday party is over!

Even if we don’t bake a dessert from scratch, we will definitely be making homemade hot chocolate to sip on while unwrapping gifts and watching Christmas movies!  This is a great basic recipe – we will either add bourbon like the recipe suggests, or we may add tequila and cayenne pepper to make it Mexican hot chocolate!

Well, that takes care of Christmas Eve, now on to Christmas Day!  Truth be told, I’ve always wanted to have a lazy Christmas day, but never had one… it’s always involved traveling in some way.  I’m pretty excited to stay in pajamas most of the day and watch Christmas movies with Daniel, we may even go see a matinee that opens on Christmas day (which Daniel’s never done before)!

I wanted to have a fancy breakfast this year too, but didn’t want anything too crazy so we could sleep in and have a super relaxing day.  I grew up eating french toast far more than pancakes, and yet in my adult life I never seem to eat them anymore!  The up side of that is… it makes the dish a bit more special, therefore making it a great option for Christmas morning!  I’ve never tried this method of baking it in the oven, but I decided I’m going to try it, since it would be quick and everything would be done at the same time.  I’m also going to bake bacon in the oven for the first time, which apparently will produce perfectly crispy, no-mess bacon!  We shall see!

To top it all off, we will be enjoying cranberry mimosas!  It’s simply 1/2 cranberry juice and 1/2 orange juice.  I love how festive it looks!

Well, these were just a few of the recipes I found, be sure to check out my board for more ideas for your dinner and breakfast Christmas recipes!